In the latest episode of New Books in Science Fiction I speak with Stephen Baxter, author of The Massacre of Mankind (Crown, 2017), the alliteratively titled sequel to H. G. Wells‘ alliteratively titled classic, The War of the Worlds.

Baxter is the author of over 20 novels and dozens of short stories. He’s won the John W. Campbell Award, the Philip K. Dick Award twice, and numerous British Science Fiction Association awards.

Few books (science fiction or otherwise) have had as large an impact on the modern imagination as The War of the Worlds. Since it appeared as a serial in a British magazine in 1897, it has been adapted for movies (at least seven times), comics, television, video games and, most famously, in 1938 for a radio drama by Orson Welles that reportedly caused some listeners, who confused fictional news for real, to panic.

In The Massacre of Mankind, Baxter envisions new technologies adapted from salvaged Martian equipment, the takeover of much of Europe by Kaiser Wilhelm, and, of course, the eventual return of the Martians, now vaccinated against the Earth-bound bacteria that vanquished them the first time.

Baxter’s narrator, Julie Elphinstone, offers a sharp contrast to the bookish and battered narrator of The War of the Worlds (who also happens to be her former brother-in-law). Elphinstone not only faces down the Martians but offers a new (and one suspects more balanced) perspective on the events recounted by her former in-law, whom she dubs the Unreliable Narrator.

To prepare for the writing of The Massacre of Mankind, Baxter combed through earlier drafts of The War of the Worlds to better understand Wells’ themes and intentions.

“By really studying a book like The War of the Worlds … and taking it apart and putting it back together again, you get a great understanding of how the writer actually worked on the book that you can’t get any other way,” Baxter says.