The War of the Worlds (1898)

Published in 1898, *The War of the Worlds* is often called the prototype of the alien-invasion novel^[1]. Wells has his Martians arrive as a series of falling 'cylinders' that crash into the heaths outside London, then unfold into towering three-legged fighting machines that sweep across Victorian England with a heat-ray and poisonous black smoke. There are no 'flying saucers' here — that phrase only entered the popular vocabulary in 1947 — but the book was the first to fix the master template: a technologically superior intelligence descending from the sky, utterly indifferent to human life. That narrative would go on to shape how the Cold-War public imagined unidentified craft overhead.