3.5 Stars 
 Considering it was written in the late 1800's, this book truly is a marvel of imaginative speculation. It's little wonder why H. G. Wells is considered one of the fathers of science fiction. 
 The story centers on an alien invasion of England, and is told almost entirely from the first-person perspective of an unnamed protagonist--an academic fellow who lives with his wife south of London. During a particular alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Mars, a "falling star" is reported to have made impact in an area of sand pits, and a mysterious celestial cylinder is found by the locals. The narrator witnesses the opening of the non-terrestrial object, and the subsequent massacre of many of the people who'd come to observe and/or attempt to communicate with the "men from Mars." We are looking back at the narrator's eye-witness experience, and so have the benefit of knowing that he, at least, is among the survivors of what is to come. We have no such assurances about any other character mentioned or encountered during the narrator's frantic survivalist journey. 
 "Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon group of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous." 
 Initially I wasn't sure I would care for this book as much as I did The Time Machine (the premise of which I loved, but hated the ending.) It did take a while to pick up steam. Granted, the initial tone was more curious than ominous--highlighting the naivete of humanity. But once we hit the 3/4ths mark, the telling drives compellingly to its conclusion. 
 At one point the author takes what feels like a bit of a needless rabbit trail to recount the flight of the narrator's brother from a besieged London--presumably for the purpose of going into more detail about the "black dust" used by the Martians to wipe out large portions of the population. I'm afraid the effect caused more of a lag than he intended, but not so much that readers ought to lose interest. 
 While the effort toward scientific plausibility goes deeper than I'd expected--both in terms of the alien tech and anatomy--it never crosses the line into the pretentious or incomprehensible. The intense sociological and psychological introspection is not only realistic, but well worth pondering. There's no banding together of humanity to triumph against a common foe... no massively satisfying explosions that would appease the expectations of current pop culture. It's even clarified that the conflict was never truly a "war" at all, given the stupendous superiority of the invaders. And there's some meaningful attempt at ecological and social commentary thinly veiled therein: 
 "We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians . . . were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" 
 The ending is, on the whole, anticlimactic. But personally, I found the way it concluded to be cautionary, comfortably complete, and meekly hopeful in a way that fiction rarely strives for in modern literature. 
 Favorite quote: 
 "But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves."