Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

For speculation on the Martians themselves I have followed the lead of Wells’s own visionary early essay ‘The Man of the Year Million’ ( Pall Mall Gazette, November 1893), to which the narrator refers in The War of the Worlds itself (p151). I have speculated that the Martians’ Heat-Ray is an infra-red laser, powered, like other Martian engines, by a compact nuclear fusion energy source. In reality work on ‘explosively pumped flux compression generators’, ascribed here to Edison, did not begin until the 1950s in the USSR and US, in the course of nuclear fusion research. I’m very grateful to Martyn Fogg of the British Interplanetary Society, the author of Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (SAE International, Warrendale, PA, 1995), for a stimulating discussion on the Martian terraforming of the earth.

In a sense Wells’s novel (like my sequel) is an alternate history, with a ‘jonbar hinge’, a branching point, coming in 1894 when a mysterious light on Mars is interpreted as the casting of a huge gun… I have, however, drawn on a large number of sources for the real-world history of the period, including Malcolm Brown’s The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War (Guild, 1991), Charles Emmerson’s 1913 (Bodley Head, 2013), Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World (Allan Lane, 2006), Allan Mallinson’s 1914: Fight the Good Fight (Bantam, 2013), Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans (Allan Lane, 2013), David Woodward’s Armies of the World 1854-1914 (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978), and Jerry White’s Zeppelin Nights (Bodley Head, 2014) on London during the war. On women at war, Kate Adie’s Fighting on the Home Front (Hodder and Stoughton, 2013); on the aerial war, Kenneth Poolman’s Zeppelins Over England (Evans, 1960); on the naval war Mark Stille’s British Dreadnought vs German Dreadnought (Osprey, 2010); on the development of tanks, John Glanfield’s The Devil’s Chariots (Sutton, 2001) and David Fletcher’s British Mk I Tank 1916 (Osprey, 2004) (the HMLS Boadicea is based on the ‘Hetherington Landship’ design of 1915). James P. Duffy’s Target: America (Praeger, 2004) summarises the Kaiser’s government’s speculative plans to attack the USA. Two speculations on alternate outcomes of the First World War are Niall Ferguson’s essay ‘The Kaiser’s European Union’ in his Virtual History (Picador, 1997) and Richard Ned Lebow’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives (Palgrave, 2014). The RMS Lusitania was, in our timeline, sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat on May 7 1915.

A reference on the Soviet Arctic is John McCannon’s Red Arctic (Oxford University Press, 1998). Useful surveys on tunnels and caves in Britain are Stephen Smith’s Underground London (Little, Brown, 2004) and Underground Britain (Little, Brown, 2009). In our reality the London Roman amphitheatre was not discovered until the 1980s.I’m very grateful to our good friends Mr and Mrs J. D. Oliver of Whiteleaf, Bucks, for help with local research on the Chilterns; a useful reference is The Chilterns by Leslie Hepple and Alison Doggett (Phillimore, 1992).

Wells’s original ‘war of the worlds’ was in fact confined to south-east England. But the Martians first came to New York as early as 1897, in the New York Evening Journal ’s heavily adapted serialisation of Wells’s novel – in fact the very first sequel to Wells’s novel – Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (January 12 – February 10 1898). Harry Kane’s Edisonade, mentioned in these pages, is an affectionate tribute. My own survey of earlier sequels is ‘H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a controlling metaphor for the twentieth century’, The Wellsian 32 (2009), p. 3.

In general the interpretation of Wells’s great book given here is my own, and any errors or inaccuracies are of course my sole responsibility.

Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent SF writer of his generation. Published around the world he has won awards in the UK, US, Germany and Japan. He has written more than twenty novels, published in more than twenty languages and is currently writing the The Long Earth novels with Terry Pratchett.

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2016 All rights reserved

The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First publication in Great Britain in 2015 by Gollancz

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