250px|thumb|A [[Henrique Alvim Corrêa illustration from a 1906 edition of the book.]]
HMS Thunder Child is a fictional ironclad of the Royal Navy, destroyed by Martian fighting-machines in H. G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds whilst protecting a refugee rescue fleet of civilian vessels. It has been suggested that Thunder Child was based on HMS Polyphemus, which was the sole torpedo ram to see service with the Royal Navy from 1881 to 1903.
Fictional description
In the novel Wells gives only a rough description of the ship. During the portion where the narrator describes his brother's perspective, he introduces the reader to the Thunder Child in chapter 17, describing it thus: "About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. This was the ram Thunder Child". A few paragraphs later, it is stated that "It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping". A similar view is expressed by Leslie Sheldon, who calls the scene "almost cinematic".
According to Gomel, the scene involving Thunder Child, with its "scriptural descriptions" of events, also demonstrates how The War of the Worlds as a whole is "permeated" by a metaphorical apocalypse that "echoes of the Bible". Despite the apocalyptic nature of the story, Gomel observes that, as a whole, the novel's happy ending (a unique feature among Wells’ novels) describes the technological advances stemming from the invasion as being beneficial for the whole world. Along similar lines, Nathaniel Otjen uses Thunder Child as an example of how Wells' writing "imagines the collapse of fossil fuel modernity and explores alternate forms of energy". According to Otjen, Wells depicts how the fossil fuel technology represented by Thunder Child is only able to combat the Martians' non-fossil fuel technology by mimicking it. John Fidler reaches a similar conclusion, describing how Thunder Childs success in damaging its enemy with a ramming attack stands in contrast to the near-complete lack of success by real-world vessels designed for ramming.
Garry Young considers Thunder Childs demise in combat against the Martians in the context of ethics of killer robots, describing Thunder Childs destruction as exemplifying "behaviour as (outwardly) dignified in the face of indignity". According to Young, "the ironclad (and its anonymous crew) is depicted as dying a valiant death against a faceless and non-human enemy, to the sound of cheers from the fearful audience looking on." Young argues that Thunder Childs crew's death should be considered dignified irrespective of whether the Martians are able to recognize or value the humanity of Thunder Childs crew.