The Massacre of Mankind (2017) — Reference

Table of Contents (from epub)

Front matter: Cover, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph

Book I: The Return of the Martians

1. A Call to Arms
2. A Meeting of Veterans
3. An Artilleryman in New York
4. An Unreliable Narrator
5. My Return to England
6. The Surrey Corridor
7. In London
8. A Meeting at Ottershaw
9. A Call from Germany
10. To Stanmore and London
11. In London
12. The Mobilization
13. Approaching Uxbridge
14. The Landing of the First Wave
15. Monday in London
16. Into the Cordon
17. Cylinder No. 12
18. The Flying-Machine over London
19. The First Hours Within the Cordon
20. An Occupied Countryside
21. At Abbotsdale
22. How the Martians Moved Out of the Cordon
23. Our Flight from Stanmore
24. On the King’s Line
25. How the Retreat Began
26. The Martians at Wormwood Scrubs
27. A Flight Across Central London
28. The Fall of London

Book II: England Under the Martians

1. I Receive a Call in Paris
2. A Meeting in Berlin
3. A Journey to the Coast
4. Aboard the Invincible
5. At the German Coast
6. The Battle of the North Sea
7. A Landing at the Wash
8. In Portsmouth
9. A Secret Assignment
10. A Night in Hampshire
11. My Return to London
12. From Aldwych to Stratford
13. Into the Sewer
14. Emergence
15. In the Trench
16. A Tunnel Under the Trench
17. Inside the Cordon
18. The Potato Fields
19. A Dinner Party
20. Verity Bliss
21. A Bicycle Ride
22. “Marriott”
23. With the Franc-Tireurs of Buckinghamshire
24. An Awakening
25. The Villa of the Cythereans
26. A Harvesting
27. A Fighting-Machine’s Passenger
28. In the West Wycombe Caves
29. The Artilleryman’s Tale
30. A Strange Negotiation
31. Into the Redoubt
32. Prisoners of the Martians
33. A Laboratory
34. The Drips

Book III: Worlds at War

1. The House in Dahlem
2. On Long Island
3. In the Bigelow Mansion
4. An Exodus
5. I Arrive at Thornborough
6. At Los Angeles
7. HMLS Boadicea
8. Into Action
9. Escape from Long Island
10. The Bridges of New York
11. Central Park
12. How the Martians Came to Melbourne
13. In Peking
14. The Martian Invasion of Manhattan
15. Walter Jenkins in Dahlem
16. A Shadow Play
17. Above Durban
18. Outside St. Petersburg
19. The Advance from the Elbe
20. To the Capital
21. With the Martians in Berlin
22. A New York Edisonade
23. A World Under Siege
24. The Revenge of the Martians
25. A Player of the Game
26. Armistice

Book IV: Mars on Earth

1. A Telephone Call
2. Aftermath
3. By Monorail to England
4. Back to the Redoubt
5. The Martians’ Underground Lair
6. The Vaterland
7. Across the Arctic
8. At Cape Chelyuskin
9. An Unreliable Prophet
10. The Epilogue

Back matter: Afterword and Acknowledgment, About the Author

Bibliographic

Baxter also wrote The Time Ships (1995), an authorised sequel to Wells’s The Time Machine.

Setting

• Time: 1921 (opening), extending to 1937
• First Martian invasion: Retconned to June 1907 (“The First War”) to match astronomical opposition
• Alternate history: No First World War (presumably due to effects of the 1907 invasion). Britain and Germany have a non-aggression pact; German soldiers at Whitehall. Stricter controls; Suffragette Party illegal.

Plot Summary

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:

• Martians are carnivorous, keeping humans and humanoid species in holding tanks for harvesting
• Breeding experiments between Martians and humans
• A feeding hole: humans hung upside-down from scaffolding while Martians inject blood directly into their bodies

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.

