The Fire People (Ray Cummings' Matter, Space and Time series Book 2)

First published in 1922, "The Fire People" by one of the masters of early science fiction, Ray Cummings, is the second novel of trilogy of tales of Matter, Space, and Time ("The Girl in the Golden Atom" and "The Man Who Mastered Time" dealing with the other two elements, respectively). The Matter, Space and Time series postulates that matter, space and time are interlinked and that one cannot exist without the others.

"The Fire People" is the story of a fiery invasion from another planet. No one could have suspected that the Earth was in mortal danger. It started with a small meteor streaking across the sky and smashing into the Earth's surface, but the event was so much more than a simple collision between the Earth and a wandering piece of space rubble. A strange glow began to radiate from the meteor, a glow unlike anything known to Earthly science; and with these emanations came death, anything coming into contact with that light was immediately destroyed. The fate of the Earth fell into the hands of an inquisitive newspaper reporter and a brilliant professor of science as they strived to save mankind from its first interplanetary threat, an attack from a distant neighbour...

Ray Cummings was an American author of science fiction, rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre".