A cylinder unscrews itself on Horsell Common in Surrey, and by nightfall the thing inside has burned a gathered crowd to ash with an invisible heat-ray and begun assembling the machines that will stride across England. Wells narrates the fall of the world's greatest empire from ground level — the choked roads out of London, the red weed spreading over the ruins, a curate coming apart in a buried house — with the flat, exact voice of a man filing a report. It is the book that invented the alien invasion, and it still lands as a cold joke at humanity's expense: the conquerors are undone not by our armies but by the smallest living things on the planet they came to take.