50 Fun Facts About The War of the Worlds

What finally kills the Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds after every human weapon has failed?

Bacteria finish the Martians because their own world has none, so they arrive with no defence against earthly disease. The narrator finds them lying dead beside their machines.

Which 23-year-old director's 1938 radio play of The War of the Worlds convinced some listeners Martians had landed?

Orson Welles apologised at a hastily called press conference the next morning, and no punitive action followed. The publicity brought him to national attention.

Which American magazine, later a women's fashion title, serialised The War of the Worlds in 1897?

Cosmopolitan was a general literary monthly when it ran the Martian invasion, decades before it turned into a women's magazine. British readers followed the same serial in Pearson's Magazine.

Which American inventor leads Earth's counter-attack on Mars in an unauthorised 1898 sequel to The War of the Worlds?

Thomas Edison is the hero of Edison's Conquest of Mars, a Boston Post serial by astronomer Garrett Serviss. It sends the inventor to fight the Martians on their own soil.

Which basic human invention is entirely absent from the Martians' machines in The War of the Worlds?

The wheel appears nowhere in anything the Martians bring to Earth, which the narrator finds astonishing. Their machines run on sliding parts and a kind of artificial muscle instead.

Which director made the 2005 film War of the Worlds, telling the invasion through one fleeing family?

Steven Spielberg had made aliens lovable in E.T., but said the plight of these survivors reflected his own unease after the September 11 attacks.

Which detail about the narrator of The War of the Worlds does H. G. Wells withhold for the entire novel?

His name is never given, and neither is that of the younger brother whose escape from London fills several chapters. Readers learn only that the narrator writes on philosophy and lives in Surrey.

How did H. G. Wells travel around Surrey choosing places for his Martians to destroy in The War of the Worlds?

By bicycle, usually in the mornings, the newly married author toured the lanes, then wrote in the afternoons. He later said he had been marking down places and people for destruction.

On the eve of which holiday did the 1938 radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds alarm American listeners?

Halloween fell the next day, and the Mercury Theatre on the Air went out live on 30 October as its episode for the season. Many American stations replay the programme as a yearly tradition.

What do the Martians take from the living captives they collect in The War of the Worlds?

Blood is their only food, since the Martians have no digestive organs at all. The narrator watches them feed through a gap in a ruined house and can hardly bear to describe it.

On which Surrey heath does the first Martian cylinder land at the start of The War of the Worlds?

Horsell Common is real heathland, and its sandpit is the spot the story picks for the landing. The author lived close by and knew the ground from his daily outings.

What does the narrator call the invisible beam that kills the peaceful deputation in The War of the Worlds?

The Heat-Ray is thought to be made in a sealed chamber and is aimed with a polished mirror, much as a lighthouse throws its beam. It works in silence, so its first victims simply burst into flame.

Which Royal Navy torpedo ram charges the Martian tripods to save a fleet of refugee ships in The War of the Worlds?

Thunder Child fells one fighting machine and, already ablaze, crashes into a second, buying time for the steamers to reach open sea. The ironclad is destroyed in the attempt.

What is the occupation of the despairing man trapped with the narrator in a ruined house in The War of the Worlds?

Curate is all the story ever calls this junior clergyman, and his loud despair almost betrays their hiding place beside a Martian pit. The narrator finally knocks him senseless to silence him.

At which north London landmark does the narrator find the Martians lying dead at the end of The War of the Worlds?

Primrose Hill holds the last and largest camp the Martians built, and the narrator climbs towards it expecting to be killed. He finds birds picking at the bodies instead.

Which condition on Earth, three times stronger than on Mars, makes the invaders clumsy in The War of the Worlds?

Gravity makes each Martian weigh three times what it does at home, so the first observers judge them helpless. Their walking machines soon solve the problem.

What does the doomed deputation wave as it approaches the first Martian cylinder in The War of the Worlds?

A white flag is chosen on the theory that the Martians, being intelligent, will read it as a signal from intelligent creatures. The astronomers leading the party are among the first people killed.

