The story starts off well enough with sightings of lights suddenly appearing on the red planet, shortly followed by the first landings near Woking where Wells resided for a while soon after he married for a second time. Just as the film portrays, there is great interest in the crater, until that is the Martians appear and start to kill people. Pandemonium breaks out and thereafter it is a day to day diary of what occurred, including the few strikes of victory as the army and navy fight back. Living in the south of London, I knew many of the places Wells mentions and could follow the path that was taken by the narrator. Unfortunately, it was that, that began to irk me about the book. It was almost like a travelogue noting all the nearby towns, going up one particular street, crossing another, down the next, naming every place he fled to. Rather than being able to continue and enjoy the tale, I began to find its flaws. I presume these flaws have been discussed before by scholars over the years as they are so blatant.

To begin with, why would the Martians attack Britain first? They had apparently been observing our planet for some considerable time before making their attack. But why choose Britain as its first target that was a major military power at the time when there were many other places around the world where they could have set up base without fear of a formidable defence? Wells of course wrote only of what he knew and not the terrain around Africa or South America that would have been better bases for their campaign! Why did the narrator head north-east towards the centre of London that was bound to be a major target? A better choice would have been west towards Devon and Cornwall, or to the north and less populated areas. Movement aside, Wells then makes a fatal error in contradicting that which he had written earlier. He describes the aliens as nothing more than a large head and many tentacles.

The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.

And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected iti nto their own veins.

But then, just two chapters later, having hidden himself along with a curate from the Martians for almost two weeks, and almost starving, the narrator climbs out of his hiding place to seek food.

My first act before I went into the pantry was to fasten the door between the kitchen and the scullery. But the pantry was empty; every scrap of food had gone. Apparently, the Martians had taken it all on the previous day. At that discovery I despaired for the first time. I took no food, or no drink either, on the eleventh or the twelfth day.

The narrator wasn't the only one left despaired.