The War of the Worlds was published by William Heinemann in London in January 1898 and is one of the most influential novels ever written — the work that invented the alien invasion narrative, inspired Orson Welles’s legendary 1938 radio broadcast, spawned countless adaptations, and established the template that science fiction would follow for more than a century. It is simultaneously a thrilling adventure story, a commentary on British imperialism, and a meditation on humanity’s cosmic insignificance.
The Novel
Martians land in cylinders on Horsell Common, near Woking in Surrey. The first cylinder opens; the creatures emerge — described with scientific precision as octopoid organisms, vast intellects driven by need (Mars is dying). Within days, they have assembled fighting machines — enormous metal tripods equipped with heat rays that incinerate everything in their path — and begin a systematic destruction of southern England.
The narrator (unnamed, a writer on philosophy) witnesses the invasion from Woking, becomes separated from his wife, and spends weeks in hiding and flight as the Martians advance on London. Wells describes the collapse of civilization with devastating realism: the stampede of refugees, the breakdown of military resistance, the silent emptying of a great city.
The Martians are eventually defeated not by human resistance but by bacteria — Earth’s microorganisms, to which they have no immunity. This famous resolution is both deus ex machina and the novel’s final argument about humanity’s place in nature: we are saved not by our intelligence or our weapons but by our co-evolution with the microbial world.
The Imperial Argument
Wells’s explicit intention was to make British readers experience what colonized peoples felt when European empires arrived with superior technology:
“And before we judge of them [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.”
The novel forces readers to identify with the colonized, the overwhelmed, the exterminated — to experience from the inside what technological superiority does to those on its receiving end.
Legacy
The novel’s influence is incalculable: every alien invasion narrative from Independence Day to Arrival descends from it. Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation (which reportedly caused public panic) demonstrated its enduring power. H.G. Wells himself never surpassed it as a work of pure narrative excitement combined with intellectual argument.
Collecting The War of the Worlds
First edition (William Heinemann, London, 1898): Grey cloth binding with black lettering and decorative design. No dust jacket.
Identification points:
- William Heinemann imprint
- “1898” on title page
- Publisher’s advertisements at rear (16 pages)
- Grey cloth with black decorations
Market values:
- Fine copies: $15,000–$40,000
- Very good: $5,000–$15,000
- Good: $2,000–$5,000
First American edition (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1898): Published the same year. $3,000–$10,000.
Serialization (Pearson’s Magazine, April–December 1897): The text appeared serially before book publication.
The combination of literary importance, cultural ubiquity (everyone knows the story), and genuine Victorian scarcity makes this one of the most consistently sought-after science fiction first editions in the world market.