The Martians of H.G. Wells
Extraterrestrial invaders from Mars in H.G. Wells' classic novel.
The Martians, called the Invaders, are the alien antagonists in H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel *The War of the Worlds*. Their goal is to wipe out humanity and take over Earth, using weapons far more advanced than anything humans had at the time.
In the story, the Martians look like octopuses or squids. Their body is basically a head about four feet across, with two eyes, a V-shaped beak-like mouth, and two clusters of eight whip-like tentacles around the mouth that serve as hands. They reproduce asexually by budding off from a parent. Inside, they have a brain, lungs, heart, and blood vessels, but no digestive organs—so they survive on Earth by using pipettes to transfuse blood from other animals, especially humans. A single eardrum on the back of their head is thought to be useless in Earth’s thicker air.
They arrive on Earth in a large cylinder launched from a giant space gun on Mars. Their main weapon is the Heat-Ray, a directed-energy device that can burn anything it hits, mounted on an articulated arm at the front of a tall tripod fighting-machine. This machine stomps across the landscape, destroying people and buildings. A secondary weapon is Black Smoke, a toxic gas fired from bazooka-like tubes; it kills humans and animals but can be neutralized by high-pressure steam jets or water. The smoke is made of an unknown element that shows four blue lines on a spectroscope. There is also a Martian aircraft, rarely seen, possibly used to spread Black Smoke from above. A red weed or creeper, linked to their home world, marks their presence.
Evidence of a second Martian race appears in the transport cylinders, likely intended as food during the trip, but all die before reaching Earth. These are bipedal, nearly six feet tall, with round heads and large eyes in hard sockets, but their weak skeletons and muscles would break under Earth’s gravity. They might not be native Martians but could resemble the Selenites from Wells’ *The First Men in the Moon*.
Based on their features, the Martians may have evolved from a human-like species, reduced over time to just a large brain and head with two sets of eight tentacles. They move sluggishly under Earth’s gravity, which is about three times stronger than Mars’. Some try to stand on their tentacles, suggesting they can walk that way on Mars, but not on Earth.
How they communicate is unclear. The narrator, watching them work together silently, thinks they use telepathy. A “queer hooting” sound is heard but attributed to air exhaled before they drain blood from victims. The fighting-machines make siren-like “Aloo, aloo” calls and a repeated “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” cry of despair that echoes through London after the Martians die from infection.
Despite their advanced tech, the Martians lack the wheel and seem unaware of disease and decay. It is theorized that their technology wiped out all germs on Mars, so they forgot about them. This ignorance proves fatal: they are destroyed by Earth’s putrefactive bacteria, which digest organic matter after death. The epilogue suggests they may have successfully invaded Venus instead.
In adaptations, most versions keep the Martians as the invading race, though many give them a spoken language, unlike the novel where they only use “Aloo” and “Ulla.” The infamous radio adaptation, a musical version, and Pendragon film adaptations are examples. In the unauthorized 1898 sequel *Edison’s Conquest of Mars*, the Martians are depicted as bug-eyed, 15-foot-tall human figures with speech. They supposedly visited Earth around 7500 BC, built the Pyramids and Sphinx as a memorial to their leader, and brought humans from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt as slaves. These slaves’ descendants served the Martians until being wiped out after the invasion, due to Martian fears of humans. At the same time as *The War of the Worlds*, the Martians were also at war with giants from Ceres.
- species
- Octopus-like or squid-like creatures
- origin
- Mars
- height
- Body nearly 4 ft across; tentacles grouped around mouth
- reproduction
- Asexual, by budding
- primary_weapon
- Heat-Ray
- secondary_weapon
- Black Smoke
- known_for
- Invasion of Earth via cylindrical spacecraft
Lore & Background
The Martians are described as disembodied heads nearly 4 ft across, with two eyes, a V-shaped beak-like mouth, and two branches of eight whip-like tentacles. They reproduce asexually by budding and lack digestive organs, sustaining themselves by transfusing blood from humans via pipettes. Their ear is believed useless in Earth's denser atmosphere. Internally, they have a brain, lungs, heart, and blood vessels.
Reader's Guide
The Martians arrive on Earth in cylindrical spacecraft launched from a space gun on Mars. Their chief weapon is the Heat-Ray, a directed-energy weapon mounted on tall tripod fighting-machines. A secondary weapon, Black Smoke, is a toxic gas released from canisters. They also leave a red weed as an indicator of their presence. Despite their advanced technology, they lack the wheel and are ignorant of disease and decomposition. Their downfall comes from terrestrial bacteria, which they have no defense against. The novel's epilogue suggests they may have successfully invaded Venus. Adaptations vary widely, with some giving them verbal language or different physical forms.
Did You Know?
- The Martians reproduce asexually by budding off from a parent.
- They have no digestive organs and sustain themselves by transfusing blood from humans.
- Their technology lacks the wheel, and they are ignorant of disease and decomposition.
- A secondary race of bipedal Martians, possibly food supplies, died before reaching Earth.
Publication and Early Reception
The War of the Worlds emerged from a period of intense creative output by H. G. This dual-market strategy gave the narrative an immediate transatlantic audience. From the outset, the novel distinguished itself as one of the earliest extended fictional accounts of a direct military conflict between humanity and an extraterrestrial species. Its narrative ambition and the sheer scale of the imagined catastrophe set it apart from the shorter invasion tales of the era. Over the following decades, it accumulated a density of critical commentary that has made it one of the most frequently discussed and analysed texts in the entire science fiction canon, a status it has maintained well into the twenty-first century.
Narrative Structure and the Invasion Sequence
The novel is told through the eyes of an unnamed first-person narrator living in Surrey, whose younger brother separately makes his way to Tillingham in Essex as the invasion sweeps across London and the southern English countryside. This dual-perspective structure, though anchored in a single voice, allows Wells to depict the catastrophe from multiple vantage points without breaking the intimate, eyewitness tone. The plot unfolds through a sequence of encounters: the narrator witnesses the initial cylinder landing on Horsell Common, shelters an artilleryman whose battery was destroyed, and later crosses paths with a curate who descends into psychological collapse. Glimpses of urban destruction, desperate retreats, and fragmentary conversations with other survivors form the connective tissue of the narrative. The invasion itself escalates from the first heat-ray attack to the deployment of three-legged fighting machines and the spread of a lethal black chemical vapour. Yet the story's most striking turn arrives not through human ingenuity but through biology: the Martians, having no immunity to Earth's microbial life, simply die, their great machines falling silent across the ruined landscape.
Thematic Ambition and Wells' Political Intent
Readers and scholars have long debated what Wells was truly saying beneath the spectacle of the invasion. The novel has been variously interpreted as a meditation on evolutionary theory, a critique of British imperialism, and an expression of broader Victorian anxieties about superstition and social prejudice. Wells himself pointed to a specific historical wound as his inspiration: the devastating impact of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Several historians have argued that the narrative's core purpose was to force Victorian readers to confront the moral implications of their own imperial project by inverting the power dynamic: the superior, technologically dominant force arrives not as a benevolent civiliser but as an annihilator. The Martians' vast, cool, and unsympathetic intellects, as described in the novel's famous opening passage, serve as a mirror held up to the assumptions of a civilisation that believed it stood at the apex of progress.
Cultural Aftermath and the Welles Broadcast
Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the broadcast caused a genuine sensation, convincing a portion of the general public that a Martian invasion of Earth was actually in progress at that very moment. This episode cemented the novel's place in popular consciousness far beyond the literary sphere and demonstrated the extraordinary power of Wells' narrative to feel immediate and credible to a mass audience. The War of the Worlds thus occupies a unique position in the science fiction canon—not merely as one of the earliest detailed accounts of a military conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race, but as a text whose cultural resonance has been repeatedly reignited by new media adaptations, each reminding audiences that the fear at its core remains as universal as the stars themselves.
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