The War of the Worlds

A cylinder falls on Horsell Common, a crowd gathers to look at it, and the heat ray burns them where they stand. Within days the Martian fighting machines are striding across Surrey, artillery has proved useless, and the narrator is running through a countryside where the ordinary rules of England have simply stopped applying. Wells wrote at the height of the British Empire and the reversal is deliberate: here are the technologically superior invaders, and here is a civilization swept aside without negotiation, much as the Tasmanians were, a comparison Wells draws himself in the opening pages. The ending, which turns on something no weapon could accomplish, has been argued about ever since. Serialized in 1897 and issued as a book in 1898, it set the shape of every alien invasion story that followed. Free PDF and EPUB editions here.