1898: H.G. Wells veröffentlicht den Roman War of the Worlds

Der Historiker und Soziologe H.G. Wells (1866-1946), auch Verfasser von The Time Machine (1895), veröffentlicht seinen Roman War of the Worlds. Ohne Umschweife kommt er bereits im ersten Satz zur Sache – Steven Spielberg wird seinem Erzähler in der Verfilmung von 2005 ähnliche Worte in den Mund legen:

„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.“