"No one would have believed that in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

--The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells.

First published in 1898 in serialized form, H.G. Wells' novel of alien invaders from Mars assaulting Earth begins with the ominious paragraph above. The story is told in a first-person narrative that gives us a personal, edgy point of view of day to day survival during the war and later under the alien subjugation. The POV only shifts later in the book when the narrator tells of his brother's own fight for survival, which results in his eyewitness account of the Martain attack on London and the battle between a Tripod and the British warship Thunder Child. Wells' gritty details of the destruction of Victorian England, and his chilling depiction of the Martians' dark deeds, still makes The War Of The Worlds a very effective read more than a hundred years later. --SF

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