Hello,
my name's Tim. Today's story was written at the turn of the 20th century and is one of the great classics of science fiction.
It's a fantastically imaginative story.
You might even say it's out of this world.
We begin in the English town of Woking.
The narrator, whose name we never learn,
is looking through a telescope with his friend Ogilvy and has just witnessed jets of gas firing off from Mars,
but is unaware of what this signifies.
Later, some sort of comet crashes into a nearby park.
He goes to investigate and finds a long metal cylinder buried in a large pit.
Ogilvy is there with a crowd of onlookers, all fired up with excitement.
The end of the cylinder begins to unscrew and tentacles emerge,
followed by a creature with a rounded body and large eyes.
The crowds retreat in horror as a strange rod-shaped machine rises from the pit.
Ogilvy approaches, but the rod begins to hiss.
before setting fire to the ground around him with an invisible heat ray.
It turns towards Ogilvy and he is vaporised.
The narrator escapes back home to his wife.
A military unit is dispatched to the crash site and a firefight breaks out.
The narrator sees neighbouring houses catch fire and realises his home is within range of the heat ray.