“The War of the Worlds” is a science fiction novel by Herbert Wells. It describes an alien invasion of Earth and is one of the first portrayals of such a conflict in literature. The events of the novel, told in the first person by an unnamed eyewitness hero, take place in England: the Martians easily defeat the British army and systematically exterminate people, yet they themselves become victims of a disease caused by Earth’s bacteria. “The War of the Worlds” is one of the classic books of science fiction that had a huge influence on the genre as a whole. The descriptions of fantastic technologies in the novel, which anticipated the development of military and space technology in the 20th century, also impacted the development of real science.