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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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War of the Worlds: New Millennium
(Douglas Niles) Fair warning, there are some spoilers in the text. You have been warned. I have very mixed feelings about this book. We all know – and if you don’t, feel free to get the full text off Project Gutenberg – what happened in the original version of The War of the Worlds, written by HG Wells. Since then, there have been a handful of movies (all ranging from barely tolerable to crap) based on a futuristic (and American) setting for the alien invasion. None of them captured the style of Wells’ work, being either too bombastic or too depressing. What I have long wanted, however, is an updated book…and finally, someone has written one. So, does it please? The basic plot is fairly similar to the original, although there are some problems caused by around a third of the book being in first-person. (An inverse of the orginal, where three chapters are third-person, following the narrator’s brother.) After the most recent unmanned mission to Mars inexplicably fails, interest in the Red Planet is still high. The whole world watches as a bright spot of light appears daily on the Martian surface. As they continue, theories abound about what is causing it. Telescopes pick up movement in space: something came from Mars and is headed towards Earth. So far, so good. At this point, the aliens unleash an EMP that knocks out most of the world’s electronic equipment, landing across America in much the same way as the original invasion did, with the US Army playing the role of the British units at Horsell Common, back in the original. Resistance is useless, apart from nukes…and it is that that more or less kills any chance of the book getting five stars from me. It’s not that it’s a bad book, it’s that people want to see – OK, I want to see – the might of the world taking on a superior opponent, but not an opponent advanced enough to brush aside all opposition. Starting with a massive macguffin such as the EMP ruins the places in the original where determined humans and one brave ship can stand and hold the Martins in open battle. I could have done this better. The ending of the book is an interesting twist on the original, when the disease-filled Martins are ‘cured’ by human medicine – perhaps the ulitighte use of ‘we had to kill them to cure them’ – and killed, in what is in effect a biological warfare act. There’s just one major problem with this; if the Martians are really (as unlikely as it seems) carrying diseases that should have spread to humanity, then they should have spread. The US and the rest of the world would be looking at a massive epidemic and would have serious problems, rather than the victorious note at the end. None of the musings of the narrator at the end of the original are repeated here, there are no hints to the future, and not a single thought given to actually talking to the Martians.
In short, not a bad effort, but only worthy of three stars. Chris
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