A shooting star is seen one night over Surrey, but it is no ordinary meteor. Observed by an unnamed astronomer, it is a vehicle from which strange, tentacled beings emerge, and soon many more of them land. They build towering tripod war machines, and set out to overwhelm and prey upon humankind using weapons that the people of Victorian England have no defense against. Presented in a tie-in edition to the BBC television series from 2019, with a new introduction by Stephen Baxter, this is one of the most influential science fiction works of all time, and still a gripping tale more than 120 years after it first appeared.