12/15/2025
Few authors in history have ever come close to the level of influence of Herbert George Wells. Not only was he arguably the inventor of the tank, but he is widely regarded as the father of science fiction. Although Wells’ works are not the earliest examples of the genre, they very definitely set the standard for all modern science fiction, and remain some of the most highly regarded works of that variety, even more than one hundred years after they were written. No book is a better example of this than the 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.
Pitting highly-advanced Martians, desperate to escape their dying planet, against the unprepared and powerless people of Victorian Britain, The War of the Worlds was the first story to depict an alien invasion, a concept now so familiar in the cultural zeitgeist that most readers can certainly recount the story beat-for-beat without even having read the book. The War of the Worlds is by far H. G. Wells’ most successful and most well-known work, having never gone out of print in all of the 127 years of its existence (as of 2025). It has spawned nearly countless retellings and derivative works. Without doubt, the most lasting image from this story, regardless of which incarnation, is the Martian Fighting Machine, the enormous tripedal craft the invaders used to so efficiently demolish the world of mankind.
The Martian vehicles from The War of the Worlds are in some ways the forebearers, certainly of sci-fi mechs and walkers, but also of armored vehicles in general, not only those confined to works of fiction. French Captain P. G. L. Dutil says as much in his 1919 study, Les Chars D’Assaut, where he cites The War of the Worlds as one of the works contributing to the invention of the tank. At the time the book was written, there was simply no equivalent to the Fighting Machines in the inventory of all the armies of the world. Wells would go on to explain how there could be, in the short story The Land Ironclads, published in 1903, wherein he imagined what could only be described as tanks, twelve years before the first true tank was built.
An article by Harold Biondo
Illustrated by Jack Hainsworth
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