Imagine you're an average citizen, chilling in 1938. Your hobbies include standard 1938-ish things: worrying about the lingering effects of the Great Depression, dancing to Benny Goodman tunes, and listening to the radio. So: you're chilling in your living room after a long day, and you decide to zone out to the radio news broadcast.

But on this night—Halloween of 1938—the news coming out of the radio is terrifying. Strange things are afoot, not at the Circle K, but in the area of Grover's Mill, New Jersey. A strange capsule-looking thing has landed. Minutes later, this capsule as hatched. Shortly after that, the creatures that have emerged from this capsule are frying everything in their path (humans included) with heat rays.

You pace in circles. You start sweating bullets. You debate hiding under the bed. In short: you panic.

*Record scratch noise*

Wait—what does this scenario have to do with a Victorian-era book called The War of the Worlds? A ton, actually. Because, just as your circa-1938 alter-ego decides to start nailing boards over the windows to avoid death-by-heat-ray, the radio announcer says:

"You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission." (Source)

Yup. H.G. Wells' 1898 alien invasion novel is a source of evergreen horror. Not only did Orson Welles' radio play cause an infamous mass panic among the radio-listening American public forty years after the book was published, but it scared the pants off the movie-going public in 1953 (winning a Best Visual Effects Oscar in the process) and went on to become a Steven Spielberg-directed fright-fest in 2005.

Yeah. The War of the Worlds is the gift that keeps on giving (you nightmares).

It's easy to understand why people keep adapting this story. The premise is deceptively simple: aliens arrive, aliens create human s'mores with their handy-dandy heat-ray technology, humankind panics, aliens die off.

But underneath this summer blockbuster plot lies an intricate dissection of Victorian current events and a deep philosophical inquiry into human nature. H.G. Wells compares the alien invasion to British colonialism, and muses over how much technology is too much technology...and he also muses over the difference between humans and animals, the innate human drive to conquer, and whether or not humankind is worth saving.

Sounds deep? It is.

But don't worry: H.G. Wells delivers these Big Thoughts wrapped in a plot that's equal parts rollicking adventure and Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. It's no surprise that Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg both adored this book enough to adapt it: we think this novel falls halfway between the highfalutin' artiness of Citizen Kane and the popcorn-munching pleasure of Jaws.

We have to hand it to ol' H.G. The dude basically created the blueprint for every single alien-invasion story that would follow The War of the Worlds...and then burned that blueprint.

Creating A Genre

Let's tackle the easy part of that statement first: the whole "creating the blueprint" thing. The War of the Worlds is widely accepted as being, if not the first, at least the best-first alien invasion novel. H.G. Wells wrote the outline for the plot we'd come to associate with everything from Independence Day to Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

...to Attack The Block to Ender's Game...

...to Pacific Rim to The Puppet Masters to The Blob to Starship Troopers to Men In Black...

The list goes on, and on, and on.

Seriously—you can thank The War of the World's any time you're reading a book/watching a movie/TV show with a plot that looks even a bit like this:

• Aliens show up.
• Are they friendly?
• Whoops—nope. They're killing people.
• Run away! Run away!
• Ah, phew: aliens are dead.
• Maybe humans should forget their differences?

Because that, folks, is the outline that H.G. Wells sets forth in The War of the Worlds.

Complicating A Genre

But here's where H.G. Wells gets next-level, and where The War of the Worlds becomes much deeper than, say, Independence Day. Where Independence Day has humans acting heroically and saving the world, The War of the Worlds has aliens dying because...they get sick.

Yeah. The War of the Worlds is all fear, no heroism. Us humans are shown as being panicky creatures totally incapable of stopping an alien invasion in its tracks. There's no "rah rah for humankind!" moment. There's only terror...and then viruses and bacteria make the aliens cough to death. (Or something like that.)

In other words, it's the rare alien invasion story that actually portrays humans as absolutely defenseless. Not only that, but it also suggests that humans' activities on Earth—you know, colonizing other countries willy-nilly—isn't all that different from flying around the solar system wreaking havoc. There's no lasting feeling that we're the good guys: in fact, Wells goes out of his way to suggest that, given half a chance, humans would be doing the exact same thing as the Martians.

That's what we mean when we say that H.G. effectively burns the genre blueprints he creates. Because in our humble opinion, no alien invasion story is quite so philosophical and introspective as The War of The Worlds. After all, how many alien stories do you read that make you feel less secure in your faith in humanity?

But Wells is just a genius like that.