What do onlookers first take the Martian cylinder to be as it crosses the night sky in The War of the Worlds?

A falling star is what hundreds of people assume they have seen, and an astronomer sets out next morning to look for a meteorite. He finds a great metal cylinder sunk in the sand.

Why do the Martians invade Earth, as the opening chapter of The War of the Worlds explains?

Their world is dying of cold: older than Earth and farther from the sun, it has thin air and oceans shrunk to a third of its surface. The narrator pictures them gazing at a warmer, greener neighbour.

Which family member does the narrator of The War of the Worlds find alive at his home as the story ends?

His wife appears at the window with a cousin just as he is giving up hope in the empty house, each having counted the other among the dead.

Which poisonous weapon do the Martians launch in canisters to smother hidden artillery in The War of the Worlds?

The Black Smoke is a heavy vapour that sinks into valleys and kills whatever breathes it, and the Martians clear it afterwards with jets of steam. It turns the flight from London into a rout.

Which fast-growing Martian plant chokes the rivers of southern England in The War of the Worlds before rotting away?

Red weed spreads wherever it finds water, damming the Wey and the Thames into shallow floods. The starving narrator gnaws some of its fronds and finds a sickly, metallic taste.

Which Surrey town, where H. G. Wells was living as he wrote The War of the Worlds, do the Martians destroy first?

Woking was the author's home from 1895, and the story wrecks it within two days of the landing. A seven-metre tripod sculpture has stood near the railway station since 1998.

Where does the artilleryman on Putney Hill propose that survivors hide and rebuild in The War of the Worlds?

In the main drains, he says, with cellars and railway tunnels besides, a hardy remnant could breed, learn and one day seize a fighting machine. After a short spell of digging he prefers cards and champagne.

How do the Martians send their cylinders to Earth in The War of the Worlds, an idea borrowed from Jules Verne?

From a huge gun sunk in a pit on Mars, each cylinder is shot out in a jet of flaming gas that astronomers can see. A flash appears around midnight on ten nights running.

Which sea creature do the grey, tentacled Martians most resemble once they crawl out in The War of the Worlds?

An octopus is the comparison a soldier reaches for on hearing them described: each Martian is a round, bear-sized head with sixteen whip-like tentacles in two bunches around its mouth.

How do the sexless Martians reproduce in The War of the Worlds, as a young one born during the invasion shows?

By budding, as a lily bulb or a freshwater polyp does: the young Martian was found still partly joined to its parent. The narrator adds that the invaders never sleep.

What is the narrator's younger brother doing in London when the invasion begins in The War of the Worlds?

Studying medicine for an exam kept him so busy that he heard nothing of the landing until Saturday morning. His flight with two women in a pony chaise shows the capital emptying in panic.

To which Surrey town does the narrator drive by hired dog cart for safety with cousins in The War of the Worlds?

Leatherhead lies about twelve miles from the narrator's house, far enough to seem safe. Driving back that night to return the cart, he meets his first fighting machine in a violent storm.

Which astronomer lets the narrator watch Mars through a telescope at Ottershaw in The War of the Worlds?

Ogilvy insists the odds against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one, then becomes the first person to reach the cylinder. He dies with the deputation sent to greet its occupants.

Which earlier H. G. Wells book, home of the Eloi and the Morlocks, appeared three years before The War of the Worlds?

The Time Machine came first, in 1895, and its far-future humans reshaped by evolution foreshadow the Martians. The author's son Anthony West saw in it a seed of the invasion story.

Colonisation's toll on which island's indigenous people did H. G. Wells cite as inspiration for The War of the Worlds?

Tasmania appears in the first chapter, where the narrator asks whether humans can complain of the Martians after what European settlers did to the islanders. The story turns empire against its owners.

What label did H. G. Wells give his early fantastic novels, such as The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man?

