Flying machine (The War of the Worlds) Flying machine (The War of the Worlds) The Flying machine is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in H. G. Wells' classic science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds". It is one of the four types of heavy machine the Martians bring with them when they invade Earth, along with the fighting machine, the handling machine, and the embankment machine. The appearance of this aircraft in the novel is very vague. The narrator's brother, escaping by sea, glimpses it shortly after the implied destruction of the Channel Fleet. The narrator himself sees the aircraft abandoned on
The War of the Worlds infrastructure such as armament stores, railways, and telegraph lines; it appears to be intended to cause maximum casualties, leaving humans without any will to resist. These tactics became more common as the twentieth century progressed, particularly during the 1930s with the development of mobile weapons and technology capable of surgical strikes on key military and civilian targets. Wells's vision of a war bringing total destruction without moral limitations in "The War of the Worlds" was not taken seriously by readers at the time of publication. He later expanded these ideas in the novels "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899), "The War