Ending

• When the next Earth–Mars opposition occurs, no new cylinders are launched. The war of the worlds is over.
• The invasion inspires world nations to recognise shared humanity and unite to address coexistence with each other and the Martians.
• Jovians function as an intervening superior power; altering the sigils to Jovian symbols causes Martian withdrawal.

Global Scope

The novel widens beyond London. Vignettes depict Martian attacks in:

• New York City
• Melbourne
• Berlin
• Los Angeles
• Constantinople
• Durban (South Africa)
• St. Petersburg

Baxter also references Martian interest in Venus (swampy) and Jupiter (mysteriously majestic).

Characters

Investigation: The Blood-Disease Question

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:

• Martians still inject human blood directly via tubes from jugular/carotid into a cannula on their bodies (Ch 34, “The Drips”). No filter, sterilizer, or processing step is described.
• Humans are bled into “big refrigerated stores, like blood banks” (Cook, Ch 34). Tubes have “peculiar markings” that Keynes speculates relate to blood types—Martians may prefer or require specific types. These are the only technical hints. Interpretation: Martian preference for human blood types is a major clue that Martians are human (or closely related)—blood-type compatibility implies biological kinship, not alien life from another planet.
• The blurb states: “The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs” and “He is sure that the Martians have learned, adapted, understood their defeat. He is right.” The how of that adaptation is never given.
• Julie carries a weapon: Porton Down (Ch 37, “A Secret Assignment”) recreated the pathogen that killed the Martians in 1907 and injected it into her blood. She could contaminate the blood supply. She chooses not to use it: “A grim old pathogen from the heart of Africa—if we use this, are we any better than the Martians? And even if we succeed, it won’t be enough. For even if we poisoned this lot, they would learn to safeguard against it, and more would come, and more…” (Ch 34). This implies (a) the pathogen would work—Martians remain vulnerable; (b) Martians would “learn to safeguard” if deployed; (c) Baxter never specifies what that safeguard would be.
• Julie later reflects: “Even if I successfully infected the Martians in England, the other nests would adapt, and the war would be lost anyhow” (Ch 34). Again: infection is plausible, adaptation is assumed, mechanism is absent.

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.

Investigation: Sigils and the Wells Canon

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:

• Crystal Egg: Paired crystals for two-way visual surveillance only — “en rapport,” seeing. No messaging. Reconnaissance.
• Inter-Martian communication: Siren-like howls (“Aloo! Aloo!”) on the ground.
• Human attempts to signal: Flag on a pole — “the Martians took as much notice as the lowing of a cow.”

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.

Investigation: The Heat Ray Across Adaptations

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.

Critical Commentary: The Sequel Adds Nothing

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.

Unaddressed Questions

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.

Open Meta-Questions

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.

Investigative / Paradigm-Threat Relevance

• Blood-feeding: Explicit depiction of Martians injecting human blood—aligns with 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.
• Sigils / Jovians: Baxter’s invention; not in Wells. Introduces higher power (Jovians) constraining Martians; planetary hierarchy motif. Weak plot device.
• Polar Martians: Martians at Earth’s poles, terraforming—parallel to Burroughs’s polar forbidden zones and Lasswitz’s North Pole
• Telepathy: Jenkins speculates Martians are telepathic, “no secrets”; connects to wotw-telepathic-purge.md
• Underground Martian city: Subterranean habitation—hollow-Earth / polar-interior motif
• Heat ray: Baxter kept Wells’s invisible, capacitor-driven thermal beam when most adaptations changed it to a visible laser. See Investigation: The Heat Ray Across Adaptations; Havana syndrome (2016) timeline.

Sources

• Wikipedia: The Massacre of Mankind
• SFFWorld review — Mark Yon
• The Guardian (Adam Roberts, 14 Jan 2017)
• Washington Post (Aug 2017)
• Irish Times (Peter Murphy, 21 Jan 2017)

Keywords: #Massacre #Mankind #2017 #Reference