The War of the Worlds Resources

Check out this great BBC website to learn more about the historical context surrounding Wells' War of the Worlds.

Check out the VictorianWeb for some scholarly articles on Victorian-era England and science. There's even a full section on technology.

Let's be honest: if you watch a movie from the 1950s, you're probably not going to be astounded by the special effects. And this movie makes some serious changes from the book. For one thing, it takes place in California. For another, it features a love story. But in all honesty, it's a fair movie version and many of the changes are pretty standard. In fact, most versions update the story to the storyteller's own place and time, and adding a love story is jus the usual for a Hollywood movie. However, this movie version also (for some reason) changes the ridiculous curate into a heroic pastor and trades in the tripods for flying machines, which we think are unforgivable changes. Sigh.

We said that the Orson Welles adaptation of The War of the Worlds from 1938 was big news. Here's the proof: they made a movie about it.

There were actually three film versions of The War of the Worlds in 2005, but the version by Spielberg is the only one we really care about. (If you want to see why, here's a review of one of the other versions, which is very clear about how terrible it is.) As with most adaptations, Spielberg's is updated. In this version, the Martian invasion of 2005 takes place in – of all places – New Jersey). There's also a change in focus, because who really wants to follow around a narrator who is so moody? Instead of the 1953 version's focus on a love story, this version adds a family issue that is totally outside of the book. Also, instead of eating blood, the Martians seem to spray it over the landscape, which is very confusing. But aside from those few gigantic changes, it keeps pretty close to the book, including some of its narration.

It can be hard to read books online (our eyes get tired sometimes), but having the whole text in an electronic format makes it a cinch to look things up. You could, for instance, easily count how many times the phrase "Black Smoke" is used. (The answer is 25, of which seven are regular references to smoke and eighteen are references to the Martians' chemical weapon.) Now, having an electronic version makes it easier to look up info like that, but you still have to do some analysis. You know, what does it mean that "Black Smoke" gets mentioned so many times? Or that "Heat-Ray" gets 40 mentions?

This article is from November 7, 1938, about one week after Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. They talk about the ridiculous ensuing panic.

Several researchers at Princeton were interested in mass media and mass panic, and the opportunity to study one such panic fell into their laps with Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Hadley Cantril (and others) wrote a book about their study, The Invasion from Mars. This Time article gives an overview of their book.

Here's a little discussion of Orson Welles' adaptation of The War of the Worlds and the panic that it caused. Bonus: watch some interviews with people who actually panicked.

After the nation panicked, Welles publicly apologized for playing a prank on them. Although what he actually said is closer to "the book is forty years old now, if you haven't read it yet, that's not my fault." Should've known better, folks.

Don't run out and buy an iPad just for this (unless you wanted an excuse to anyway), but we found this trailer for an interactive book version of The War of the Worlds, and it looks kind of cool. Now you're not just reading about the Martian Heat-Ray, you're using it. Actually, that sounds kind of gruesome.

This is perhaps the most famous adaptation of The War of the Worlds. It's updated to 1938 and has a very realistic style – it even starts with a musical show that is interrupted by breaking news of aliens landing in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Because it was so realistic (and because there were no commercials during the show and only three mentions that it was fiction), it caused something of a panic. There have been several other radio versions of The War of the Worlds, but this is the most famous, so famous that The Simpsons used it in their Halloween story "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid" in Treehouse of Horror XVII.

Now, you could track down all the radio versions of The War of the Worlds and see how they differ and research their histories… or you could listen to this hour-long episode of the public radio show Radiolab, which is all about the radio adaptations and mass hysteria.

Wells and Welles meet (on the radio) and briefly discuss The War of the Worlds and the panic that resulted from the radio adaptation.

Listen to this recordings of Wells. He talks about topics like war, technology, our place in the world, and how humans are similar to animals.

The title really says it all here. In 1978, Jeff Wayne released a prog rock (short for "progressive rock," and if you don't know that, you should thank your lucky stars) musical version of The War of the Worlds. We might not be huge fans of prog rock, but the album does include several famous people (Richard Burton as the narrator) and is kind of fun. If you listened to the other radio adaptations and thought "this just needs more synthesizer," then this musical version is for you.