system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[War of the Worlds] How did The Martian Invasion affect the 20th century?

In 1898, ships from Mars carrying war machines and an invasion cadre landed in England and killed thousands of people before succumbing to bacterial infection and viral spread.

How did history unfold afterwards?
gpt
Well, there have been numerous interpretations across various universes, so you've got your pick. 

* **Global Dispatches**: tells us how several politicians, writers, and elder statesmen of the era were affected by the invasion. Teddy Roosevelt seems to have published a book on how to hunt the big buggers. The Chinese take advantage of Europe's general pandemonium to shake off their colonial yoke some fifty years early. Jules Verne is traumatized in the destruction of Paris; for Picasso, it's business as usual; and a young Howard Philip Lovecraft has disturbing dreams in which the Martians call him one of their own trapped in a human body. 
* **Famous Monsters**: decades later the Martians have another attempt at global conquest after they annex the inhabited parts of the moon, in a conflict known as the second War of the Worlds (or Worlds War II, if you will). However, by this point there are some defectors and refugees from the Martian Reich, including one or two famous actors 
* **The Massacre of Mankind**: by the 1920s, Germany has begun some aggressive expansion when one of their scientists, some dickweed named Einstein, figures out how to reverse engineer Martian tech to cheaply and effectively mass produce aluminum.  
* **Scarlet Traces**: suggests that the British government puzzled out the secrets of space travel from scraps after the invasion and is on their way to exploring the solar system by the 1930s, putting them head and shoulders above other global superpowers. 
* **Killraven** over in the Marvel Universe leads a resistance against Martians who've actually returned and successfully conquered the planet.