‘The Crystal Egg’ is a science fiction short story written by H. G. Wells in 1897.The story tells of a shop owner, named Mr. Cave, who finds a strange crystal egg that serves as a window into the planet Mars.The story was written the same year in which Wells was serializing ‘The War of the Worlds’ in ‘Pearson’s Magazine’, a year before it was published as a novel. Because of the vaguely similar descriptions of the Martians and their machines, ‘The Crystal Egg’ is often considered a precursor to ‘The War of the Worlds’, though there is no clear foreshadowing of the events that transpire in the novel.