The War of The Worlds is a classic H.G. Wells novel about the invasion of Earth by intelligent beings from the planet Mars. Set in Victorian England, it takes the general form of the Invasion Literature subgenre popular at the time, but was innovative in depicting its conflict as between worlds rather than nations.

The story unfolds near the English town of Woking, where Wells was in fact living when he wrote the novel. A "falling star," at first thought to be a meteorite, plunges into the nearby common. Soon it is evident that this object is not of natural origin, but rather is a conveyance for alien beings. Several factors, such as the current opposition of Mars and recent telescopic sightings of unusual events on that planet's surface, lead to the conclusion that the invaders are Martian. The original "cylinder" is followed by others, one arriving each night. Using a mobility far swifter and weaponry far more lethal than any yet invented by humans, the Martians begin a reign of terror that takes them through town after town and finally into the heart of London, most of whose population is either annihilated or driven to panicked flight from the city. In the words of the novel's first-person narrator, "It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind." The narrator, separated from his wife and brother, undertakes his own frantic journey to London and points beyond, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of strangers he encounters along the way. At one point he is trapped in a house by the fall of one of the Martian cylinders, and uses this vantage point to observe and pass on to the reader details of Martian activity. In the end the Martians perish, victims not of the actions of humans, but of the deadly terrestrial bacteria to which Earthlings had long been immune.

Critically acclaimed since its original serialized publication in 1897, The War of the Worlds has never been out of print.enotes "The War of the Worlds, Introduction". That year, the contemporary translator and critic Henry Durand-Davray called the book "'powerful and dramatic' [and] "far superior to 'Jules Verne's inventions."The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, Patrick Parrinder, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005 (ISBN 0826462537, 9780826462534), p. 34. More recently, Stanislaw Lem wrote that the novel was "the most brilliant work of H.G. Wells," saying that "by transcending its science-fictional model, [it] belongs to the treasures of world literature."The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe [1], p. 146. Like all of Wells's fiction, the novel was intended as more than mere entertainment. In his article "H.G. Wells and the Scientific Imagination," W. Warren Wagar remarked of the book's various levels that it "may be construed . . . as horror tale, apocalypse, political fantasia, or warning to a complacent England, basking in the warmth of Queen Victoria's 60th anniversary Jubilee."W. Warren Wagar, "H.G. Wells and the Scientific Imagination", Bloom's Modern Critical Views: H.G. Wells, ed. Harold Bloom, p. 2. War of the Worlds has also been described as "an allegory of the conquest of a primitive society by technologically sophisticated colonists with no respect for native values or culture."David Y. Hughes, "The Garden in Wells's Early Science Fiction," H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction, ed. by Darko Suvin and Robert M. Philmus, Buckness University Press, 1977, (ISBN 083871773X). Many critics have commented on the book's influence on later writers of science fiction. David C. Smith, for example, notes in H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal that "it clearly set patterns for much science fiction since [it's publication]."David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, Yale University Press, 1986, p. 67.