- Taloni, John.
The Compleat Martian Invasion.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2016.
ASIN B01HLTZ7MS.
-
A number of years have elapsed since the Martian Invasion
chronicled by H.G. Wells in
The War of
the Worlds. The damage inflicted on the Earth was
severe, and the protracted process of recovery, begun in the
British Empire in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign, now
continues under Queen Louise, Victoria's sixth child and eldest
surviving heir after the catastrophe of the invasion. Just as
Earth is beginning to return to normalcy, another crisis has
emerged. John Bedford, who had retreated into an opium haze
after the horrors of his last expedition, is summoned to Windsor
Castle where Queen Louise shows him a photograph. “Those
are puffs of gas on the Martian surface. The Martians are
coming again, Mr. Bedford. And in far greater numbers.”
Defeated the last time only due to their vulnerability to
Earth's microbes, there is every reason to expect that this time
the Martians will have taken precautions against that threat to
their plans for conquest.
Earth's only hope to thwart the invasion before it reaches the
surface and unleashes further devastation on its inhabitants is
deploying weapons on platforms employing the anti-gravity
material Cavorite, but the secret of manufacturing it rests with
its creator, Cavor, who has been taken prisoner by the ant-like
Selenites in the expedition from which Mr Bedford narrowly
escaped, as chronicled in Mr Wells's
The
First Men in the Moon. Now, Bedford must embark on a perilous
attempt to recover the Cavorite sphere lost at the end of his
last adventure and then join an expedition to the Moon to rescue
Cavor from the caves of the Selenites.
Meanwhile, on Barsoom (Mars),
John Carter
and Deja Thoris find
their beloved city of Helium threatened by the Khondanes, whose
deadly tripods wreaked so much havoc on Earth not long ago and
are now turning their envious eyes back to the plunder that
eluded them on the last attempt.
Queen Louise must assemble an international alliance, calling on
all of her crowned relatives: Czar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm, and
even those troublesome republican Americans, plus all the
resources they can summon—the inventions of the Serbian,
Tesla, the research of Maria Skłowdowska and her young
Swiss assistant Albert, discovered toiling away in the patent
office, the secrets recovered from Captain Nemo's island, and
the mysterious interventions of the
Time
Traveller, who flickers in and out of existence at various
moments, pursuing his own inscrutable agenda. As the conflict
approaches and battle is joined, an interplanetary effort is
required to save Earth from calamity.
As you might expect from this description, this is a
rollicking good romp replete with references and tips of
the hat to the classics of science fiction and their
characters. What seems like a straightforward tale of
battle and heroism takes a turn at the very end into
the inspiring, with a glimpse of how different human
history might have been.
At present, only a Kindle edition is
available, which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
December 2019 