Scientific romances was his own term for the stream of fantastic novels he produced in six years from 1895. The phrase itself was older: an 1879 encyclopaedia had already applied it to Jules Verne.

For what did H. G. Wells credit his brother Frank in the dedication of The War of the Worlds?

The original idea was Frank's: he had imagined superior beings from another planet suddenly dropping from the sky. The dedication calls the book a rendering of it.

Which American astronomer claimed Mars had canals built by intelligent beings, an idea The War of the Worlds drew on?

Percival Lowell founded his own observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, and wrote three books arguing that Mars sustained intelligent life. The planet search he began there led to Pluto.

Which rocket pioneer said reading The War of the Worlds at sixteen first turned his mind to space travel?

Robert Goddard read the story when it was newly published and went on to build and launch the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926.

Which 1871 tale of a German landing in England began the invasion craze The War of the Worlds joined?

The Battle of Dorking, by George Chesney, sold 80,000 copies as a pamphlet and set off decades of invasion scares in print. H. G. Wells swapped the German army for Martians.

Which astronomer's words, taken from The Anatomy of Melancholy, form the epigraph of The War of the Worlds?

Johannes Kepler supplied the question that opens the book: if other worlds are inhabited, are they or we the masters of creation? It reached the author second-hand, through a much older English book on sadness.

With what does the narrator strike down his raving companion in the ruined house in The War of the Worlds?

A meat chopper hangs on the scullery wall, and the narrator turns the blade back to hit with the butt, stopping the shouts that would bring the Martians. A probing metal tentacle still drags the stunned man away.

Which author wrote The Massacre of Mankind, the 2017 sequel to The War of the Worlds approved by the Wells estate?

Stephen Baxter set his sequel in 1921 and gave the telling to Julie Elphinstone, a minor figure from the first book, as a second Martian invasion begins.

In which US state do the Martians first land in the 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds?

New Jersey got the invasion when the script moved the first landing from Victorian England to Grovers Mill, a real village in West Windsor. Real place names made the reports more convincing.

What form did the first half of the 1938 radio War of the Worlds take, making the invasion sound real?

Fake news bulletins kept breaking into a programme of live music, each more alarming than the last. The programme took its first break only after about thirty minutes.

Which rival industry do historians say exaggerated the 1938 War of the Worlds radio panic to discredit broadcasting?

Newspapers had lost advertising to radio during the Depression, and their front pages turned scattered frights into a nationwide stampede. Researchers have since found that real panic was rare.

Which writer of the 1938 radio script for The War of the Worlds later shared an Oscar for co-writing Casablanca?

Howard Koch was a staff writer on fifty dollars a week when he moved the story to modern America, and he kept the rights to the script. Hollywood noticed, and he shared the Casablanca award with the Epstein brothers.

Which actor plays dock worker Ray Ferrier, a divorced father of two, in the 2005 film War of the Worlds?

Tom Cruise had already worked with the film's director on Minority Report, and here plays a crane operator trying to get his two children across a collapsing country.

Which actor is heard but never seen as the narrator of the 2005 film War of the Worlds?

Morgan Freeman's narration frames the story at both ends, explaining at the close why the invaders collapsed. The 1953 film gave that closing speech to Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Where have the alien tripods been waiting before they attack in the 2005 film War of the Worlds?

Buried underground long ago, the machines are boarded by pilots who ride down in bursts of lightning. The change replaced the cylinders that cross space in the book.

For which craft did the 1953 film The War of the Worlds, set in California, win an Academy Award?

Special effects won the film its Oscar: its manta-shaped war machines hung from wires that sharper home-video formats later exposed. Editing and sound were nominated.

Which film star narrates Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical album of The War of the Worlds as the Journalist?

Richard Burton topped a very short list of candidates, and the composer compared his voice to a musical instrument. He said yes days after a script was left for him at a New York stage door.

Which singer took Forever Autumn, from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds album, into the UK top five in 1978?

Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues sang the ballad, whose melody began life in 1969 as a jingle for a Lego commercial.