Wells's two masterpieces are still the definitive treatments of the themes of time travel and alien invasion.

In The Time Machine, Wells's Time Traveller journeys to the world of 802,701 AD, where humanity has devided into the effete, beautiful Eloi and the brutal subterranean Morlocks. In The War of the Worlds, the Martians - intellects 'vast and cool and unsympathetic' - send their war machines to wreak havoc across the world.