The Martians of The War of the Worlds: Tripods, Heat Rays and Why They Died

The invasion was current events. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli, observing Mars at a close opposition from Milan, drew a network of straight lines across it and called them canali, channels; English newspapers printed "canals," and a wealthy Bostonian named Percival Lowell built an observatory at Flagstaff in 1894 to study them. Lowell's Mars (1895) argued that the lines were irrigation works carrying polar meltwater to the equator of a dying desert planet, and that only a civilization older and more advanced than ours could have built them. H.G. Wells, a trained biologist writing for magazines, read Lowell and asked the next question. His brother Frank, he later said, had wondered aloud what would happen if beings from another planet dropped from the sky and began laying about them, and the two ideas combined.

The War of the Worlds ran in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897 and appeared as a book in 1898. Wells set it in the Surrey commuter towns he knew, landing the first cylinder on Horsell Common outside Woking, and opened it with a comparison that gave the book its conscience: the Martians do to Britain what Britain had done to Tasmania, and readers who found the invasion monstrous were invited to notice why. The novel was the first alien invasion story and remains the model for all of them, down to the detail that the invaders arrive from a planet astronomers had told the public to watch.

Wells designed his Martians as an evolutionary argument. They are the size of a bear and almost all head: a bulging cranium, two large dark eyes, a fleshy beak in a V shape, no nose, a tympanic ear on the back, and two bunches of eight thin tentacles where hands would be. They have no stomach; they take the blood of living creatures and inject it into their own veins, and on Earth they take it from people. They do not sleep, and they reproduce by budding. Wells presents them as a possible future for humans, a body reduced to a brain and hands by a technology that did the rest, an idea he had already floated in an 1893 essay on the man of the year million. The Martians are ugly because they are us, later.

The machines did what the bodies could not. Each cylinder, fired from a Martian cannon and crossing space in a month, unpacked into fighting machines: three-legged walkers a hundred feet tall with a hooded head, articulated tentacles and a generator for the Heat-Ray, an invisible beam that ignited whatever it touched. They fired canisters of the Black Smoke, a heavy poison gas that settled into valleys and killed everything breathing, and they released the red weed, a Martian plant that spread over riverbanks and choked the Thames. Wells wrote this seventeen years before the first tanks and poison gas of 1915, and the book has been read as a prophecy ever since, though he was extrapolating from artillery and industrial chemistry that already existed.

They died of the smallest thing on the planet. Mars, Wells explains, had eliminated microorganisms ages ago or never had them, so its people had no immunity to Earth's bacteria; from the moment they began feeding on human blood they were being infected, and within about three weeks of the first landing the fighting machines stood idle over London with their pilots dead inside. The narrator, walking through the ruined city, hears the last of them howling from Primrose Hill. The military had achieved almost nothing: one machine destroyed by a shore battery, one by the ironclad Thunder Child. Wells was a student of T.H. Huxley and the ending is Darwin's, not Providence's. Humans had bought their immunity with an uncountable number of deaths across their whole history, and the Martians had not paid.

The ending has proved un-improvable. George Pal's 1953 film gives the Martians manta-shaped hovering machines instead of tripods and a religious frame, but they still die of germs; Steven Spielberg's 2005 film buries the tripods under the earth for a million years and still ends with a Martian dying in a Boston street of the common cold. Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical album, which sold more copies than any adaptation was seen, kept it in the lyrics. The bacteria are the story's argument, and adaptations that change them lose the argument.

The Martians outlived the canals. Lowell's lines dissolved under better telescopes by the 1910s and vanished for good when Mariner 4 photographed a cratered, dry Mars in 1965; the question of life on Mars retreated to microbes, ancient water and the samples the Perseverance rover has been caching since 2021. Wells's invaders, meanwhile, kept coming. Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre broadcast of October 30, 1938 moved the landing to Grover's Mill, New Jersey and delivered it as news bulletins, and the newspapers reported a national panic that later research found to be mostly their own invention; a 1949 Spanish-language version in Quito, Ecuador, ended with a mob burning down the radio station. The 1953 film, the 1978 album, the 2005 film, a 2019 BBC series set in Wells's own Edwardian England and a Fox series that ran from 2019 to 2022 each remade the Martians in the image of their decade's fear: the bomb, the Cold War, terrorism, climate.

The Martians also gave ufology its first template. When the saucers came in 1947, the press reached for Mars by reflex, and the contactees of the 1950s reported meeting Martians and Venusians because those were the planets the public had been told to expect neighbours on. The history of UFOs starts in the same decade Wells was writing, with the 1896 airship wave, and the reading list in best alien science fiction novels puts the book first because every invasion since is an answer to it. The 1938 broadcast, and whether anyone actually panicked, has its own case file in this Knowledge Base.