TL;DR: The Massacre of Mankind (2017) — Reference: Baxter also wrote The Time Ships (1995), an authorised sequel to Wells's The Time Machine. The novel widens beyond London. Vignettes depict Martian attacks in: - New York City - Melbourne - Berlin - Los Angeles - Constantinople - Durban (South Africa) - St. Petersburg Stephen Baxter | Authorised sequel to H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds | Orion Books / Gollancz
Not in this collection — published 2017, under copyright. Reference document only.
Front matter: Cover, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph
Book I: The Return of the Martians
Book II: England Under the Martians
Book III: Worlds at War
Book IV: Mars on Earth
Back matter: Afterword and Acknowledgment, About the Author
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Author | Stephen Baxter |
| Publisher | Orion Books (UK) / Gollancz |
| Publication date | 19 January 2017 |
| Pages | 453–456 |
| ISBN | 978-1-4732-0509-3 |
| Preceded by | The War of the Worlds (1898) |
| Authorisation | Authorised by the H.G. Wells Estate |
Baxter also wrote The Time Ships (1995), an authorised sequel to Wells's The Time Machine.
Prologue (1920–1921): Julie Elphinstone, ex-sister-in-law of the original narrator (now named Walter Jenkins), returns from New York to England. Jenkins has detected signs of a second Martian attack. London is a totalitarian dystopia preparing for war. Frank (Julie's ex-husband, Walter's brother) is conscripted.
Second invasion (1921): At 7:00 pm, 50 cylinder-shaped missiles strike London, wiping out nearly half the British Armed Forces. At midnight, more cylinders land with Martian warriors. Martians emerge immediately (unlike the 19 hours in 1907) and engage with heat rays. Army, Navy, and Air Force counterattacks fail. Martians systematically target infrastructure—bridges, factories, railway stations. Many Londoners escape or shelter.
1923: Martians control England, mostly within a cordon. Jenkins asks Julie to infiltrate the Martian zone to attempt communication. She travels there with a group, meets a saboteur named Marriott, and discovers:
Sigil gambit: Julie learns Martians communicate with Mars via sigils carved into the earth. She plans to alter the sigils to disrupt communications. Eric Eden (veteran of the first war) transports her inside the cordon in a massive "landship" (tank-sized vehicle). Marriott detonates explosives to change the Martian sigils into Jovian (Jupiter) symbols. Within two hours, the Martians withdraw and Jovians leave a circular sigil on the Moon—implying a higher power has intervened.
1937: The book jumps 14 years. Martians remain on Earth but their location is unknown. Jenkins takes Julie half a mile underground to a Martian city beneath England. Jenkins speculates this reflects life on Mars: telepathic, no secrets, equality. The British Martians built a space gun and fired themselves back to Mars.
Arctic colony: Reports say other Martians moved to Earth's poles (more Mars-like climate). Julie, Jenkins, Eden, and others take a German Zeppelin to the Arctic and witness a Martian terraforming operation. Jenkins theorises that with the Jovians watching, the Martians are forced to colonise rather than conquer, and humans should cooperate.
The novel widens beyond London. Vignettes depict Martian attacks in:
Baxter also references Martian interest in Venus (swampy) and Jupiter (mysteriously majestic).
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Julie Elphinstone | Narrator; ex-sister-in-law of Walter Jenkins |
| Walter Jenkins | Original War of the Worlds narrator (named) |
| Frank | Julie's ex-husband, Walter's brother; conscripted |
| Eric Eden | Veteran of first invasion; operates "landship" |
| Albert Cook | "The Artilleryman" from the original novel |
| Marriott | Saboteur inside the cordon |
| Philip Parris | Walter's cousin; helps Julie with police |
| Brian Marvin | New leader of Britain's recovery |
If Martians died from terrestrial bacteria in the first book, why do they continue consuming human blood in the sequel? What trick mitigated this?
Answer: Baxter never explains the mechanism in the text. The sequel sidesteps the question.
What the text does establish:
The narrative trick: The sequel is resolved by the sigil/Jovian gambit, not by bacteria. Baxter never has to explain how Martians avoid germs because germs are never the resolution. The blood-disease problem is evaded, not solved. Reviewers (e.g. Reactor/Tor) infer "they've adapted" from the blurb and from the fact that Martians emerge immediately (unlike the 19 hours in 1907) and survive—but no in-text passage describes biological adaptation, filtration, or any mitigation.
Summary: Martians consume blood as before. Baxter implies they "learned, adapted" (blurb) but provides no on-page mechanism. Refrigerated storage and blood-type coding are the sole technical details; neither is explained as antibacterial. The Porton pathogen plot shows Martians are still plausibly vulnerable; Julie's refusal to use it and the sigil ending mean the question is never answered.
Sigils have no basis in Wells. The original War of the Worlds and The Crystal Egg mention no carved symbols, ground markings, or Earth–Mars communication channel. Wells describes:
Sigils do not replace the crystal eggs. The crystals were for observation; Baxter introduces a wholly new, unexplained mechanism (carved symbols that "communicate with Mars"). The mechanism is vague—technology or magic? How would ground-carved symbols transmit across space? How would Martians on Earth "see" them, or is the idea that they transmit to Mars? Baxter does not explain.
The sigil gambit as plot device: Changing symbols to "Jovian" ones causes Martians to withdraw in two hours and Jovians to leave a sigil on the Moon. No setup, no rules, no prior mention of Jovians or sigil mechanics. Wells ended the first invasion with terrestrial bacteria—a solution already in the story, grounded in germ theory. Baxter ends the second with a deus ex machina: a new cosmic power invoked by altering symbols. It reads as a contrived way to resolve the sequel.
Sigils are unnecessary if crystal eggs exist. Wells established that Martians had paired crystals for Earth–Mars observation. For communication, they could use the same technology or something analogous. Introducing an entirely different system (ground-carved sigils) when the eggs already provide a canonical mechanism is narratively redundant and inconsistent. After over a century to devise a meaningful sequel, the first authorised continuation invents a weak substitute and ignores the existing canon. That is suspicious.
The crystal eggs have been erased from the franchise. Wells published The Crystal Egg in 1897, one year before War of the Worlds; the stories share a Mars cosmology. Yet the crystal eggs have never appeared in any other War of the Worlds adaptation—not the 1938 radio play, not the 1953 film, not Spielberg's 2005 film, not the various comics or serials. They do not appear in Baxter's sequel. Interpretation: The eggs are the most suggestive element in Wells's Mars corpus—surveillance devices that enable control at a distance, the Palantír before Tolkien. Their systematic omission from all post-Wells WotW fiction suggests someone does not want us thinking about them. We leave this as an interpretive frame, not a proven claim.
Wells's original description: The Heat-Ray is invisible — "Heat, and invisible, instead of visible light." It operates by generating "intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity" (a realistic capacitor-like energy-storage device) and projecting it as a parallel beam "by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light." The beam is an invisible thermal shaft; witnesses see only its effects (flames, charred bodies). Wells described a plausible directed-energy weapon—not a laser, not a visible sci-fi ray gun.
Adaptation erasure: Most War of the Worlds adaptations changed the Heat-Ray to a visible beam—a generic sci-fi laser or flashlight effect. They also dropped the technical specificity (non-conductivity chamber, parabolic mirror) in favour of a simple "death ray" with no physics. Exceptions: Jeff Wayne's musical album (1978) and Baxter's sequel (2017) kept the heat ray invisible, closer to Wells.
Why Baxter kept it invisible: Baxter could not easily change it to match the visible-laser convention without raising eyebrows—a conscientious sequel would adhere to Wells. But the suspicion runs deeper: was the primary motivator for Baxter's book to describe such a weapon accurately in 2017, under the strict guise of Wellsian science fiction? One year prior (2016), US diplomats in Havana reported symptoms later attributed to a directed-energy weapon—the so-called Havana syndrome. Coincidence? Unlikely. A 2017 authorised sequel that faithfully depicts an invisible, capacitor-driven thermal beam—the only major WotW work to do so—would effectively re-insert Wells's technically precise DEW description into public discourse, while remaining safely under the label of fiction. We leave this as interpretive; evidence of authorial intent is absent.
The first authorised sequel to The War of the Worlds does not engage with the more obvious questions raised by Wells's worldbuilding. It escalates (100 cylinders, global attacks) but does not deepen.
Why didn't Martians seek control through systems of control? Wells gave them crystal eggs—paired surveillance devices that could observe Earth from Mars. The parallel is Denethor's palantír in Lord of the Rings: a seeing-stone used for surveillance becomes an instrument of control (Sauron manipulates Denethor through it). Martians with crystal surveillance could have seeded observation devices, identified key human leaders, and exercised influence—propaganda, subversion, selective targeting—rather than brute conquest. Baxter does not explore this.
Why ground assaults only? No information warfare, no psychological operations, no attempt to turn human factions against each other. The Martians rely on cylinders, heat rays, and physical dominance. A civilization advanced enough to cross space could plausibly deploy subtler means. The sequel repeats the original's kinetic template.
Why try the same assault but larger when humans have advanced? By 1921, humanity has tanks, aircraft, improved artillery, poison gas. Wells's 1907 invasion failed to bacteria; the Martians "watched and learned." Yet their second attempt is more of the same—more cylinders, same tactics. They do not adapt strategy, develop countermeasures to human technology, or exploit human political divisions. They merely scale up. It defies the "learned from the first invasion" premise.
The two-book franchise leaves these questions open:
Were SF authors demonstrably, systematically prevented from exploring narratives that get too close to the actual truth? If Mars or Martian contact encodes suppressed history, would publishers, estates, or other gatekeepers steer sequels away from the more plausible scenarios—control through surveillance, subversion, institutional capture—and toward dumb, kinetic invasion tropes?
Were the powers that be—military-industrial complex or other actors—interested in ensuring that managed disclosure appears only in science fiction and in a deliberately simplistic form, so as to derail serious investigation? Framing Mars as "aliens in tripods" keeps it in the realm of entertainment. A narrative of Martians as infiltrators, controllers, or institutional insiders would be harder to dismiss.
We leave these questions open. There is no direct evidence of editorial suppression or coordinated narrative management. The absence of such evidence does not confirm or deny the hypothesis. The failure of the authorised sequel to address obvious narrative gaps remains a datum—one that may reflect authorial choice, market constraints, or something else.
wotw-forbidden-blood.md and Wells's original discipline-collapse thesis. Blood-type compatibility: Keynes speculates Martians prefer specific human blood types; this implies biological kinship—a major clue that Martians are human, not alien.wotw-telepathic-purge.md