Questions by Chapter: Chapter 1: The Eve of the War From what perspective is humanity viewed? What qualities in the Martians make them dangerous to humanity? Mars' reddish color led to speculation that it had at one time held more oxygen in its atmosphere, now locked up in iron oxide. Wells' treatment of it as an old and nearly-exhausted world was commonplace at the time he was writing, and his adoption of this view influenced much later Martian fiction. The American bison seemed poised on the brink of extinction in 1898, though it has since been brought back; but the dodo was entirely killed off by English explorers of Mauritius in the 17th Century, becoming in fact synonymous with extinction, as in the expression "dead as a dodo." In the 18th Century the British almost eliminated the native inhabitants of Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia, when they turned it into a penal colony. Wells several times draws parallels between the Martians' treatment of Earth and Britain's treatment of its colonies. The use of gigantic guns rather than rockets to launch space vehicles may have been inspired by Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865). In Orson Welles' production, the narrator is Ogilvy, the astronomer, introduced against the background of the ticking clockwork described here. What effect does it have on the novel to have an ordinary, unnamed narrator, not technically trained and often far from the center of activity? What irony is created by the topic of the series of papers he is writing? The bicycle had been