The War of the Worlds is a novel that describes the Martian invasion on London in the nineteenth century. The story begins one evening after a cylinder is found on Horsell Common in London. The people approach the object and are instantly killed by a heat-ray. A frightening invader emerges from the cylinder. When the powerful Martians build extremely large killing machines that destroy everything with gas burning rays, mankind is on the brink of extinction. They gorge on the blood of humans kept alive inside their machines. The War of the Worlds is described by a protagonist from Surrey who lives through the invasion of southern England. The container which drops from the sky suddenly and lands near the narrator's home has an alien with grey skin and large eyes and tentacles. As more containers drop, a human delegation forms and approaches the Martians with white flags of peace, but the Martians kill them immediately. As the British military arrives, the humans of southern England engage into a war and stop the Martians from assembling their unknown machinery. The military cannot face the Martians and their technology.