Shallow Ice: A Couple of Chapters of Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind

I think, when you get down to it, most of these long-term projects I try to throw myself into tend to come off the rails because I hit something that is a breaking point for me. I tried to do a Michael Moriarty Movie Marathon years ago, and it fell apart four movies in because I watched Hitler Meets Christ.

It isn’t always because I encounter something bad even. Just something that fills me with an ineffable desire not to go on. And obviously, living in a slow-motion action replay of the worst sins of the 1980s has not really helped fill me with desire to finish off the TV series. But what has actually broken me and made me stall out is something more inexplicable. So consider this my surrender: I am giving up on trying to be an absolute completist about this whole War of the Worlds thing, and I’m going to just move on and knock out the things that are actually left in my queue — one movie, I think three comic books, and seven TV episodes — and address anything else that pops up purely on the “if it tickles my fancy” basis.

I got through the Pendragon movie. I had no trouble with the two grammatically whimsical DG Leigh novellas. But for some reason, Stephen Baxter’s authorized sequel to the original novel has just brought me to a crashing halt.

Through some weird twist of irony, I first became aware of Stephen Baxter about twenty years ago, when I read The Time Ships, which is another sequel to a Wells novel. I liked it. I found it a pretty quick read, and I liked the way it fused a fidelity to Wells’s style with more plot-driven storytelling, and the way it confronted a lot of Wells’s conventions head on, such as having the Time Traveler learn a bit of Freud and realize that his visceral revulsion toward the Morlocks wasn’t purely rational, but might have had something to do with getting briefly locked in the root cellar as a small child.

One cool thing about The Time Ships that I learned years later is that Baxter had originally pitched it as a Doctor Who novel, but it was rejected. The basic plot of The Time Ships is that the Time Traveler, attempting to return to help the Eloi against the Morlocks, arrives in a completely different future, where a race of intelligent, nonviolent Morlocks have enclosed the sun in a Dyson sphere. The Time Traveler and his Morlock companion attempt to return to his native time, but only make it as far as a version of the 1940s where World War I never ended and London is covered by a concrete dome to protect from aerial bombardment. The changes in the timeline are suggested to be the result of the Traveler’s own story having inspired the H. G. Wells surrogate. The Traveler ends up going back millions of years, then forward to a version of 19th century Earth whose ecosystem has collapsed, where post-human creatures build the titular Time Ships, which they use to travel back to the Big Bang in order to find a universe with the optimal initial conditions before going back to his own “historical axis” to bootstrap his own story by giving his younger self the initial sample of the radioactive isotope used to build the time machine. Which, yeah, sounds like possibly a bit too weird even for Doctor Who… But… Weird esoteric beings seeding the moment of creation to force creation along the path they want is the plot of the eventual Doctor Who eighth Doctor novel Timeless, and that plot arc ends with the Doctor’s origin story being rewritten into a time loop in Sometime Never, plus, Baxter’s basic original idea of a first Doctor adventure based around history being repeatedly changed by the travelers’ presence shows up in Simon Guerrier’s The Time Travellers. Baxter himself would end up writing a Doctor Who novel in 2005, The Wheel of Ice. But this time, I don’t know. All the idea in here that I got to, I rather liked… But I found that no matter how long I spent reading it, I never seemed to make any forward headway. I’d look at the number of pages behind me and the number ahead, and I’d just be overcome with despair at the thought of going on for the length of time it would take me to finish the book.

How far did I make it? I made it to the end of chapter 14. Does that sound like a lot? Most of my reading these days has been to Dylan and Evie, so it sounds like a lot to me.

Chapter 14 is about the midpoint of Book I.

There are four books. I made it 70 pages, about a sixth of the way through the book. I stopped just after the Martians put in their first appearance. Seventy pages is kind of a long time to take to get to the actual warring of the worldsing. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy what I read, it just left me with no sense that the story was going to go anywhere in a timely manner.

Right from the get-go, Baxter makes cool and interesting choices in its characters. The narrator for our sequel is Julie Elphinstone, the ex-wife of the original narrator’s brother. That original narrator? He’s even got a name and for once, it’s not some play on Wells’s. Walter Jenkins gained world fame for his history of the war, but then went on to a certain amount of infamy for his unpopular persistence in reminding people that the Martians were still out there and might come back some day.

Reprising one of the things I enjoyed in The Time Ships, Walter’s therapist calls out a lot of issues from the original novel. Walter is suggested to be suffering from PTSD, which, given the circumstances of its discovery, they call by the adorable name “heat-stroke”. More than that, there are some hints that Walter might be on the spectrum, with his therapist, lacking modern terminology to describe it, suggests that the “heat-stroke” exacerbated an already-existing condition involving an unnatural detachment and difficulty connecting with other people. As an example, he cites the way he borrows his neighbor’s horse to help evacuate his own family without warning the neighbor about the imminent danger. Or that he never bothered to learn the name of the curate. It’s Nathaniel.

Walter’s marriage, like his brother’s, has fallen apart. Rather than accepting the narrative we usually see amplified in adaptations, of the narrator’s consuming desire to reunite with his wife, Walter’s therapist calls him out on the fact that he couldn’t be bothered to even put her name in the book. (It’s Carolyne. Like the curate, the name we’re given is the one Jeff Wayne invented for his version). While Walter protests that this is just a “literary affectation”, his therapist counters that he named Ogilvy. And also, something which goes unmentioned far too often: Walter claims he spent the entire war desperately trying to find his wife. But he knows where she was going the whole time and makes no effort to go that way. It’s true. Leatherhead is south-east of Woking. The narrator heads north-east to Weybridge, and then to London.

