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Read & copy
“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;”
Meaning & context
Wells opens by overturning ordinary human confidence and asking readers to imagine humanity itself as the observed and vulnerable species rather than the observer.
Source details
The War of the Worlds, Book One, Chapter I, “The Eve of the War,” Project Gutenberg #36. The sentence opens the novel by establishing the retrospective Martian-invasion premise and the narrator’s contrast between human complacency and extraterrestrial scrutiny. It is speculative-fiction narration, not a factual claim that Earth was observed by Martian intelligence.