H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, serializing it in Pearson's Magazine the previous year. Martians, whose planet is dying as the sun cools, invade England in armored tripod fighting-machines equipped with heat rays and a chemical weapon called the Black Smoke. The novel's unnamed narrator, a philosopher from Woking who is separated from his wife during the initial attack, witnesses the systematic destruction of the home counties and eventually London, and the complete failure of British military and civilian institutions to resist the invasion. The Martians are eventually killed by bacteria to which they have no immunity.
Wells designed the Martian invasion as a structural reversal of British imperial expansion in Africa and Australia, a way of asking his readers to imagine experiencing from the inside what subjected populations experienced when technologically superior forces arrived with no regard for the inhabitants' prior claims. The narrator makes this explicit at the novel's beginning, connecting the fate of the Tasmanians, eliminated by British colonists within decades of contact, to his own potential fate under the Martians. The British army's total ineffectiveness against the Martian technology is also part of the argument: the military superiority that made British imperialism possible was itself contingent on the technological gap it exploited.
The novel established several conventions of science fiction invasion narrative that have been so thoroughly absorbed by subsequent genre fiction that the original can seem derivative of its own imitators. Reading it in the context of 1898 British imperialism restores the political argument that the genre conventions have since decontextualized. What Wells accomplished was the use of speculative fiction to defamiliarize a set of conditions his readers took for granted, British technological and military superiority, the naturalness of colonial expansion, by constructing a scenario in which they were on the receiving end of the same logic they were applying to others.
Jules Verne predicted the internet, the moon landing, and video conferencing in his novels, over 100 years before they happened.
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