The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells was released as a serial in Pearson’s, April-December 1897. (It appeared in America in Cosmopolitan.) It was not Wells’s last novel, but it is certainly his greatest. In it a Martian race invades the Earth with superior technology and a cold, blatant disregard for humanity. The ending of the book had the Martians killed by microbes and not by staunch Englishmen. In fact, the humans in the tale come off pretty badly. Wells establishes the idea of a Science Fiction novel in which aliens are superior to humans. This was one of the spurs that lead to sequels. That and the question: could the Martians come back?
“Edison’s Conquest of Mars” (The Boston Post, 1898) was an unauthorized sequel written by the American, Garrett P. Serviss about another American, Thomas Edison. In this tale written only six weeks after the last installment of the original novel, Thomas Edison (who had not endorsed the use of his name and more than Wells had given permission for a sequel) gathers a group of men to help in the creation of weapons and ships to take the fight to the Martians. They destroy them in space, then defeat them on their own planet, suing for peace. Serviss feels no need to be faithful to Wells, and makes his Martians bipedal with big heads and bulgy eyes.
The book version was heavily illustrated by Bernard Manly Jr. of Chicago, IL. who re-drew the images from the best of the newspaper illos. A. Searles Langley, who wrote the introduction for a new edition of the book, declares Garrett P. Serviss an equal to Jules Verne, and he stands besides the other giants of SF. No matter your opinion, Serviss could be seen as establishing a different SF trope: humans are always smarter than aliens, such as will be championed by John W. Campbell and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Serviss does this in the way later authors would, make the aliens a bunch of buffoons.
“The War of the Wenuses: Translated from the Artesian by H. G. Pozzuoli” (1898) a parody by C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas, again striking while the book was fresh in the readers’ minds. “A ‘Punch-style’ parody … in which the natives of Venus, young ladies, invade Earth (in giant crinolines) in a quest for sartorial improvements, devastating all males with the dreaded ‘mash’ glance.”
And then you have to wait seventy-one years until 1969. (I am, of course, ignoring the 1938 Radio version with Orson Welles, the 1951 film by George Pal, and even the awesome rock opera by Jeff Wayne in 1978, etc. because this piece is about fiction, not other media.)
Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds was a series of stories written between 1969 and 1975 by Manly Wade Wellman for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, including: “The Adventure of the Martian Client” (F&SF, December 1969), “Venus, Mars and Baker Street” (F&SF, March 1972), “Sherlock Holmes Versus the Martians” (F&SF, May 1975).
Expanded into book form in 1975 Wellman’s son, Wade Wellman wrote “Appendix: A Letter From Dr. Watson”, and Manly added stories: “George E. Challenger Versus Mars” and “The Adventure of the Crystal Egg”.
The Second War of the Worlds by George H. Smith (1976) was one of two novels to appear that year. Smith has the Martians immunize themselves then invade a parallel Earth called Annwn (after the Celtic underworld). This time the Martians should succeed but Annwn has its own special problems.
The second novel was The Space Machine (1976) by Christopher Priest. This book uses both The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. A man and woman use a machine to land on the surface of the Mars before the great invasion of Wells’s book. They find the humans there enslaved by their Martian masters.
In honor of a century of Wellsian fun, War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches edited by Kevin J. Anderson, was published in which each story told of the invasion through the eyes of a famous person or unusual POV, including teddy Roosevelt, Percival Lowell, Pablo Picasso, Henry James, Winston Churchill and H. R. Haggard, Albert Einstein, Rudyard Kipling and Gandhi, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, jack London, Emily Dickenson and others.
“Night of the Cooters” by Howard Waldrop has the Texas Rangers deal with the conflict. “Foreign Devils” by Walter Jon Williams features Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi. “Resurrection” by Mark W. Tiedeman has Tolstoy and Stalin. The anthology explores many different views on the world and how invasion feels from the human perspective.
There have been a more than half dozen sequels since 1997, including Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind (2017) but this piece is centered on the 100 years since that Pearson’s serial. No doubt the 21st century has as much to say about Wells, the Victorians and those Martians as the last hundred years did.
