He looked back on this as a lucky turn of events, as it was then that he developed the habit of reading.īecause his family did not have much money, Wells became an apprentice to a draper at age thirteen, working twelve-hour days. He broke a bone in his leg and was forced to spend two months in bed.
When Wells was seven, he was injured while playing with a friend of his father. His father was a shopkeeper and a professional cricket player with the Bromley team his mother was a part-time housekeeper. Herbert George Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, in England. Humanity has entered into space exploration since this novel was published, and many of the specific details are no longer of concern.īut there will always be uneasiness about the unknown and curiosity about what might happen when people of Earth contact lives from other worlds.
Still, their advanced intelligence gives them the power to create powerful weapons, such as Heat-Ray guns that can level whole towns tripods with hundred-foot legs, that give them mobility and even flying machines, which, in 1898, were beyond human technology. They are not super beings, but bodiless heads, barely able to move because the atmosphere of Earth is so much thicker than that of their own planet. Wells, who had an intense interest in science from an early age, created his Martian invaders with a strict sense of the laws of biology and physics. Like the radio program, much of the novel takes its power from appearing to be real.
Until the night of that broadcast, few people realized the power of broadcast media to make whole populations feel powerless when faced with breaking events. The Mercury Theatre on the Air, headed by twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles, broadcast over the radio an adaptation of the book that was so realistic that it caused widespread public panic, mob violence, and looting. In 1938, it became part of one of the greatest and most horrifying media events of all times. The story has become an integral part of our culture, frequently retold in graphic novels and films. A century later, it has never been out of print. Wells's science fiction masterpiece The War of the Worlds was originally published in Pierson's magazine in 1897 and was issued as a novel the following year.
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