This official sequel to HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds is impressive but raises one key question: how did those tripods actually walk?
“Authorised by the HG Wells Estate”, trumpets the cover of Stephen Baxter’s War of the Worlds sequel. 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. I can’t think of another living writer more deserving of the “official heir of Wells” tag than Baxter. Indeed, this isn’t the first time he has written a Wellsian sequel. His 1995 novel The Time Ships expanded 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. The Massacre of Mankind is a more straightforward exercise in rerunning its source text’s storyline. The Martians are back, and this time no microbe can stop them. They’re reheating their heat rays, and trying again with the tripods. 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. Things do not look good.
Related: The War of the Worlds by HG Wells – review
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