Plot
When Martians surround Earth with an armada of flying saucers, President James "Jimmy" Dale addresses America concerning the historic event. People around the country follow the story, including news anchors in New York, employees and guests at the Luxor Las Vegas hotel in Nevada and a trailer trash family in fictional Perkinsville, Kansas. The President's science aides set up a first contact meeting with the Martians in Pahrump, Nevada.
Using a universal translator, the Martians announce they have "come in peace." However, when a hippie releases a dove as a symbol of peace, the Martians shoot it down and attack the army and gathered crowd. General Casey, Jason Stone, and Billy-Glenn are among those killed. Thinking that the reason for this is a "cultural misunderstanding," President Dale has Professor Donald Kessler continue negotiations with the Martians, whose ambassador is invited to address the United States Congress. At this meeting, the Martians massacre most of the members of Congress and retreat to their saucer. Kessler begs for the Martian ambassador to stop, but he is knocked out and taken aboard their ship.
General Decker tries to convince President Dale to retaliate with nuclear warfare, but the president refuses. A Martian assassin, disguised as a beautiful woman, enters the White House and unsuccessfully attempts to assassinate Dale. After the unsuccessful attempt on his life, the Martians then begin a full-scale invasion, in which they destroy Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Washington Monument, the Easter Island Moais, Mount Rushmore - replacing the stone president heads with Martian heads, and other locations.
Meeting with the leader one more time to plead for peace, the leader goes to shake hands with President Dale but the ambassador's hand comes off and crawls on President Dale, and then stabs him to death. Meanwhile, Richie Norris, a Kansas teenager, discovers that the Martians heads explode when they hear Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call". He and his grandmother drive around town, using the song to destroy the Martians. The military hears about the recording and broadcasts it around the globe and into space, killing most of the Martians and causing the few remaining survivors to flee Earth.
Richie and his grandmother are later awarded the Medal of Honor by the only surviving member of the government, the President's teenage daughter, Taffy, at a ceremony including a Mariachi band playing The Star Spangled Banner on the steps of the ruined United States Capitol.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)