Gollancz have announced that they are set to publish The Massacre of Mankind in 2017, an ‘official’ sequel to The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The book will be written by multi-award winning author Stephen Baxter who, in addition to writing plenty of his own bestselling novels, wrote The Long Earth series of novels with Sir Terry Pratchett.
This new novel will be set in 1920s London. The Martians from The War of the Worlds will be back, targeting Britain first as payback for their resistance, and the war will start over. Worryingly for mankind, the Martians have learnt from their past mistakes and it will take far more than the common cold to stop the death toll.
Stephen Baxter said: “HG Wells is the daddy of modern SF … [He] did more than any other writer to shape the form and themes of modern science fiction, and indeed through his wider work exerted a profound influence on the history of the twentieth century. Now it’s an honour for me to celebrate his enduring imaginative legacy, more than a hundred and fifty years after his birth.”
Marcus Gipps, Gollancz Commissioning Editor and the editor overseeing the book, said, “Steve has a great track record of collaborating with other authors, from Arthur C. Clarke and Alastair Reynolds to Terry Pratchett. I’ve seen early material from this remarkable new project, and can’t wait to unleash Steve’s new Martian terror upon the world.”
The War of the Words was first published in 1897 and it would be impossible to even guess at the millions of people who have listened, seen or read a version of it. Despite this, it was originally rejected by a publisher who stated that it was: “An endless nightmare. I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book.” Equally worth noting is the mass panic it caused in 1938 when a version of it aired on radio. At the time three of four families owned a set and a vast number of them tuning in to the dramatic presentation of The War of the Worlds, thought that an alien invasion was well underway.
The Massacre of Mankind will be published in hardback and eBook on the 19th January 2017.
