Works · Novel · 1897

The War of the Worlds

First appeared Apr–Dec 1897 in Pearson's Magazine

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Astronomers see flashes on Mars, and a few nights later something falls on Horsell Common outside Woking. The cylinder unscrews to reveal tentacled creatures who cannot bear Earth’s gravity until they climb into three-legged fighting machines that burn crowds with a heat-ray and poison the air with black smoke. A philosophical narrator sends his wife to safety while his brother is caught in the flight from London to the coast, and the army’s guns prove useless. Cut off, the narrator shelters with a curate and then a mad artilleryman, and has to watch what the invaders are doing with the people they capture.

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.

Book One, Chapter I (The Eve of the War). Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #36 (Gutenberg text (book form, with the extra chapter))

The publication record

The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells

Novel

Serial Apr–Dec 1897 Pearson's Magazine C. Arthur Pearson, London Nine monthly instalments, illustrated by Warwick Goble. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes a parallel run in Cosmopolitan (US). First public appearance, hence anchorYear 1897. [1][2][3]
Volume 1898 William Heinemann, London First book edition; only the year is established. The Surrey History Centre notes the book form adds an extra chapter and fuller discussion of invasion and colonisation. [1][2]

Goble illustration, Pearson's 1897 Warwick Goble (1862-1943), 1897. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

H. G. Wells, 1866–1946. The War of the Worlds first appeared when H. G. Wells was 30. Other works here: The Time Machine, Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man.

Facts

The serial ran in Pearson’s Magazine from April to December 1897 (nine monthly parts, with 1897 also the year of a Cosmopolitan run in the US); the first British book edition, from Heinemann, followed in 1898.[1][2][3]
Wells set the invasion in the neighbourhood where he lived: the first cylinder falls on Horsell Common near Woking, and the narrator names Horsell, Ottershaw and Woking in the opening chapters. The Surrey History Centre quotes Wells saying he cycled around Woking marking down suitable places and people for destruction by his Martians.[4][2]
Warwick Goble illustrated the Pearson’s serial; the Surrey History Centre records that he drew the tripods, which Wells at first disliked but later praised, and that Cosmo Rowe also contributed illustrations.[2][3]
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia reads the Martians as monstrous invaders whom Wells equates with white Europeans, so that the book anatomizes Western imperialism; it also records Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast, ‘The Night that Panicked America’.[1]

Setting

‘early in the twentieth century’, as the opening chapter puts it[4][2]

Woking
Horsell Common
Ottershaw
Surrey
London

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed dates and attribution

First appearance: 1897 (Pearson’s Magazine, April to December) is the anchor. A Cosmopolitan run in the US was parallel; its dates were not verified.
Serial start: the Surrey History Centre and Princeton (both fetched) give April to December 1897.

Threads

Threads in

No sourced relation to an earlier work is recorded.

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1897, and the other writers alive when The War of the Worlds appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).