The Massacre of Mankind: Authorised Sequel to The War of the Worlds

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To those of us who survived it, the First Martian War was a cataclysm. And yet, to minds far greater than our own and older even than the Martians, minds who regard our world from the cold outer reaches of space, that conflict must have seemed a trivial affair indeed, and unworthy.

Since the First War, and indeed before it, the nebular hypothesis has become familiar enough to the newspaper-reading public, and over time has been amply confirmed by the scientists. The sun is the father and mother of the solar system. From its mass periodically are expelled tremendous blasts of matter, belts of gas and dust and complex elements baked in that hot hearth, which coalesce across millions of years into globes: these are the planets with their retinue of moons, which, cooling, then recede slowly from the central fire. It follows that the further a world is from the sun, the older it must be – that globe and its cargo of life – and cooler. Thus the earth is older than hot, fecund Venus; and Mars, austere and chill, is in turn older than our temperate globe. The outer worlds, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are ancient indeed and locked in the stasis of time and cold. But Jupiter – king of planets, more massive than the rest combined, and older than Mars as Mars is older than our world – is, must be, host to the gravest intellects of all.

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