Carolyne gets my favorite line in the bit I read. Julie at one point tries to comfort her by reminding her that Walter really did love her, and she replies, “I know. I read about it in his book.” Frank Jenkins, Miss Elphinstone’s ex, also appears. The separation appears to have been amicable, mostly related to a difference of opinion over having children. Elphinstone has become a journalist, living in America after having been driven from Britain for being a sufferagette. Which is illegal. A theme we’ve seen before, Great Britain is in the process of stumbling toward fascism in the wake of the war.

The freshest take on a character to return from the original novel, though, is Albert Cook, the artilleryman. I put a lot of weight into how an adapter addresses him. And Baxter’s approach is something I haven’t seen before. We’ve seen the artilleryman taken seriously as a burgeoning fascist. We’ve seen him mocked as an ultimately useless wannabe. But what Baxter gives us is an artilleryman who’s basically gotten a bad rap. He does have his literary version’s distaste for “learning and erudition,” but he’s mostly… Just a guy who was having a bad day. His grand plans on Putney Hill were just idle musings, and nowadays, he’s mostly pissed off at the way history remembers him. In this universe, Charlie Chaplain’s best known character isn’t a tramp, but the “Little Sojer”, a “Comical, good-hearted gunner in an ill-fitting uniform, who forever dreamed of being a general while his guns exploded in sooty smoke.”

Possibly the most surprising character to return is Eric Eden. If you’re asking, “Who?” that’s why he’s the most surprising. Well, here’s Eden’s appearance in the original novel:

Several officers from the Inkerman barracks had been on the common earlier in the day, and one, Major Eden, was reported to be missing.

S’it. One sentence. Not even the whole sentence. Reports of Major Eden’s disappearance have apparently been somewhat exaggerated, as he is alive and well in New York 14 years later, ready to become one of the major characters in Baxter’s sequel. And I love the idea of that, of Baxter latching on not to the obvious choices, but rather to a pair of characters far out on the periphery.

Miss Elphinstone’s introduction teases the fact that by the end of the story, our heroes will have journeyed as far as Jupiter. The story doesn’t try to hammer Wells’s cosmology into something more scientifically accurate: this is a solar system teeming with life, and following the “nebular hypothesis”. Venus, nearer the sun, is younger, with less advanced life, Mars is older and more advanced, but nearer the end of its life cycle. Jupiter, twice as far out, is even more advanced, enough so that they seem to have found an alternative way to deal with the aging of their planet to the Martians’ plans of conquest.

The thing that really turned me off on Baxter’s book, I guess, is the pacing. I made it through seventy pages. But in that time, Julie Elphinstone and Walter Jenkins never actually meet in person. The biggest parts of the story are handled in the form of lengthy international telephone conversations. Walter summons Julie, Albert, and Eric, along with Julie’s colleague Harry, to New York for an urgent transatlantic call in which he warns them of impending danger… And suggests they all catch a steamer back to his house in Woking.

England, as I mentioned, has been slouching toward fascism and is on a war footing already, due to the escalating “Schleiffen War”, under the leadership of General Brian Marvin (who doesn’t appear to be a real person), with the support of Churchill — yes, I do like that Baxter assumes Churchill would throw in with the fascists (Baxter also asserts, interestingly, that Arthur Conan Doyle would back the regime as well, as Julie notes he’s got a new book out that sounds like propaganda for the regime).  And Miss Elphinstone had been forced out due to her involvement with the suffragettes. But all the same, she heads over there, meets up with her ex-husband Frank and Walter’s ex-wife Carolyne… For another phone call, this time from Germany, where Walter warns them that Martian cannons have been observed firing, and a new invasion fleet is on the way. And while this information is a shock, it’s not really all that much of a heads-up, as the news breaks publicly not long after. While Frank (who is an army doctor), Eric and Albert are duty-bound to return to Horsell Common (Walter argues, correctly as it turns out, though I don’t find the argument compelling, that the Martians will start their second invasion by retracing the first wave’s steps to recover the remains of their fallen comrades), Walter drops out of the story for a bit. Flipping ahead, it doesn’t appear that he puts in another appearance until the beginning of Book 2. For another phone call. You know, Walter mentions that he’s basically summoned Julie, Eric and Albert from comparative safety in America to the beachhead of an impending invasion… But he never does get around to actually justifying that decision.

Like I said, I gave up shortly after the Martians put in their first appearance. Only that’s not exactly true: I gave up after the first battle, but the Martians don’t show up in person. Julie isn’t present for the battle. She can’t move around England unescorted thanks to being on the government’s shit-list, and certainly wouldn’t be allowed on the battlefield anyway. Frank and Julie don’t meet again for two years, we’re told, but she inserts his report of events at this point in the narrative.

And the big twist of that first battle, which for me is a sort of cliffhanger because it’s where I stopped reading, is that while Walter and the scientists he’s consulted were right about the timing of the Martians’ arrival, and about the size of their fleet, and about their landing site, they missed one crucial detail. The Martian opening assault isn’t another wave of cylinders containing tripods. It’s a kinetic bombardment. The first wave of landings are simply solid cylinders which smash into the ground with enough force to disarticulate anyone nearby.

See? Cool idea. But you know what else might have been cool? Martians. From reviews, I’ve learned that a big chunk of the book follows The Great Martian War‘s conceit and basically becomes an alternative history of World War I, with Martians. And I hear it’s really good, but the thought of wading through seven years of the Martians very slowly shoring up their beachhead in England and very slowly expanding outward just fills me with a kind of holy terror. Maybe some day I’ll be in the right mental space to gallop through the remaining 400 pages. But not today.

---

• The Massacre of Mankind is available from amazon.