The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches: edited by Kevin J. Anderson (1996), comprising the following stories:
The Roosevelt Dispatches by Mike Resnick; Canals in the Sand by Kevin J. Anderson; Foreign Devils by Walter Jon Williams; Blue Period by Daniel Marcus; The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James by Robert Silverberg; The True Tale of the Final Battle of Umslopogaas the Zulu by Janet Berliner; Night of the Cooters by Howard Waldrop; Determinism and the Martian War, with Relativistic Corrections by Doug Beason; Soldier of the Queen by Barbara Hambly; Mars: The Home Front by George Alec Effinger; A Letter from St. Louis by Allen Steele; Resurrection by Mark W. Tiedemann; Paris Conquers All by Gregory Benford and David Brin; To Mars and Providence by Don Webb; Roughing It During the Martian Invasion by Daniel Keys Moran and Jodi Moran; To See the World End by M. Shayne Bell; After a Lean Winter by Dave Wolverton; The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective by Connie Willis.
About as enjoyable an homage-anthology as I can remember. The War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches gives us the adventures of a wide variety of historical figures during the great Martian invasion chronicled in the novel by H.G. Wells. We visit the invasion on many fronts and on many continents and in many countries, with a side-trip to Mars itself so that Edgar Rice Burroughs can report on what John Carter did to halt the invasion from the Martian end.
The shifts in tone and subject matter from story to story can be a bit jarring, as the stories run the gamut from meditative tragedy to a loopy satire of academia from Connie Willis. But that range is part of the volume's charm: you really don't know what's coming next. Maybe it's Tolstoy and Stalin teaming up to create a refugee camp in late-Tsar-era Russia. Maybe it's a bunch of rootin', tootin', shootin' Texas folk taking on the Martians. Maybe it's an H.P. Lovecraft pastiche pitting Boy Lovecraft against the Martian invaders of Providence like some moody, glum, but plucky Hardy Boy.
The writers tend to gravitate towards writers as protagonists, including Mark Twain, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and H.G. Wells himself. Highly recommended, and I'd really like to see a full-length novel version of John Carter vs. The Martians by George Alec Effinger.
The Mysterious West by Brad Williams and Choral Pepper (1967): Fun and surprisingly fact-based assortment of weird stories of the American (and, in a cameo, Canadian) West. The essays examine everything from Romans and Phoenicians in places where one wouldn't expect to find them to the odd adventures of various outlaws, miners, ghosts, and lost expeditions. A good time-filler, especially if one follows up on some of the stories to check their truthiness. Recommended.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2002-2003; collected 2003): The second volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins a few days before the first volume ended, on Mars, as an army of fictional Martians and emigre humans (most notably John Carter and his Martian allies from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian books and one of the Martian races from C.S. Lewis' John Ransom trilogy) push the blood-sucking, heat-beam-wielding 'Martians' of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds off Mars forever. Conditionally, they succeed -- but the 'Martians', who are not originally from Mars, launch their escape vessels towards Earth.
This second volume has a structure imposed upon it by Moore's choice of The War of the Worlds -- the Martian invasion of Great Britain proceeds pretty much as described in the Wells novel, though now we observe much of it from a new perspective, that of the League and the government trying to stop the invaders. Captain Nemo's revamped Nautilus submarine turns out to be a potent weapon against the Martians at first, but soon things become quite dire, as they do in the original novel.
Can Mina Harker and Alan Quatermain track down a mysterious scientist who perhaps has the only weapon that can defeat the invaders? Will one of the members of the League betray them? Will the Invisible Man discover that Mr. Hyde's bestial super-senses allow the beast-man to see the Invisible Man? Will Alan and Mina finally consummate their relationship? Will we get to see why Mina has hidden her neck within a scarf for nearly two whole volumes? Will Mr. Hyde get to dance while singing a jaunty tune?
Along with these pressing questions and some crackerjack cartooning from Mr. O'Neill -- Martian tripods have never looked so weirdly alien and baroque, nor Mr. Hyde so terrible and necessary -- comes a nearly 50-page prose piece on the historical geography of the world the League inhabits.
We learn more about previous Leagues (especially the ones led by Prospero and by Lemuel Gulliver), have our first meeting with soon-to-be major player Orlando (from Virginia Woolf), and visit the fictionally derived landscape of the League's world, in which the locations and characters and creatures of Herman Melville, Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Swift, Daniel DeFoe, Mary Shelley, and hosts of others all share the same world. Lots of fun, lots of rewardingly heavy lifting. Highly recommended.
The Forge of God by Greg Bear (1987): Bear's apocalyptic alien-invasion novel stands in the first rank of novels in that sub-genre. It's a page-turner, light on its feet for a nearly 500-page novel without sacrificing characterization or an exploration of society and individuals under pressure.
And the science is plausible for its time (and pretty much still ours). One of the pleasures of 'hard' science fiction lies in the attention to scientific detail. Bear augments this with an attention to sociological detail: the alien invaders have been watching humanity for awhile, and they enjoy playing mind games with humanity while the doomsday clock counts down.
Bear's narrative hits the ground running, as one of the protagonists (an American scientist) learns that one of Jupiter's moons has vanished. This causes something of a mainstream buzz for a short time, but Bear's near-future world (our past, now -- 1996-1998) has become as inattentive to astronomy as our world. The buzz dies. And then, in a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey, strange, seemingly alien artifacts are found in Australia, Death Valley, and Mongolia.
And then things start to get worse.
As in H.G. Wells's seminal War of the Worlds, humanity here faces aliens who are far more technologically sophisticated. Wells's aliens, though, had a pragmatic reason for their invasion: they were hungry. Bear's aliens don't have that motive. What is their motive? Why do they do the things they do? Read the novel to find out.
Bear gives us a sublime sense of scale that often isn't there in apocalyptic novels, rendered with technical skill and not a little poetry: the science goes down smoothly and the enormity of the horrors visited upon the planet -- and upon the deftly drawn characters of this novel -- lingers in the memory. Highly recommended.
