The War of the Worlds

“Martin Danahay’s edition shows the extent to which The War of the Worlds draws on the biological and astronomical theories, political ideologies, and military technology of its time. Readers who want to appreciate this greatest of all alien narratives in its original Victorian context cannot do better than to consult this edition.” — Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading

“One reads this edition with great pleasure. The novel is lightly and intelligently annotated, making concise sense of all the local allusions that make this remarkable fantasy so realistic. The appendices, which reprint portions of articles from the 1890s, suggest an intellectual context for the work and are often interesting in themselves, especially Percival Lowell’s meditation on how some form of life might develop on Mars. The pictures of the various guns, cannons, ships, and other machinery mentioned in the novel give a wonderful sense of the scale of the war.” — John Huntington, University of Illinois at Chicago