That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals.

Basic set up:

In this excerpt, the narrator explains to us why the Martians want to take over Earth: Their planet, Mars, is falling apart. Our planet is still nice and cool and green and fresh.

How can we talk about sci-fi without talking about Martians? Sci-fi writers love creatures from Mars almost as much as David Bowie. In H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Martians are the bad guys. They want to take over our planet. And we humans have to fight to stop them, even though these Martians are way, way smarter than us.

We've already mentioned that non-human characters in Sci-fi are often set against human characters in a way that allows us to better define what we mean by "human." In the passage above, we see Wells drawing up some important contrasts between Martians and humans.

Martians are clearly more intelligent than us humans: they have "intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of," but they're also not very nice. They have hard hearts. They're greedy and they're after what doesn't belong to them—our own planet Earth. And they look down us. They think we're just "inferior animals."

So the passage sets up the Martians as very different from us: they're the Big Bad Wolf and we're the harmless three little cute piggies. But what's interesting is that the narrator also draws parallels between Martians and humans. Just as the Martians look down on us as lowly animals, we look down on "monkeys and lemurs" and other animals as beneath us. The narrator, in other words, implicitly suggests that we aren't necessarily that much better than the Martians with their superiority complex. We, too, have a superiority complex because we look down on other creatures.