Every Friday, Marilyn Knapp Litt, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, brings us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle. Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog, ClassicKindle.com, a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so you don’t miss anything. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

War of the Worlds is a terrific early science fiction novel (1898) by English writer H.G. Wells. It has been made into movies numerous times, but I think it is overlooked as a book.

The US seems to have cycles of UFO reports and lately we have entered one of those cycles. For awhile I wondered how so many people with smartphones could fail to film the UFOs they reported, but now YouTube is brimming over with shiny, fleeting objects!

Perhaps it is as H.G. Wells wrote:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

I will leave the big reveal to the reader, but the narrator will give you an idea of the horror in encountering his first Martian:

I saw astonishment giving place to horror on the faces of the people about me. I heard inarticulate exclamations on all sides. There was a general movement backwards. I saw the shopman struggling still on the edge of the pit. I found myself alone, and saw the people on the other side of the pit running off, Stent among them. I looked again at the cylinder, and ungovernable terror gripped me. I stood petrified and staring.

Great fun!

Click here to get your free copy of War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells >>>