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With this book H.G.Wells created in 1898 the first novell about an interplanetary invasion,becoming a guiding star of countless martian-tales.As well as The Time Machine The War of the Worlds was written in response to several historical events.The most important was the unification and militarization of Germany.
Another specific event that inspired Wells was the fact mars being positioned particularly closely to earth in 1894, leading to a great deal of observation and discussion.
Orson Welles produced according to War of the Worlds the maybe most famous,but surely the most effective radio broadcast,1938 in the USA.Although announced as radio play,the public reaction was a mass-hysteria;the people panicly left the citties...
Mars and earth are in conjunction and the astronomers` consensus is that Mars was inhabited and that ist inhabitants were farer andvanced.
One evening,one of six space-shots that land in this storry in England streaks across the sky and crashes at Woking.The narrator and other people come running and see a great cylinder.After a while the martians come out,purse-like creatures with tentacles,who are unable to move properly because of the higher gravitation on earth.Most of all people who are around the first cylinder,watching its landing are killed by enormously effective heat-rays.The Martians set up a hundred-foot high walking machines atop each of which is a dome containing a Martian operator.With this machines the Martians gradually advance towards London.Military forces can`t resist their heat-rays and gas attacks.The population flees madly,with no planning,no govermental controll,no resources.The narator is trapped for two weeks in a house next to the landing-place of the sixth cylinder.Along with him is the curate a weak an selfish man which the narrator was forced to knock down as he is about to scream to the martians in hysteria.As the martians disappear he meets the artilleryman.They think about how the humans could survive in the underground-system of London. Later he will find out,that Martians were all killed by terrestrial bacteria against which they had no natural defense.
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