To The Last Page

There have been many books 'inspired' by The War of the Worlds  and many film versions, but surprisingly there has up until now never been a true sequel to H.G. Wells' seminal alien invasion classic. It's surprising because the conclusion of the original almost invites a response, certainly at least on the part of the Martians. Their invasion having failed over an unforeseen minor detail that had catastrophic consequences - the Martians being vulnerable to common earth bacteria relatively harmless to humans - you would think they would be working on a vaccine while they plan a new conquest of Earth, their need and determination to succeed now surely even greater than it was before. " They learned the hard way, and next time will come prepared ", one clear-headed voice observes in The Massacre of Mankind  about the inevitability of another Martian attack, and activity on the red planet in 1920 just thirteen years after the First War indicates that just such an ...

There's an element of fanboy excitement in Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds taking up the challenge of continuing the adventures of Arthur C. Clarke's space explorer Howard Falcon in The Medusa Chronicles , but there's another relevant reason for doing it. The hero of Clarke's 1971 novella A Meeting With Medusa was cybernetically rebuilt after an accident piloting a balloon, the mechanical enhancements permitting him to take part in the first manned mission to Jupiter. The spirit of the novella was partly boy's own SF adventure, but like most of Arthur C. Clarke's work, it dealt with the need to continue with the advancement of scientific investigation and exploration, and through it to better understand and develop the capacity of mankind. Science, technology, cybernetics and biological enhancements have advanced considerably in the time since Clarke's original novella, and a lot more is known about the planets in the solar system and about what lies b...