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The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells first serialised in 1897 by Pearson's Magazine in the UK and by Cosmopolitan magazine in the US.

Year:
1898
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BOOK ONE THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS CHAPTER ONE THE EVE OF THE WAR No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. 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. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
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H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games. more…

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    You need to add short stories especially of 19th and early 20th centuries by giants like Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, A. Kuprin, Maupassant, Jack London, W. W. Jacobs, Dickens, Bret Harte, H. H. Munro (Saki), Robert Barr, Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan le Fanu (The great Irish Horror Stories pioneer), Lucy Mod Montgomery, Sarah Anne Jewett, Rex Ellingwood Beach, Saadat Hassan Manto, R. Tagore and numerous other great short story writers of that golden era. 
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  • imagin
    I can't find Francis Bacon here. There are related books but not the author in person. I wish I could read his essay ''Of Studies''. I think Francis bacon is as famous as Shakespeare, but unluckily there is not a work of his. 
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