Warwick Goble's War of the Worlds: Martian Tripods Carry Fallen Comrade
Remarkably, this 1897 illustration predicted autonomous war machines with mechanical limbs decades before actual military robotics — though real drones lack the eerie communal grief depicted here. Four towering Martian fighting-machines wade through a smoky, fire-lit landscape, carrying the wreckage of a destroyed comrade between them in a haunting display of alien solidarity. Warwick Goble's loose, atmospheric brushwork conjures apocalyptic dread through silhouette and sepia wash, the reflective water below mirroring the chaos above in H.G. Wells' seminal alien invasion narrative.
This is early proto-pulp scientific romance at its most atmospheric — closer to literary illustration than lurid pulp sensationalism, but the subject matter of mechanical alien conquerors mourning their own dead carries a genuinely unsettling proto-SF gravitas. It represents the ur-text of alien invasion fiction rendered with Edwardian restraint.
“The four carrying the debris of their comrade between them.”
