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Scientific setting

Wells was trained as a science teacher during the latter half of the 1880s. One of his teachers was Thomas Henry Huxley, a major advocate of Darwinism. Wells later taught science, and his first book was a biology textbook. Much of his work makes contemporary ideas of science and technology easily understandable.

The scientific fascinations of the novel are established in the opening chapter. The narrator views Mars through a telescope, and Wells offers the image of the superior Martians having observed human affairs, as though watching tiny organisms through a microscope. In August 1894, a French astronomer reported sightings of a "strange light" on Mars. Wells used this observation to open the novel, imagining these lights to be the launching of the Martian cylinders toward Earth.

Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed features on Mars in 1878, which he called canali (Italian for "channels"). In 1895, American astronomer Percival Lowell speculated in his book Mars that these might be irrigation channels, constructed by a sentient life form to support existence on an arid, dying world. The novel also explores ideas related to Charles Darwin 's theory of natural selection.

In 1896, Wells published an essay on 'Intelligence on Mars' in the Saturday Review, setting out ideas about life on Mars. Wells speculates on the nature of Martian inhabitants and how their evolutionary progress might compare to humans. These ideas are used almost unchanged in The War of the Worlds.

Wells has also imagined how life could evolve in hostile conditions, like those on Mars. The creatures have no digestive system, no appendages except tentacles and put the blood of other beings in their veins to survive. Wells was writing some years before Karl Landsteiner discovered the three human blood groups (O, A, and B), and showed the challenges of even transfusing blood between humans with incompatible blood groups.