The War of the Worlds
Narrated by Andrew Bond
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells's 1898 novel, drops a Martian cylinder onto an English common and lets the panic spread from there.
It opens on an ordinary evening in Surrey. A shooting star comes down on Horsell Common, and the crowd that gathers to look at it has no idea what is about to unscrew itself from the inside. When the Martians climb out and their heat-rays start burning across the fields, curiosity turns to panic. Roads fill with families fleeing on foot and by cart, the army moves in, and the unnamed narrator is separated from his wife in a country that no longer follows its old rules.
The second half finds him trapped in a half-collapsed house, sharing the rubble with a curate whose fear grows more dangerous by the day, watching the Martians at close range through a crack in the wall. When he finally gets out, he crosses a silent countryside choked with red weed, meets an artilleryman full of half-mad plans for living underground, then walks on alone into an empty London waiting for an answer nobody expected.
Wells wrote it as one novel in two books, and this is the whole of it: the invasion and the aftermath, the panic and the long quiet that follows. It is the book that started the alien-invasion story, and a close character study besides, told in the observational voice of late-Victorian England. There is real dread in it and no gore, only the slow creep of the unknown across familiar fields and rail lines. Anyone who came to science fiction through later invasion stories will recognize where they began.
Andrew Bond holds the tension back rather than playing it. The strange lights, the emptied lanes and the overgrown city settle around you instead of jolting you awake, which is rather the point: one of science fiction's oldest stories, paced for the end of the day.
