About This Book

The storyline launched Orson Welles toward fame and fortune with his notorious radio tour de force; it was based on this novel. It's the original invaders-from-Mars-destroy-Earth's-civilization story. You may not be old enough to have heard the radio show; you may not be old enough to remember the mid-century film — or even the Woody Allen film that featured the incident. But the novel itself is part of America's science-fiction mythology, and here's your chance to share it!

About H. G. Wells

(1866-1946) Born in Bromley, Kent, England, Wells had an unpropitious start in life. Apprenticed to a draper when he was 14, he tried and rejected several other trades, and after finding work as a schoolmaster's assistant, he won a scholarship to study biology and graduated from London University in 1888. His best known books today are his early works of science fiction.

H.G. Wells is known as a novelist, a forceful journalist, sociologist, and historian. He was active in social issues, and worked to change 19th-century attitudes in economics and religious beliefs. His futuristic adventure stories, of which "The Time Machine," published in 1895, was the first, include "The Island of Doctor Moreau," "The Invisible Man," "The War of the Worlds," "The First Men in the Moon," and several collections of short stories. Almost all of these appeared before 1900.

In addition to science fiction, Wells later many successful novels of realistic comedy and of social commentary that were popular in their time, but have been eclipsed by the great familiar works of speculative fiction that have been immortalized in film and other media.