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krpalmerDuring my vacation in Europe this spring, I managed to find my way back to a science fiction bookstore in Stockholm I'd happened on in my first trip there eight years before. Taking in its mix of Swedish and English-language material of all sorts once more, I noticed a book by Stephen Baxter I hadn't heard of before. The title The Massacre of Mankind did get my attention; seeing it was a sequel to The War of the Worlds reminded me I'd run across a copy of The Time Ships in my university's used textbook store about two decades before. Another continuation of an H.G. Wells novel did seem interesting enough.
I only had so much foreign currency and so much space left in my wallet, though, so I decided I could wait and go looking for this new book on the other side of the Atlantic. Once back from vacation, I checked the nearest bookstore but didn't see it. It was months later before I was surprised all over again to find a North American edition on the shelves there, but that edition being a hardcover did leave me thinking I could save my money and keep waiting. The wait hadn't been that long, though, before there was another surprise in seeing a copy on the new books shelf of the city library; I signed it out at once.
When I'd paged through the first chapters of the book in the local bookstore, I have to admit to an impression of not having been grabbed straight off. Part of that might have been getting through the introduction of a first cast of characters, some unnamed figures from the original now with their own names. One character did happen to have been named in Wells' novel, but in such a way as to make his surviving the original story a matter of interpretation; I did get to wishing we'd have been given a more detailed explanation of how that had happened, as what little was said did sound interesting. Reading back through those early pages and into the action, though, did make things much more compelling even as I noticed how short the chapters could be as viewpoints shifted.
Wells' original story has made a deft transition from "a tale of the next war" unlike anything in that fin-de-siècle genre to "an austerely eloquent prototype interesting just for its transformation of the past"; with that invocation of "alternative history" in mind, Baxter's new novel can be seen as another "First World War much more grandiose than actual history." With that, though, did come one new Martian defence that did have me thinking "that's not sporting"; I had to keep supposing artillery concentrations achieved in the real world could have made quite a difference to what was described in the original. I did pick up on some themes familiar from The Time Ships, such as some psychoanalysis of the original story's narrator and the exigencies of crisis leading to more roles for women, and some themes familiar from other books of his I've read such as an exploration of "hominid species." The science fiction did manage to bring in some modern ideas while not "retconning" the old-fashioned cosmological assumptions of the original.
While the title (drawn from the original) might have seemed a bit grandiose at points along the way, by the time the story was finished (managing to allude to one of the very first third-party sequels and the 1938 radio play, along with further vintage works of science fiction by Wells and others) things had been pretty impressive. I did suppose at times this could only be "a sequel," and where The Time Ships was famously open-ended continuing The War of the Worlds perhaps needs just a bit of acceptance. Perhaps, too, the recent works of Wellsian scholarship mentioned by Baxter in his notes at the back had me wondering if I'd ever have the chance to read them myself.
I only had so much foreign currency and so much space left in my wallet, though, so I decided I could wait and go looking for this new book on the other side of the Atlantic. Once back from vacation, I checked the nearest bookstore but didn't see it. It was months later before I was surprised all over again to find a North American edition on the shelves there, but that edition being a hardcover did leave me thinking I could save my money and keep waiting. The wait hadn't been that long, though, before there was another surprise in seeing a copy on the new books shelf of the city library; I signed it out at once.
When I'd paged through the first chapters of the book in the local bookstore, I have to admit to an impression of not having been grabbed straight off. Part of that might have been getting through the introduction of a first cast of characters, some unnamed figures from the original now with their own names. One character did happen to have been named in Wells' novel, but in such a way as to make his surviving the original story a matter of interpretation; I did get to wishing we'd have been given a more detailed explanation of how that had happened, as what little was said did sound interesting. Reading back through those early pages and into the action, though, did make things much more compelling even as I noticed how short the chapters could be as viewpoints shifted.
Wells' original story has made a deft transition from "a tale of the next war" unlike anything in that fin-de-siècle genre to "an austerely eloquent prototype interesting just for its transformation of the past"; with that invocation of "alternative history" in mind, Baxter's new novel can be seen as another "First World War much more grandiose than actual history." With that, though, did come one new Martian defence that did have me thinking "that's not sporting"; I had to keep supposing artillery concentrations achieved in the real world could have made quite a difference to what was described in the original. I did pick up on some themes familiar from The Time Ships, such as some psychoanalysis of the original story's narrator and the exigencies of crisis leading to more roles for women, and some themes familiar from other books of his I've read such as an exploration of "hominid species." The science fiction did manage to bring in some modern ideas while not "retconning" the old-fashioned cosmological assumptions of the original.
While the title (drawn from the original) might have seemed a bit grandiose at points along the way, by the time the story was finished (managing to allude to one of the very first third-party sequels and the 1938 radio play, along with further vintage works of science fiction by Wells and others) things had been pretty impressive. I did suppose at times this could only be "a sequel," and where The Time Ships was famously open-ended continuing The War of the Worlds perhaps needs just a bit of acceptance. Perhaps, too, the recent works of Wellsian scholarship mentioned by Baxter in his notes at the back had me wondering if I'd ever have the chance to read them myself.