The Massacre of Mankind: Authorised Sequel to The War of the Worlds

Afterword and Acknowledgements

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.

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.