War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches is a 1996 science fiction anthology, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and published by American company Bantam Spectra. It is a tribute to H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds"; each story envisions a famous individual's reactions to the Martian invasion and the impact of the invasion on a different part of the world. Several of the stories tie into other works of fiction; Anderson would also later go on to write "The Martian War", a novel that also presented Wells' Martian invasion from the viewpoints of
The War of the Worlds 1900 echo scientific ideas of the time, including Pierre-Simon Laplace's nebular hypothesis, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, and Gustav Kirchhoff's theory of spectroscopy. These scientific ideas combined to present the possibility that planets are alike in composition and conditions for the development of species, which would likely lead to the emergence of life at a suitable geological age in a planet's development. By the time Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds" there had been three centuries of observation of Mars through telescopes. Galileo in 1610 observed the planet's phases, and in 1666 Giovanni Cassini identified the polar ice