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Shortly before his intuition about an atomic bomb, Leo Szilard had been reading The World Set Free by H. G. Wells--a novel about a German invasion of France and the use of atomic bombs in a global war, a novel written in 1913 but set in the 21st century. Wells called his radioactive element Carolinum: "once its degenerative process had been induced, [Carolinum] continued a furious radiation of energy, and nothing could arrest it." In 1913, Wells was already writing about radioactive decay, half-lives, burning cities, even about deforestation, diminishing supplies of coal and oil, and the rush toward bankruptcy. And he inspired Szilard. Wells wrote--and Szilard read--of the final achievement of a world government and the abolition of atomic weapons--the "world set free." "The catastrophe of atomic bombs shook men...," Wells wrote, "out of their old-established habits of thought." And it was H.G. Wells who gave us the phrase, "a war to end all war."

Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised.

Verne, along with H. G. Wells, is often popularly referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".[1]

Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times keeping the nominal value and only changing the unit to an Imperial measure. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and whole chapters were cut because of the need to fit the work in a constrained space for publication.

Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.

Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells's concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations, although Wells also presents a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]

On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.