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For Wells, as for his contemporaries, evolutionary theory was at the hub of biological thinking. It dominated much of what he wrote, both in the form of fiction and science journalism. In essay after essay, especially in his first decade of professional writing from 1887 to 1896, he attacked the traditional anthropocentric viewpoint that man was somehow special and that nature was teleologically oriented toward our species. What was Homo sapiens but just another, accidental episode in the panoramic sweep of history? That was Wells's fundamental premise, and from it he went on to contemplate the precariousness of man's tenure on Earth. In an early piece, "Zoological Regression," he writes:
There is ... no guarantee in scientific knowledge of man's permanence or permanent ascendancy.... [I]t may be that ... Nature is, in unsuspected obscurity, equipping some now humble creature ... to rise in the fullness of time and sweep homo away ... The Coming Beast must certainly be reckoned in any anticipatory calculations regarding the Coming Man.But the threat to humankind, Wells realized, might come not only from some lower species which subsequently evolved to take our place. In The Time Machine, the "Coming Beast" is man himself, or at least a bestial form of Homo that, in the far future, has diverged from a gentler, feebler strain of humanity that represents the other extreme end-point of our development. Then again, perhaps the challenge to humanity would come from beyond the Earth and from a creature that was our intellectual superior.
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No phase of anthropomorphism is more naive than the supposition of men on Mars. The place of such a conception in the world of thought is with the anthropomorphic cosmogonies and religions invented by the childish conceit of primitive man.The Martians, he concluded, "would be different from the creatures of earth, in form and function, in structure and in habit, different beyond the most bizarre imaginings of nightmare." A year later, he gave full reign to such speculation in The War of the Worlds.
Wells further explored the variety of forms that extraterrestrials might take in his writings on silicon-based life and his 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon.
On October 30, 1938, broadcast across the United States the production "War of the Worlds" from H. Wells; this production revealed the extent to which the fear of hostile aliens had landed on Earth.