It’s not clear why the Martians, having soundly defeated a combined English and German army on English soil, then dig in for several years, rather than immediately moving on to subdue the rest of the planet. Freight coaches lay on their backs like tremendous cockroaches, upended.” The civilised delights of Edwardian catastrophe are all present and correct.Ī few puzzles remain. In occupied England, the protagonists come across a “smashed train”: “the locomotive’s boiler had been disrupted by the caress of the Heat-Ray. One character is woken in the night by the sound of planes overhead: “aircraft … he recognised the humming of the big screws”.

As well as all the in-universe fixtures and fittings, the style is a clever pastiche of Wells. It’s Baxter’s best novel in a long time, and this may be because it reads like a genuine labour of love. The intertextuality gets a little tiresome – there are a great many cameos by famous people, and quite a few science fiction in-jokes – but the story never loosens its hold.

Since this is a novel that basically repeats in expanded form the narrative trajectory of the original, it’s impressive how tense Baxter makes things: the foolish overconfidence of the human defenders and the ghastly inevitability of the Martians’ triumph. But the main strength of The Massacre of Mankind is its tightly gripping storytelling. The story roams around the whole world, and Baxter also chucks in hairy water-dwelling Venusian humanoids and mysterious super-intelligences living on Jupiter. He has great fun winding back science to 1899 levels, reinstating canals on Mars, space travel by giant cannon and so on. Things do not look good.īaxter rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in. A shattered Britain, still trying to piece itself together from the first assault 14 years previously, has fallen under the sway of a quasi-fascist dictator. They’re reheating their heat rays, and trying again with the tripods. The Martians are back, and this time no microbe can stop them. The Massacre of Mankind is a more straightforward exercise in rerunning its source text’s storyline. His 1995 novel The Time Shipsexpanded the universe of Wells’s slender The Time Machine (1895), turning the original’s linear to-and-fro into a foliating mesh of alternating timelines. Indeed, this isn’t the first time he has written a Wellsian sequel. I can’t think of another living writer more deserving of the “official heir of Wells” tag than Baxter. Since Wells’s works all came out of copyright in 2016, this is not a legal requirement on behalf of the publisher nonetheless, the imprimatur is fitting. “A uthorised by the HG Wells Estate”, trumpets the cover of Stephen Baxter’s War of the Worlds sequel.

The time ships stephen baxter