The War of the Worlds

What the words in this puzzle mean

ARTILLERY

The guns the army brings up against the tripods, and which achieve almost nothing.

CYLINDER

The metal container each Martian craft arrives in, unscrewing slowly from within.

EARTH

The target of the invasion, chosen because Mars is dying and cooling.

EXPLOSION

The flashes seen on Mars through the telescope, which were the launches.

FEAR

The book's real subject — the collapse of ordinary society under it.

GREEN

The colour of the flashes from Mars, and of the flare as a cylinder lands.

HEAT RAY

The Martian weapon, an invisible beam that sets everything it touches alight.

HORROR

The tone Wells sustains by keeping the narrator ordinary and the events vast.

HORSELL

Horsell Common, the heath near Woking where the first cylinder lands.

INVASION

The plot, and the template for almost every alien invasion story since.

LONDON

The city the Martians advance on, emptied in the greatest panic Wells could imagine.

MARS

The Martians' dying home world, which drives them to take a warmer one.

MARTIANS

Huge-brained, bodiless creatures who feed on blood and cannot survive Earth's microbes.

METALLIC

The quality of the unscrewing sound from inside the cylinder, heard before anything emerges.

METEOR

What the first cylinder is mistaken for as it crosses the sky.

MONSTERS

What the crowd calls the Martians once they climb out of the pit.

NARRATOR

An unnamed writer on philosophy, whose ordinariness is what makes the story work.

OBSERVATORY

Ogilvy's, where the narrator watches the flashes on Mars before anyone understands them.

OGILVY

The astronomer who shows the narrator Mars and is killed approaching the first cylinder.

OTTERSHAW

The Surrey village where the observatory stands.

PULSATED

How the Martian bodies move — the wet, breathing quality Wells keeps returning to.

SANDPIT

The crater the first cylinder digs on the common where it lands.

SCREW

The cylinder's cap, which turns slowly from inside while the crowd watches.

SMOKE

The Black Smoke, a heavier-than-air poison the Martians use to clear whole districts.

SMOULDERING

The state of the countryside behind the heat ray's path.

STENT

The Astronomer Royal, killed with the delegation that approached under a white flag.

SURREY

The county the invasion begins in, a few miles from Wells's own house.

TELESCOPE

The instrument through which the launches on Mars were seen and misread.

TENTACLE

The Martians' limbs, which they use in place of the bodies they no longer have.

THUNDER CHILD

The torpedo ram that charges two tripods and sinks, the one human victory in the book.

TRIPOD

The three-legged fighting machine, the image the novel is remembered by.

WELLS

H. G. Wells, who wrote the novel in 1898 while living in Woking.

WOKING

The Surrey town where Wells lived and where he set the landing.