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Cover of The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds

Martians land in Surrey. Wells writes the invasion as local journalism, which is why it still frightens.

Listening time
about 6 h 24 min
Length
59,938 words
First published
1898
Public domain
the author died in 1946
Edition
Edition and cover by Standard Ebooks, released CC0
Download in the app
340 KB stored on your device
Language
English
Shelf
Before It Was a Genre
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Free. Open the app, go to Discover, find the title and tap Get. It narrates on your device in the voice you choose, your own included. View the edition at standardebooks.org.

How it begins.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.

The War of the Worlds · H. G. Wells · 1898

  • MichaelStandardAmerican · male · the free engine0:39

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