The War of the Worlds

A late 19th-century English unnamed narrator is the witness of the sudden arrival of Martian invaders who have come to the British Isles in cylinder-shaped spacecrafts. The technologically superior Martians unleash devastating heat-rays and drive towering tripods as they begin to conquer the Earth, causing widespread panic and destruction that spells doom and threatens to end human civilization.

The War of the Worlds is the earliest novel that speaks of extraterrestrial invasion, popularizing the trope and ideas of invasive extraterrestrial beings with advanced technologies attacking humanity. The novel plays with the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest, postulating what if humans were attacked by a species more advanced than humanity to threaten their position as the apex predators.

The Whitewolf Classic edition of The War of the Worlds contains the original English text.