What’s Real and What’s Invented in War of the Worlds

This is the rare Victorian novel you can fact-check on foot. The Surrey place names in the first three chapters are the ones on the map today, which is also why the playable War of the Worlds can put its opening doorway on a common with a car park.

📍 The places you can walk to

The cylinder lands where Wells could see it from his own front door. In Chapter II the astronomer Ogilvy is persuaded a meteorite has come down “on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking”, and he finds the pit “not far from the sand-pits” — all four of those are real, and the sand-pits are still there.

Wells wrote the majority of the novel in Maybury Road, Woking, between 1895 and 1898, which is roughly a mile and a half from the common he chose to destroy first. The town’s own record of this notes that the borough later named an entire cycle network after the planets, so the joke has been running for some time.

🦿 What Wells actually calls the machines

Search the text and the word everybody uses turns out to be the word Wells barely uses. His own systematic terms are compounds, and they are applied consistently from the moment the machines appear.

• ✅“Fighting-machine”: 17 occurrences, spread across 17 separate lines. This is the book’s formal name for the walking weapons.
• ✅“Handling-machine”: 17 occurrenceson 12 lines — the crab-like tool-users that do the digging and assembling in the pit, and the machines the narrator watches longest.
• ✅“Tripod”: 8 occurrences on 7 lines, across a 60,000-word novel, and used inconsistently even then.

Twice the word means the legs and nothing else — something “staggered up on tripod legs” in Book One, Chapter XI, and machines whose “tripod supports were almost entirely submerged” in the Thunder Child chapter. Elsewhere it stands in loosely for the whole thing, as in “a monstrous tripod, higher than many houses” in Chapter X. No consistent rule emerges from the eight uses, and the inconsistency is the finding here: Wells never settled the word into a technical term for any one part of the machine.

He also gets irritated about it in the text. In Book Two the narrator stops the story to complain about an illustrator who had drawn the machines for a popular pamphlet after one hasty look.

“He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect... They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being.”

The Ruined Pit is a doorway in the playable War of the Worlds: you are watching a handling-machine unpack the second cylinder through a slit in a broken wall, close enough to see what it is assembling, and you can keep watching or move before the light changes. Role-play The War of the Worlds →

🩸 Where the blood-spraying comes from

One of the questions Google suggests about this book is why the tripods spray blood, and the answer is that in Wells they never do. The red weed in the novel is simply a plant that arrived with the cylinders: it spreads up the sides of the pit within days, chokes the waterways, and is described as “quite a transitory growth” that few people ever saw.

The image people are remembering belongs to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film, in which the machines harvest human blood and tissue and spray it across the landscape to fertilise the alien vegetation. It is an elegant solution to a problem Wells left open — where the red weed gets its nutrients — and it is an invention of the screenplay.

📺 What the BBC added in 2019

The BBC’s three-part series is the most faithful version on the geography, keeping the story in England and shooting around the right county, and the least faithful on the cast. It moves the invasion to Edwardian 1905, and it builds the whole thing around a couple, George and Amy, of whom only the man has even a loose counterpart in Wells.

The 2019 production made that change deliberately. Wells gives his narrator a wife who appears twice and is never named, so any adaptation that wants a second lead has to write one from nothing, which is exactly what the cast guide here finds when it goes looking for names.

🗿 A statue for an invasion that never happened

Since April 1998 a seven-metre Martian machine designed by Michael Condron has stood at one end of Crown Square in Woking town centre, with a second piece set into the paving nearby: a cylinder, half buried, ploughing into the ground with the paving stones rippling away from it in coloured rings.

The cylinder carries a plaque quoting the narrator on the moment the first one opened, and the town added a bronze of Wells himself in 2016. A market square in Surrey has therefore been commemorating a fictional atrocity for nearly thirty years, and the machines in the sculpture are called a name the novel it honours almost never uses.