It's a quirk of literary history that HG Wells's genre-defining tale of Martian invasion is probably more famous for its adaptations  the Orson Welles radio play that supposedly tricked America into believing they were genuinely under attack from Martians, the films, television series, even Jeff Wayne's double album and live tour  than the groundbreaking original, first published in serial format in Pearson's Magazine in 1897.

Perhaps that's because there's no hero character a la Dan Dare or Buck Rogers to grab the attention in Wells's battle of civilisations  barely anyone, indeed, has a name. There is no pulsating final battle, in which a winner is garlanded with the spoils of victory, because the defeated species falls via much more prosaic means. Even the language, at times, is remarkably matter of fact. One of the first observations the journalist narrator makes on encountering the creature that has emerged from the alien cylinder in, er, Surrey, is to note rather starchily "the absence of a chin".

Each generation has adapted The War of the Worlds to reflect its own concerns; the approaching conflict in Europe in the late 1930s, the cold war in George Pal's 1953 film, and Spielberg's post-9/11 take on the tale. But in doing so they habitually overlook the key to enjoying Wells's book. Very much a comment on the ethics of the seemingly advanced Victorian world, he continually compares the Martians' acts of destruction to our own obliteration of indigenous animal and human populations in the name of "progress". There is a creeping sense, throughout the book, that perhaps humanity deserves this invasion and shouldn't think of itself as all-powerful. All of which makes it far more satisfying than a straight, pulpy, alien invasion drama  a true classic that has pointed the way not just for science-fiction writers, but for how we as a civilisation might think of ourselves.