The War of the Worlds

The plot is similar to other works of invasion literature from the same period and has been variously interpreted as a commentary on the theory of evolution, imperialism, and Victorian era fears, superstitions and prejudices. Wells later noted that inspiration for the plot was the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. The story is told in the first-person with a narrator making his way about London as the invasion proceeds. Glimpses of destruction, his retreat, and conversations with other survivors drive the narrative.
Some historians have argued that Wells wrote the book to encourage his readership to question the morality of imperialism. In the preface to his collected works in 1933, Wells explained: "My early, profound and lifelong admiration for [Jonathan] Swift...is particularly evident in a predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions", adding "The War of the Worlds like The Time Machine was another assault on human self-satisfaction", both being "consciously grim, under the influence of Swift's tradition".

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.

The Coming of the Martians

In the mid-1890s, aliens on Mars plot an invasion of Earth because their world is becoming uninhabitable. In the early 20th century, on a Friday in the summer, an object thought to be a meteor lands on Horsell Common, near the narrator's home. It turns out to be an artificial cylinder launched towards Earth months earlier, as Earth and Mars approached opposition. Several Martians emerge and struggle with Earth's gravity and atmosphere. The alien beings do not resemble humans and have an enormously enlarged head and brain, two large eyes, and a beak mouth, on an octopus-like body with long, whip-shaped tentacles for grasping and locomotion. When humans approach the cylinder waving a white flag, the Martians incinerate them using a heat ray. The crowd flees. That evening a large military force surrounds the cylinder.
The next night, the narrator sees a three-legged Martian "fighting-machine" (tripod), armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon that dispenses toxic smoke. Tripods have wiped out the human soldiers around the cylinder and destroyed most of Woking. The narrator approaches his own house and finds the landlord dead. He offers shelter to an artilleryman whose battery was wiped out attacking the cylinder. The narrator and the artilleryman try to escape but are separated during a Martian attack. As refugees try to cross the River Wey, the army destroys a tripod with artillery fire, and the Martians retreat. The narrator travels to Walton, where he meets a curate.

The Martians attack again, and people begin to flee London, trying to escape the deadly black chemical vapor spread by the invaders. The narrator's brother reaches the coast and buys passage to Europe on a refugee ship. Three Tripods attack, but a torpedo ram, HMS Thunder Child, manages to destroy all three, with the ironclad sinking shortly after the third tripod's destruction due to damage it sustained from the tripods' weapons. Fortunately, its effort was enough to allow the evacuation fleet to escape unscathed. Soon, resistance collapses, and Martians roam the shattered landscape unhindered.

The Earth under the Martians

In Book Two, the narrator and the curate witness a Martian machine seizing people and tossing them into a metal carrier. The narrator realises that the Martian invaders have plans for their victims. When a fifth Martian cylinder lands, both men are trapped beneath the ruins of a manor house. Hidden in the wreckage, the narrator observes the Martians in the impact pit and learns that they feed on blood, taken now from humans, and that they appear to communicate with some type of telepathy. The curate falls into despair. When he tries to eat their remaining food, the narrator knocks him unconscious. A mechanical tentacle probes the smashed house and removes the curate's body, but the narrator is able to escape and hide.
The Martians abandon the cylinder's crater, and the narrator heads for West London. En route, he finds Martian red weed everywhere, prickly vegetation spreading wherever there is water, but notices that it is slowly dying. On Putney Hill, he encounters the artilleryman, who is planning tactics for how humans can continue fighting the Martians after they control the world. The next day the narrator heads into the deserted ruins of London and hears a strange howling sound coming from immobile Martian fighting machines. On an insane impulse, he resolves to die and end his hopeless situation. He approaches a stationary fighting machine on Primrose Hill, expecting to be killed. To his joy and relief, he discovers that all the Martians are dead, killed by earthly bacteria, to which they had no immunity. The martian invasion lasts around three weeks.
The narrator suffers a nervous breakdown, over the course of three days. Returning to Woking, he finds his wife. In the following days, humankind gradually recovers and makes scientific progress from studying the Martian corpses and machines. However, there is still the humbling realization of Earth's vulnerability and the possibility of another invasion.