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Let's go to Mars

Wells invents the hostile Martian

Wells's Martians land near Woking, burn Surrey with a heat-ray, and die of bacteria. The invading alien enters the culture and never leaves it.

An ink and pencil drawing of a three-legged Martian machine striding over a hillside and firing a pale narrow ray, with a stricken warship listing in the river below and figures fleeing along the bank.
Henrique Alvim Corrêa's 1906 drawing for the Belgian edition: the walking machine and the heat-ray, drawn eight years after the book and fixed in the culture ever since. · Image: Henrique Alvim Corrêa

H. G. Wells serialised The War of the Worlds in Pearson's Magazine in Britain and The Cosmopolitan in America from April to December 1897; Heinemann published the book in January 1898. The first cylinder comes down on Horsell Common near Woking, unscrews, and disgorges machines that walk. A heat-ray flattens Surrey, and the British Army is irrelevant within days. The Martians are then killed by terrestrial bacteria, having no immunity to them — an ending that turns on microbiology rather than heroism.

Mars was understood at the time to be older than Earth, colder, and drying out — Schiaparelli's and Lowell's Mars — and Wells asked what its inhabitants would do about it. That version of the planet survived in fiction until Mariner 4 photographed Mars in 1965. Wells opens by comparing the invasion to the extermination of the Tasmanians, and the novel is at least as much about the British Empire as about Mars.

In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars in All-Story Magazine — the Barsoom of dying sea-bottoms, thin air and warring races, later collected as A Princess of Mars. Between them Wells and Burroughs fixed the two settings the culture still uses: Mars as a threat, and Mars as somewhere to go. Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury both said Burroughs got them started.

On 30 October 1938 the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a version of Wells on CBS, directed by Orson Welles, aged 23, from a script by Howard Koch that moved the landings to Grovers Mill, New Jersey and presented the first act as breaking news bulletins. The show aired opposite the most popular programme in America and had a modest audience. Later work by Jefferson Pooley, Michael Socolow and A. Brad Schwartz found frightened, confused listeners in real numbers but no mass panic. The press, with reasons of its own to argue that radio was dangerous, ran the hysteria headlines anyway.