About

the war of the worlds

by h. g; wells

book i. the coming of the martians.

i.

the eve of the war.

no one would have believed, in the last years 
of the nineteenth century, that human affairs 
were being watched keenly and closely by 
intelligences greater than man's and yet as 
mortal as his own ; that as men busied them- 
selves about their affairs they were scrutinized 
and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a 
man with a microscope might scrutinize the 
transient creatures that swarm and multiply in 
a drop of water. with infinite complacency 
men went to and fro over this globe about 
j;heir 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 

i 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 dis- 
tance 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 life's beginning but nearer its 
end. 

the secular cooling that must some day over- 
take 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 mid-day tem- 
perature 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 tem- 
perate 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 look- 
ing across space, with instruments and intelli- 
gences such as we have scarcely dreamt 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 gray 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.