Coming this autumn to your television screen! A brand new BBC Drama adaptation of HG Wells’s classic novel, The War of the Worlds, published in 1898 and never out of print since. The book is widely used in schools today.
The story is set in England and tells of a catastrophic conflict between humans and extraterrestrial ‘Martians’, which invade in their spacecraft and spread out all over the country. The aliens, about the size of a bear with oily brown skin and tentacles, use giant tripods to move around, destroying everything and everyone in their path with heat rays and poisonous smoke. Law and order soon breaks down, the social structure collapses and many men and women revert to a barbarous state.
Over the years, there have been many adaptations, film and television versions of the book; Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of the book as a play, taking the form of a news bulletin, apparently fooled thousands of people into believing that America was actually being invaded, although this was greatly exaggerated by the newspapers of the time.
The BBC claims that its version will be true to Wells’s original: ‘the War of the Worlds that I wanted to make is one that is faithful to the tone and spirit of the book, but which also feels contemporary,’ says the writer, Peter Harness.
Unfortunately, we haven’t a copy in the Classic Fiction Collection for you to read– it’s on the Missing Books List – so if you find a secondhand hardback or paperback in good condition when you’re out and about, please consider donating it to the Classic Fiction Collection at the PPL. Thank you.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
— H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 1898
