The War of the Worlds is now such a well-known story that it is hard for modern readers to imagine how awe-inspiring the idea of alien invaders once was. Wells did not invent the genre of science fiction (that distinction is typically attributed to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), but he was a major influence in turning it into the established genre we know and love today. In short, science fiction is a genre that is dependent on fictionalized extensions of scientific technologies and logic for its plot. Wells also introduced other ideas into the genre, such as the trope of conflicts functioning as thinly-veiled commentaries on actual real-world issues.
The War of the Worlds explores the horrors of invasion and empire-building, and it repeatedly draws parallels between the invading Martians and European conquerors who violently subjugated native peoples around the world. Beneath the invading space creatures and the struggle for humans to survive an attack by Martians is a story that touches, in a very sophisticated way, on themes such as British imperialism, evolution, the coming technological revolution in warfare, and even the weaponizing of biology.
People and critics often laud science fiction—not to mention the work of H.G. Wells, specifically—for its ability to use the alien and inhuman to uniquely capture deeply human sentiments and conflicts. Ultimately, the point of science fiction as literature isn't to merely imagine the scientifically outlandish: the point is to discover new perspectives on the substance of existence and humanity's place in the world. The War of the Worlds exemplifies this ethos in two ways. First, its plot uses Martians as a device to highlight the terror and inequity intrinsic to the act of colonization, perhaps nowhere more relevant than in Wells' homeland of England. Second, the infamous Orson Wells broadcast showed in an unexpected way just how believable and intimately terrifying the substance of The War of the Worlds was: people in the zeitgeist of 1938 were all too ready to believe, hysterically, that they really could be invaded by highly evolved, otherworldly outsiders bent on their destruction.
This philosophy of science fiction has gone on to influenced iconic stories in a range of genres and styles, touching everything from the heavy and wide-ranging human musings of Star Trek to BioShock, a modern, sci-fi, dystopian critique of Ayn Rand in video-game form. Beyond reading The War of the Worlds as a story unto itself, we can also interpret is form and influence as a kind of source text (among other such texts, like Frankenstein) for an entire modern mode of human inquiry.
