So there's a War of the Worlds sequel novel coming out in a few days, an actual authorized one...

So there's a War of the Worlds sequel novel coming out in a few days, an actual authorized one. This sort of thing triggers my 'tism, when a writer makes a sequel to something a different writer came up with a longass time ago. I feel like they usually miss the whole point of the original work. WotW in particular was more of a "makes you think" sort of thing, rather than a riveting story that needed continuation. What are your thoughts, Veeky Forums? Are you okay with this sort of thing?

I generally don't like it but Stephen Baxter is a well-known SF author who has written multiple good works and has a strong grasp of the historiography of the genre. I usually read these things more as homages than actual sequels though.

Honestly I didn't like authors setting works in someone else's world, authorized or not, until I read the Songs of a Dying Earth tribute anthology and most of the stories were pretty good.

It was meant for Western Readers to realize what they were doing in The Scramble For Africa was rotten. It was meant to have a "How would you feel if someone did this to you" vibe.

The Time Ships is the other big authorized sequel that he did, is that any good?

Time Ships was fun. You should read it.

So more 'fuck you whitey you bad' bullshit

great (((literature)))

What bothers me most about this is the fact that War of the Worlds told a full complete story. There wasn't any room left for a sequel. No important questions unanswered, no interesting lore left to discover, no storyline to follow farther. It was fucking over.

> triggers my TISM

I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to flesh out more ideas from Wells' premise. I'd want to describe it more as "approved" than "official" though, because its not like people are ever going to consider this book part of Wells' ""official"" content

I might look through it at the library. it could be good

I read The Time Ships, it's alright. Baxter's imagination and realistic integration of science into his stories is great, but his characterization is slim and his dialogue is... Well, pretty bad at best and cringeworthy at worst. Same was true of the other Baxter book I read, Evolution. I imagine this WoTW sequel he's doing will be in a similar vein. Still worth a read if you like hard sci Fi.

The fucking summary isn't doing it any favors.
>Martians invade Britain first to punish them for "resisting" the first time
One of the points the first one made was to establish that the Martians don't even see humans as intelligent creatures, let alone ones with a military. They interpret our guns and boats as the equivalent of ants biting you when you kick over their anthill.
>other alien races existing
>narrator from first book has his name revealed
>new narrator is the first one's sister-in-law, never mentioned in the first book despite the first one mentioning he fears for the safety of his family, his wife and brother

How do you get your sequel authorized? I think my Eloi fanfiction can really expand on the novel

I'd be quite happy if people thousands of years more advanced came to my country and left all their knowledge, built healing vats and teleportation devices, and doubled our life expectancy

Now overpopulation is unfixable without genocide, good job

Authorized by the Welles estate, I believe.

Wells wasn't really talking about African Africans, he was talking about the Tasmanians and shit, who were basically exterminated within the span of a century by immigrants. He makes reference to animal species too, the bison and dodo.

>race of invaders arrives from exotic lands
>cannot be bargained with or bought off with exchange of knowledge, not interested in making friends
>only interested in the land, see you as little more than an infestation of wild animals

Yeah, people are always like "Belgium committed genocide in the Congo," but they always forget how the Congolese massacred those poor Italians. There's two sides to every story and certainly no such thing as a genuine bad guy. Hitler was just misunderstood.

go back to /pol/, this is a communist board

Sorry I'll just go and let all the historians know they're wrong about colonialism being awful.

Maybe the best way to avoid things you do getting called shitty is to not do shitty things, at least not on a world-changing scale.

Can't wait for the automatic "we built their roads and rails!(to cart away all their resources and wealth). We gave them medicine!(So our fucking settlers could benefit from the herd immunity and our own labour force didn't die).

Let's be honest. Much of colonialism wasn't maliciously minded, it was simply selfish. Just as selfish as every other nation ever has been.

There was some malicious stuff, but it was MOSTLY sidelined by selfish pragmatism (which merely introduced capitalism to those colonised, instead of, say, exterminating them).

>>new narrator is the first one's sister-in-law, never mentioned in the first book despite the first one mentioning he fears for the safety of his family, his wife and brother
So?

You could just read the book as "colonialism is bad" and not "OUR colonialism, specifically, is bad".

To be fair, it did end by alluding to the Martians successfully colonizing Venus. They were bound to come into conflict with humans again at some point, though you'd think it would be after a long time, when humans developed space travel technology.

>capitalism
So they work themselves to death instead?

Well yeah it was motivated largely by selfishness, but if you kill tons of people and oppress tons more for profit, material benefit and consumer goods, I don't really see that as much better than doing it for malice. If that principle worked you could defend rape, which may not be based on 'malice', but on being so selfish you want to have sex more than you care about someone's mental health.

But yeah, it's a fairly common opinion that if you go back to that period of time every culture was selfish and willing to do horrible things. No real arguement against that based on my current level of historical knowledge. That's why a book saying people were doing a shitty thing back then shouldn't be offending anybody.

Well yeah it was motivated largely by selfishness, but if you kill tons of people and oppress tons more for profit, material benefit and consumer goods, I don't really see that as much better than doing it for malice. If that principle worked you could defend rape, which may not be based on 'malice', but on being so selfish you want to have sex more than you care about someone's mental health.

But yeah, it's a fairly common opinion that if you go back to that period of time every culture was selfish and willing to do horrible things. No real arguement against that based on my current level of historical knowledge. That's why a book saying people were doing a shitty thing back then shouldn't be offending anybody.

>shitty

Why do professionally aggrieved internet leftists use this adjective so much? I see this everywhere. Is there some sort of SJW style guide that you morons all buy and read? Also nice appeal to authority champ, I like the implication that historians are the ultimate arbiters of the morality or immorality of people who lived hundreds of years ago.

how the heck is it authorized if Wells is dead?

>authorized by the HG Wells estate

His grandchildren are cashing in.

Historians are actually a much better authority on every conceivable aspect of history than people ranting about white genocide all day. And you can go ahead and ignore their value judgement. Ask one of them to describe in neutral terms what the scramble for Africa was factually like for most Africans, just the basic course of events without saying anything of good or bad, and decide for yourself whether that woulda been something you'd be on board with. You'd be some kind of masochist to answer yes.

And seriously you can call someone an SJW, call someone champ to try and affect a faux-seniority, try not to jizz yourself from sheer smugness hurling reddit-level fallacy accusations, and say I'm working off a script?

Sorry, I forgot about all the non-Western colonialism going on in 1898. Like...

Welcome to the wonderful world of being exploited post-death. Look at poor Peter Cushing.