The War of the Worlds was the first novel in which a Martian invasion of planet Earth was narrated. Its author, H. G. Wells, is, along with Jules Verne, one of the fathers of science fiction, and this book is one of the pearls of the genre. First published in 1898, it raised deep concerns in a society that looked with fascination at that other world, Mars, about which nothing was known and, therefore, everything could be assumed. In particular, he projected apocalyptic fears of an invasion by more technologically evolved beings: "It was the beginning of the defeat of civilization, of the slaughter of humanity."

Like all classics, the cadence of its effects endured over time and, forty years after its publication, the American actor and director Orson Welles adapted the novel and dramatized, in a radio broadcast, the arrival of Martian ships in the city of New York, producing chaos, panic and general confusion in the populous city. It was Halloween night and that was his joke and tribute to H. G. Wells, who had written: "Many truths have been told in jest."

This edition includes a QR link that allows you to listen to the original recording of Orson Welles and read the translation of said radio script. Likewise, it recovers the illustrations of the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa, published only in 1906 by the Belgian publisher L. Vandamme & Co. in a limited edition of only five hundred copies. Started four years after the appearance of the famous book, and worked with charcoal pencil and ink on paper, they brought to life "those monsters that had something of a fungus in their oily dark skin."

With the recovery of this historic edition, for the first time the Spanish-speaking reader is offered an illustration work that pleasantly surprised H. G. Wells himself, and whose pre-modernist lines and futuristic look deserved praise from the honored author.