Book 1 Opening: The Arrival
Book 1: The Coming of the Martians
The novel’s opening is deliberately calm. The narrator describes a quiet evening in Woking, Surrey, as a “falling star” streaks across the sky. Wells establishes the mundane normality of Victorian suburban life before destroying it. The contrast between the ordinary setting and the extraordinary event is crucial — it makes the invasion feel real and immediate.
The cylinder lands on Horsell Common, and curious crowds gather to watch it being unscrewed. Wells presents the onlookers as complacent and naive — they treat the alien arrival as entertainment, expecting to find something they can understand and control. This complacency reflects broader Victorian attitudes: the belief that Britain was invulnerable and that no force could challenge its supremacy.
Wells sets the invasion in suburban Woking, not an exotic location. The mundane, recognisable setting makes the horror more shocking and forces Victorian readers to imagine the invasion happening to them. The contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary is a key technique throughout the novel.
Wells reinforces this ordinariness through specific domestic detail. The narrator mentions his wife, his study, his daily routine. He walks to the Common as a curious observer, expecting to see nothing remarkable. This mirrors the attitude of Victorian society as a whole — comfortable, complacent, and utterly unprepared for catastrophe. The genius of Wells’s approach is that he makes the reader share this complacency before shattering it.
Victorian Complacency
The crowd that gathers around the cylinder on Horsell Common behaves as if watching a spectacle. People arrive by carriage and bicycle. Boys throw stones. A man sells apples. Wells uses these comic details to satirise the assumption that nothing truly dangerous could happen on English soil. The British Empire had exported violence around the world for centuries, but the homeland itself felt untouchable. The Heat-Ray shatters this illusion in seconds.
The Martians themselves are described with deliberate disgust. The narrator sees “a big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear” with “Gorgon groups of tentacles.” Wells uses the classical reference to Gorgons to link the invasion to mythological horror, suggesting that what the crowd witnesses is beyond rational comprehension. The contrast between the familiar English countryside and the alien horror emerging from the cylinder creates a visceral shock.
The Heat-Ray
When the Martians emerge and deploy the Heat-Ray, the tone shifts violently. The crowd’s curiosity turns to terror. Wells describes people being incinerated in graphic detail: “It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.” The simile reduces human beings to fuel, stripping away all dignity and individuality. This dehumanisation mirrors how colonial powers described the peoples they conquered.
Wells uses a first-person narrator whose perspective is deliberately limited. He can only report what he personally sees, hears, and feels. This creates uncertainty and suspense — the reader, like the narrator, never has a complete picture of the invasion. It also mimics the experience of real disaster: confusion, fragmented information, and panic.
The narrator’s psychological realism is one of Wells’s most powerful techniques. He admits that his mind kept returning to normality — he expected the army to contain the threat and the government to restore order. This inability to accept the scale of the catastrophe mirrors how real people respond to disasters: with denial, confusion, and a desperate clinging to routine. Wells understood that the greatest obstacle to survival is not external danger but the human refusal to believe that the world has fundamentally changed.
The Collapse of Order
As the Martians advance, Victorian social order rapidly disintegrates. The military fails. Communications break down. Crowds flee in panic. Wells presents this collapse as inevitable — the structures that Victorians relied on (army, police, railways, telegraph) were built to maintain order among humans, not to resist an alien intelligence. The veneer of civilisation is shown to be extraordinarily thin.
The army, police, railways, and telegraph all fail against the Martians. Wells shows that Victorian civilisation is fragile — its institutions depend on unchallenged supremacy. When that supremacy is challenged, everything collapses. This critiques the Victorian belief that their society was permanent and unassailable.
The narrator himself struggles to comprehend what is happening. He admits that his mind kept returning to normality — he expected the army to contain the threat, the government to restore order. This psychological realism is one of Wells’s most powerful techniques. The narrator’s inability to accept the scale of the catastrophe mirrors how real people respond to disasters — with denial, confusion, and a desperate clinging to routine.
Wells devotes significant attention to crowd behaviour during the evacuation. People trample one another, steal food, and abandon the weak. The narrator watches the social order dissolve with terrifying speed. Wells suggests that civilised behaviour is a luxury of safety — when survival is at stake, humans revert to primal instincts. This anticipates twentieth-century psychology and disaster studies.