Herbert George Wells
HG Wells was the author of the seminal work The War of the Worlds in which he documents his experiences during the Martian invasion. Born in Kent, on 21 September 1866, Wells died on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home overlooking Regent’s Park, London.
A prolific author he wrote more than 50 novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography.
In addition to his fame as a writer, he was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works.
Wells rendered his fiction convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed Wells’s Law – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 with “O Realist of the Fantastic!”. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897), before the Martian invasion turned him to chronicling the ‘War’.
Wells’s earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a Darwinian context. He was also an outspoken socialist from a young age, often (but not always) sympathising with pacifist views.
The police receive a number of reports of an especially bright falling-star, which was seen early in the morning rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame, high in the atmosphere. Observers described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds.
20 minutes later some people in the crowd gathered around the pit, which includes Wells, report seeing something alive within the pit’s shadows. #Martians
Wells later reports seeing greyish billowy movements in the pit, and then two luminous disks—like eyes emerge. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking-stick, coils up out of the writhing middle, and wriggles in the air towards the crowd.
And now a big greyish, rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, rises slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it catches the light Wells describes its skin glistening like wet leather.
Two large dark-coloured eyes regard the crowd. There is a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivers and pants, and drops saliva. The body heaves and pulsates convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage grips the edge of the cylinder, another sways in the air.
Wells later writes of a strange horror in their appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges or any chin, the incessant quivering of its mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of its lungs.
Ogilvy and Stent are chosen to lead the deputation. As they approach the pit there is a flash of light, and a quantity of luminous greenish smoke comes out of the pit in three distinct puffs. Slowly a humped shape rises out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light flickers out from it.
Flashes of flame follow the light and a bright glare leaps to figure to figure. It is as if some invisible jet impinges upon them and flashes into white flame. And then each man is suddenly turned to fire. And then the beam is turned on the crowd.
#Martian-Heat-Ray
Wells observes the tops of the trees about the Oriental College bursting into flames, and the tower of the little church beside it collapsing. The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof-line of the college itself looks as if a 100-ton gun had been at work upon it.
The illustration shows the design of the original mosque, intended to have been completed in 1899.