Nevertheless, it’s worth bearing in mind that what the Martians bring is even more nihilistic than imperialist lust for power and riches: they are bent on the entire extermination of the native peoples, with the exception of the bare minimum they need to keep alive so they can indulge their strange blood-drinking habits. The scenes involving Londoners fleeing the capital in fear and panic are rightly praised and are among the best writing Wells ever produced they are more powerful now after such scenes became commonplace during the two World Wars as people fled war-torn homelands in search of refuge, and such scenes remain part of the news to this day. In The War of the Worlds, then, Wells turns the tables and gives Britain a flavour of what it would be like if Victorian Britain was the colonised, rather than the coloniser. People start fleeing London when the Martians start using black smoke – a form of chemical warfare – against the city’s inhabitants. His brother lives in central London and his letter outlines the shift in the capital as people realise their weapons are useless against the Martians. Interspersed within the narrator’s own story is a second narrative, detailed within a letter the narrator’s brother sends to him and which the narrator relates to us. Man-made guns prove useless against the Martians’ superior weapons. Civilisation soon starts to fall apart as panic spreads among the English populace. The Martians attack a group of men who approach them, destroying them with a heat ray. The novel’s narrator is nearby, writing a paper on morality, and gets to see a Martian emerging from the cylinder, about the size of a bear and possessing a ‘tentacular appendage’. They arrive in cylinders on a common in Surrey. The Martians invade England, seeking to colonise Earth, as Mars has become inhospitable.
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