International Studies Preparatory Academy

ENGLISH 1105The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells [1898]
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited?…Are we or they Lords of the
World?…And how are all things made for man?—
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
BOOK ONE: THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER ONE: THE EVE OF THE WAR, excerpt
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.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs,
serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria
under the microscope do the same. 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 curious to recall some of the mental habits of
those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon
Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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 early in the
twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the
nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there
far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since
Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning
but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed
with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now
that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our
coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until
they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps
gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That
last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a presentday problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has
brightened their intellects, e