Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. and distribution is encouraged It is available as a series of MP3 files, one file per chapter.

Please read the License before distributing this eBook. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. Wells This is a copyrighted computer-generated audio performance of Project Gutenbergs public domain book, 'The War of the Worlds', by H. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. SparkNotes Plus subscription is 4.99/month or 24.99/year as selected above. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. Wells, Edward Gorey (Illustrator) 3.83 290,629 ratings10,676 reviews Want to read Buy on Amazon Rate this book This is the unabridged H. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. Fiction can be frighteningly realistic sometimes.“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

It’s not known if Welles knew of this hoax, although he was familiar with a similar BBC radio ruse from 1926, courtesy of Catholic priest and broadcaster Ronald Knox, which interrupted a program on 18th century literature to claim that Big Ben had been toppled by trench mortars and the Savoy Hotel had been torched.Īnd finally, the much quoted claim that HG Wells wrote the first alien invasion sci-fi novel? In 1892, six years before War of the Worlds, an Anglican clergymen from Melbourne, Robert Potter, got there first with The Germ Growers, a tale of aliens secretly arriving on earth with the aim of destroying humanity through germ warfare. The play, entitled “The Imaginary Invasion” was reported in the New York Times, which noted that “many women and children became hysterical and even men were alarmed”. Like Welles’s broadcast, the spoof caused urgent calls to and from the police and panic among listeners.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells