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Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: A Sequel to ‘The War of the Worlds’

But Wells clearly wasn’t happy with that. In the final draft, the narrator is burned, wounded, but he follows the Martians in a way that’s more “get it over with.” Then he goes into a fugue, a kind of three-day dropout. I think Wells was groping for a prediction of shell shock, which wasn’t a recognized condition until the First World War, 20 years later. So it’s a tremendous prediction, which I think is underrated by critics. That discovery, of how much Wells worked on the book, was a real revelation for me.

In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

What focuses it all for me when I write is, I try to imagine a book on the shelf in the store that I have to read. It looks perfect for me. I’m my own trial reader, in a way. I thought the title had to be a quote from the original novel. It had to be the Jazz Age, with the Martians returning to a rather more modern world than the Victorian age of the early Wells.

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Stephen Baxter

Credit
Sandra Shepherd

But what changed it was that work Wells put in to evolving the characters. That swerved me, and I got the narrator in there. My own narrator is writing a historical memoir, involving interviews with other people, the same way Wells did. In the end, I decided it’s a sequel, and it’s best to use Wells’s techniques if you can — to help the reader accept it, and to make a seamless transition from one book to the next.

Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

Gerry Anderson, the TV producer. “Fireball XL5” was my first exposure to science fiction. I was just about to turn 5 when it debuted. He delivered high-quality material for kids, where otherwise it was all wobbly puppets and patronizing adults. Well, his puppets were wobbly, but they wore great uniforms. It was black and white, just like the 1950s movies, the same special-effects quality. It blew me away. You got this fantastic vision of the future with these great vessels. It was well made; better quality than “Dr. Who” at the time, say, in terms of production values.

Persuade someone to read “The Massacre of Mankind” in 50 words or less.

You know the original story: The Martians came, were going to conquer, but they were defeated by bacteria. They were like Columbus; they didn’t know what they were doing, but they got somewhere. The next expedition is the conquistadors, who know exactly what they want and how to get it.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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