Martian

Name: Martian

AKA: Unknown

Location: Mars

Novel: The War of the Worlds

Author: H.G. Wells





Natural History:
The Martians were a race of beings from the planet Mars. They invaded the earth in the late Nineteenth Century.

Arriving on Earth in large cylinders, the Martians revealed themselves quite dramatically. They heaved out of the cylinder as a dark bulk, larger than a bear, that glistened like wet leather. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively.

Two large dark-colored eyes were above a lipless brim, much like a fleshy birds beak, that quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.

Their huge round bodies, or heads, were about four feet in diameter. In the back of the body was a single tympanic surface, which was probably useless in Earth's dense air. Around their mouths were sixteen slender, almost whip-like tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight. Their bodies were composed mostly of brain, but internally had lungs, a heart, vessels, and nerves. Their eyes saw blue and violet as black, but their sight was comparable to a humans.

The Martians had a peculiar way of eating. They injected the fresh living blood of their victims into their own bodies. They did not sleep or fatigue. It was discovered later that they reproduced by budding. Audio communication among the Martians was never observed, but it was believed that they communicated telepathically and with elaborate gestures.

Upon their arrival, they also (perhaps unknowningly) brought the red weed. A cactus like vegetation that grew over everything rapidly. This red weed perished before the Martians.

The Martians were slain by putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon the Earth.

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."