The Massacre Of Mankind
Stephen Baxter
Gollancz hardcover £18.99
**** (4 stars)
review by Christopher Geary
Stephen Baxter wrote the award-winning novel The Time Ships (1995), an excellent
sequel to classic book The Time Machine
(1895) by H.G. Wells, and so Baxter is the perfect choice for this sequel to
Wells’ greatest work, The War Of The
Worlds (1898). The Massacre Of
Mankind picks up the story in the 1920s when the Martians are preparing for
their much feared return to Earth, as predicted by astronomers view of Mars, a
world of “red lakes, green continents” - harbouring busily intelligent, but entirely unsympathetic, life with ancient rivals in the Solar system clearly
the wiser residents of Jupiter.
The heroine and narrator of this adventure, ex-suffragette
Julie, returns to a Britain where paranoia under military rule, in league with
Germany, seems a necessary evil, despite defences bolstered by the
technological fallout from Martian warfare in 1907 that, amongst other
accomplishments, ensured that the ship’s armour-plating applied to the Titanic
proved the famous ocean-liner really was unsinkable. Emerging from its period
melodrama, the best SF content here is found in speculative paragraphs about
origins of the Martian slave labourers, some Cytherean amphibians from Venus, and the
cosmological implications of inhabited planets within reach of conventional
rockets.
Baxter manages to shoehorn a full set of eclectic WOTW references - to Orson Welles’ radio
broadcast, Hollywood ’s
classic 1956 movie, Jeff Wayne’s album, and even Wells himself - into this
roundly international storyline, with glowing fan-boy reverence for such
meta-fictional asides. And the great philosophical question of human futurism
is also keenly addressed: does a threat from space of ET invasion unite the
world? There is a heartfelt and hopeful answer and, of course, this narrative’s
conclusion is never in any doubt, but Baxter springs a genre medley of clever
twists along the way to a finale that Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass might find
suitably appealing.
