ALIENS IN FAMOUS LITERATURE 👽

Aliens: Creatures from planets other than Earth (extraterrestrials). 

Aliens have been included in the 20th century works of Ender's Game, when they were portrayed as 'The Formics/Buggers and The Midwich Cuckoos, as The Children, to modern movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Martian. 

But when did the idea of alien-life originate from?

After a 1894 French newspaper first explored the very idea of it all, it was the 1897 literary work of H.G Wells that popularised and documented the idea of extra-terrestrial life through the science-fiction novel - going by the name of The War of The Worlds. 

The Martians

The novel vastly surrounds the idea of martians (extra-terrestrials) attacking planet Earth. Based in the late 1890's, the book is based in South-East England and is narrated by an unnamed male narrator. Martians, which once inhabited the planet Mars, arrived on Earth via metal cylinders that land in a Surrey common. The Martians are portrayed as 'the size of a bear, grey in colour, with brown, oily skin, two large dark eyes, and lip-less mouths shaped like V's. The British Army become heavily involved at the arrival of these foreign objects, and the first sighting of the aliens, unfamiliar to Earth's gravity and atmospheric conditions, that emerge from the cylinders.

The Tripods

The Martians bring giant fighting machines (tripods). They are provided with heat-guns and toxic weaponry which shoot poisonous black smoke. These destructive tripods are responsible for the obliteration of a town (Woking) and seizing humans by claws into an enormous metallic attachment to the tripods; its purpose is to carry the humans.

Alongside the tripods and martian's presence, is the 'martian web' which can be described as a prickly red herbage that occupies any abundant water. 

When the narrator begins to go mental due to the trauma and resorts to suicide by approaching a tripod; it is discovered that the martians and everything they have brought have been destroyed by the action of a microscopic bacterial virus. 

War Of The Worlds has come to be known as the earliest literary work that explores the idea of alien invasions and war between the human and an extra-terrestrial race in detail. It has influenced the invention of rockets; one of which is liquid-propelled, and both of which had effects on the Apollo 11 Space mission 71 years later. A 1978 Jeff Wayne orchestra recording was also an adaption of the novel. 

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 (1898), The War of the Worlds