In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.” Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the century approached.

After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.” The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “ my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic).

Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations.

War of the worlds alvim correa