The War of the Worlds is a science-fiction novel written by H.G. Wells in the year of 1898. The planet Mars has grown uninhabitable for the Martians to live there. They are forced to find a way to Earth and start the attempt to wipe out the human race. When the Martians shot themselves off their planet in cylinders towards Earth, landing near a town in England, an astronomer named Ogilvy, along with the narrator, saw some strange shooting light in the sky and went in the one direction of which the cylinder seemed to have landed, hoping to find it. When they found the crash site, the news soon spread like wildfire. A crowd started to gather around the crater the cylinder had made, expecting to see men much like themselves crawl out of the opening that was slowly unscrewing itself. The Martians emerged and their appearance was like anything but men, being "big" and "greyish" with "oily brown skin," and "the size, perhaps, of a bear," with "two large dark-coloured eyes," and a lipless "V-shaped mouth" that drips saliva, surrounded by "Gorgon groups of tentacles." The narrator finds them "at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous." They had a weapon that shot heat-rays, setting aflame anything in its path. Many people were shot by it including the astronomer, while the others along with the narrater fled for their life.