The War of the Worlds

Record summary

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, first serialized in 1897, presents extraterrestrial beings arriving in engineered vehicles and interacting violently with humans. It is a major nineteenth-century reference point for later interpretations of alleged occupants, craft, and invasion narratives. The novel matters comparatively because it shows that extraterrestrial-machine imagery already had a sophisticated literary form before twentieth-century UFO reports. It is fiction, not testimony, and its publication history, serialization, and relation to earlier invasion literature should be kept separate from later media claims.