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Free Story eBook: The War of the Worlds
Author: H. G. Wells
PUBLISHED: 1898 / 147 Pages
The War of the Worlds describes the fictional 1895 invasion of Earth by aliens from Mars who use laser-like Heat-Rays, chemical weapons, and mechanical three-legged ”fighting machines” that could potentially be viewed as precursors to the tank. After defeating the resistance the Martians devastate much of eastern England, including London…
Book Excerpt
o recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need to remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one-seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature a
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