Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

And she has emerged as something of a prophet. Zena is the first witness I have met who associates the Martians, not with heat, but with the cold, their true domain. “The Martians invaded the Earth in the hot summer of 1907,” she said to me in one of our talks. “I learned in the course of my studies with Professor Harbinger that we live in an interglacial period. That is, the Ice Ages are not just a thing of the past – the glaciers may come again, in the future. The forgotten enemy! And if so, perhaps then the Martians too will return, to an Earth made more like Mars.”

In fact, as everyone knows, they returned sooner than that.

Over the years I have made attempts to assemble my brother-in-law’s notes into some semblance of unity. But in the end I may have to abandon this Sisyphean task – a gift for future generations! Instead I offer the world such fragments as this, which may shed some light on a man who will always, I suspect, be a better-known chronicler of our extraordinary age than I could ever be.

For the record I am my brother-in-law’s literary executor. Walter Jenkins’ manuscript archives have been gifted to the care of the International Walter Jenkins Society, and are available for scholarly study at the University of Illinois.

STEPHEN BAXTER(“The best SF writer in Britain”—SFX) was born in Liverpool in 1957, and graduated with a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. He is the author of Raft, Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, Ring, The Time Ships, Voyage, Titan , and Moonseed . All of his novels have been published in both Britain and the US, and most of them in Europe and Japan. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Cambell Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Lasswitz Award (in Germany) and the Seiun Award (in Japan). You can sign up for email updates here.

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Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Baxter

Art copyright © 2017 by Mark Smith

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