The War of the Worlds

Martians land in the Home Counties, and within days the most powerful empire on earth is a column of refugees on the road out of London. Wells wrote it as first-person reportage — an unnamed narrator describing what he saw, block by block, with no heroics and no victory — and the ending turns on biology rather than on human resistance, which is the whole point.

Context: a16z note that it “was written at the peak of British imperialism,” which is the reading that makes it more than an alien-invasion story: it is an account of what colonisation feels like from underneath, addressed to the people doing the colonising. Kyle has already read The Time Machine, the first of the four Wells titles on the list.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the classics tier.
• H. G. Wells — the author; Kyle’s existing page reads him through a Darwinian lens.
• The Time Machine — the Wells Kyle has read.
• The Invisible Man (Wells) — the third Wells title on the list.
• The Island of Doctor Moreau — the fourth.
• Dystopia — Wells’s stories, as a16z put it, “usually ended badly.”
• Science Fiction — the genre he is credited with fathering.