War of the Worlds

The 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


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.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the
sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it
receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world.
It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our
world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its
surface must have begun its course.  The fact that it is scarcely one
seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling
to the temperature at which life could begin.  It has air and water
and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

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
present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars.  The immediate
pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their
powers, and hardened their hearts.  And looking across space with
instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of,
they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of
them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with
vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of
fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad
stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them
at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us.  The
intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant
struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
of the minds upon Mars.  Their world is far gone in its cooling and
this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they
regard as inferior animals.  To carry warfare sunward is, indeed,
their only escape from the destruction that, generation after
generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what
ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only
upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its
inferior races.  The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness,
were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged
by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.  Are we such
apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?