Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

I coughed, rudely. ‘But these big-brained librarians of yours came to the earth – our earth – and slaughtered us, and drank the blood of our children.’

‘Perhaps we need men like Churchill when we must make war, and we must think the unthinkable. But it was you who found a way to make the peace, Julie – not Churchill…’

You must imagine the two of us, arguing in that odd little room with its rather dim lights and rather ill-judged furniture, and its window looking out over the ruins to Horsell Common, where history had been made – and here was the man who first wrote that history, with some degree of eloquence. I scarce believed a word he said, but they were such beautiful words. ‘They will not come,’ declared the Unreliable Narrator now. ‘The Jovians have ensured that. But – and I’m with Haldane on this – I’m not one to argue for an over-reliance on the Jovians to look after us forever. The Jovians intervened once in our affairs, and the Martians’, like a deus ex machina – like the Old Testament God with His floods and plagues. We cannot rely on such help in the future; we should not. We cannot bow down before these temporal deities. We ought to stand on our own two feet – perhaps Mikaelian’s marvellous Federation is a first hopeful step—’

‘How long, then, Walter? Always assuming the Martians give us the time… How long before we reach some level of perfection?’

For answer he dug out a manuscript from the pile before him: dog-eared and yellowed, and stained perhaps by spilled coffee, yet he handled this relic with tenderness. ‘This is the very paper on which I had been working, in this study, on the afternoon when the first cylinder opened over on Horsell Common. I remember I had a selenite paperweight; I wonder what became of that? It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the advancement of the civilising process. When I had to abandon it – I remember I broke off in mid-sentence to get my Chronicle from the newsboy, and he spoke to me of “dead men from Mars” – I was in the midst of a paragraph of prediction. I never went back to the work. I look at it now – how young I was! How ignorant! I was no prophet. And yet, you know, in my dim groping, it seems to me I hit on certain perceptions. Now I have finished that last paragraph. Call it sentimental. Oh, I will never attempt to have the paper published, but…’

‘Read it to me,’ I said quietly.

He picked up the sheet. ‘“In about two hundred years, we may expect—”’

The telephone rang.

Walter stared at it, as if frozen.

I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was a little after midnight.

Still Walter did not stir.

After three rings, I crossed the room and took the handset. ‘Yes? Yes – he is here…’ And I took the message. ‘Walter – it is Carolyne .’

He looked at me blankly.

‘She says she arranged this with Eric Eden, arranged for your astronomical exchange to call her first, not you. To help you manage the news, you see.’

Walter picked up the photograph of Carolyne, and touched the face behind the glass. ‘And the Martians?’

I listened to Carolyne’s quiet, calm voice.

‘They did not fire, Walter. The cannon did not fire, on Mars.’

‘I was right, then.’

‘You were right.’

‘It’s over. The end of the War of the Worlds. Now the Union of the Peoples can begin…’ He seemed to run down, like an unwound clock. ‘ Carolyne. ’ He touched that photograph once more. ‘Once I counted her, as she counted me, among the dead.’

‘She’s here, Walter.’

He bowed his head. And he took the phone from my hands.

For an authoritative and accessible edition of Wells’s novel I can recommend the Penguin Classics edition (2005) edited by Patrick Parrinder. Page numbers quoted here refer to this edition, and I have taken spellings and other vocabulary elements from this source. I have also relied on the critical editions by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geguld (Indiana University Press, 1993), and Leon Stover (McFarland & Co., Inc., 2001). I have drawn on decades of Wellsian scholarship, beginning with Bernard Bergonzi’s seminal The Early HG Wells (Manchester University Press, 1961), through works like Patrick Parrinder’s Shadows of the Future (Liverpool University Press, 1995) and Steven McLean’s The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells (Palgrave, 2009). Biographies of Wells himself include Michael Foot’s very accessible H.G.: The History of Mr Wells (Counterpoint, 1995). In addition, during the composition of this book I attended two stimulating Wells Society seminars, on Wells and the First World War at Durham University in September 2014, and on Wells and Ford Madox Ford at Kings College, London, in September 2015.

As regards War of the Worlds itself, a recent ‘biography of the book’ is Peter J. Beck’s The War of the Worlds: From H.G, Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and

Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2016).I.F. Clarke’s The Tale of the Next Great War (Liverpool University Press) is a good anthology and analysis of coming-war fictions, a sub-genre of which The War of the Worlds was a part. On Wells’s particular fascination with London, see ‘“My Own Particular City”: HG Wells’s Fantastical London’ by H. Elber-Aviram, in The Wellsian no. 38, 2015, pp977-1210. Patrick Parrinder’s paper ‘How Far Can We Trust the Narrator of The War of the Worlds? ’ ( Foundation no. 77, pp15-24, 1999) stimulated my thinking about that troubled character. See also Eric J Leed’s No Man’s Land (Cambridge University Press, 1979) on shell shock.

An excellent analysis of Wells’s book’s internal chronology, military action and strategy was given in three papers by Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley in The Wellsian , the journal of the H.G. Wells Society (no. 29 pp2-20 2006, no. 30 pp36-56 2007, no. 31 pp4-33 2008). For the purposes of this book I have adopted a date of June 1907 for the Martians’ first invasion. Gangale and Dudley-Rowley show that this date is the best fit to the astronomical clues Wells provides – but his text is inconsistent, and indeed the editors of the two critical editions cited above each came to a different conclusion.

On timings: daylight saving time, advancing the clocks by an hour during local summer, was introduced in 1916 in Germany during World War I as a fuel-saving measure, and the practice soon spread, though not universally, across Britain and around the world. In this novel, in which WWI as we know it was never fought, I have assumed that DST has not been adopted, so that British times given are in GMT throughout (as they were, of course, in Wells’s novel, which predated DST), and global times are relative to this time zone.

The scientific consensus of the late nineteenth century concerning the evolution of the solar system was a central driver for The War of the Worlds – and this sequel is therefore set in a universe in which these theories remain valid, notably the ‘nebular hypothesis’ of the formation of the solar system to which Wells referred (p7), as developed by Kant (1724-1804) and Laplace (1749-1827). Meanwhile the notion that the sun was cooling relatively rapidly was championed by, for example, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907). As for the planets themselves, I have allowed Mars to be as Wells sketched it in his novel and as Lowell and others imagined it, for example in Lowell’s Mars (Houghton, Mifflin, 1895) and Mars and Its Canals (Macmillan, 1906). (In reality the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli died in 1910.) K. Maria D. Lane’s Geographies of Mars (University of Chicago Press, 2011) was a useful discussion of the cultural background and impact of Lowell’s Mars hypotheses. A ‘dripping wet’ Venus is as, for example, the Swedish astronomer Svante Arrhenius described it in The Destinies of the Stars (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918). From the 1920s spectroscopic and other evidence would cast doubt on the earthlike models of these worlds, with clinching evidence of the planets’ inhospitability provided by the space probes from the 1960s onwards.