The War of the Worlds
Wells invented the alien invasion narrative as an explicit reversal of British colonialism. The Martians do to England what England did to Tasmania. Every alien invasion story since descends from this 1898 novel.
The prose is the turn-off most cited, “sentences which are greater than 100 words” and syntax that fights modern reading habits. The narrator is cold and passive, an observer rather than an actor, which some read as deliberate and others simply find dull company, “not a pleasant book to read.” Momentum drops hard around the halfway point once the shock wears off and the beats of fleeing and hiding repeat, until “people will forget the beginning by the time they reach the end.” The brother’s separate London thread is thin enough to forget. And the resolution is a flashpoint, called abrupt against the tension built.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
