The War of the Worlds

A green shooting star drops onto Horsell Common, and Woking's curious gather at its rim, peering into the pit with more excitement than dread, right up until the cylinder's lid begins, slowly, to turn. H.G. Wells builds the invasion from a single cold thought: watch what a species older and hungrier than ours would actually do to a planet it wanted, the way we ourselves have done to creatures and to peoples we judged beneath us. The heat-ray reduces a crowd of onlookers to ash before they can even run. The tripods stride over English hedgerows as though the army sent to meet them were made of paper. Wells's unnamed narrator flees across a countryside emptied of every certainty he was raised on, that man stands at the summit of creation, that guns and empire mean anything at all. And when the invaders fall at last, they fall not to those guns but to the smallest and humblest life on the planet, the one thing nobody thought to fear.