The Beast Master, by Andre Norton and The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

These two novels appear together here simply because both were recently chosen by the Classic Science Fiction forum (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ClassicScienceFiction/info -  there is one 30+ year old and one modern book chosen for discussion each month)

With the exception of the Janus books, I had read very little of Norton's works until quite recently, and The Beast Master (first published in 1959) was new to me.

The story has a bold and dramatic start – with the Earth being burned to a cinder in a war with the Xik, and the surviving humans being dispersed around the galaxy. One of these is Hosteen Storm, a Navaho, a former commando and a beast master: someone who is able to connect mentally with genetically modified animals. He travels with his animal team to Arzor on a long-planned revenge mission, but finds on arrival that the circumstances are not what he expected, and he is tested to the limit in battling unexpected enemies before reaching an optimistic conclusion.

It has been noted by other reviewers that Norton had a penchant for setting stories in rural or wilderness areas rather than cities, and that native tribes often feature. Both are true of this book, which also shows what I am coming to recognise as her tightly-plotted adventures, with rich descriptions and, for the period, good characterisation. She was a very competent story-teller, and I finished this book in two sessions. However, the story did not seem particularly memorable to me, and did not capture my interest in the same way as her Janus novels, which are among my favourites.

I note that there was a sequel,  Lord of Thunder, published in 1962, then three more co-authored by Lyn McConchie no less than four decades later: Beast Master's Ark (2002), Beast Master's Circus (2004), and Beast Master's Quest (2006 – the year after Norton's death). There was also a US film, The Beastmaster, made in 1982 and a Canadian TV series, BeastMaster showing 1999 to 2002, but neither stuck to the original story.

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The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin comes highly recommended, among other things winning the Hugo award in 2016. It is set on a tectonically very active world in which civilisation is routinely crippled every few centuries by periods of catastrophic earthquake and volcanic events – known as the Fifth Season – after which the survivors have to rebuild and start again. So the landscape is littered with the remnants of past civilisations – deadcivs – the most enigmatic and impressive of which are vast obelisks which hover and drift in the air, whose purpose was forgotten long before.

The people of this world appear to be mostly human, with exceptions: one variety of human has a special and spectacular talent, the ability to sense the structure of the ground beneath their feet and by an effort of will to draw energy from around them to stop – or trigger – tectonic events (echoes here of Orson Scott Card's A Planet Called Treason). These orogenes are widely mistrusted and are controlled by the Fulcrum, a paramilitary organisation whose Guardians train and discipline the orogenes. There is also another and very different form of humanoid life – the mysterious and highly dangerous stone eaters who rarely interact with people.

The structure of the story follows the current fashion of starting with separate plot threads which at first appear to be unconnected but are pulled together in the latter part of the tale. Jemisin adds her own twist to this as is apparent early on, in that she starts with a catastrophic incident close to the end of the story, and the various threads take place at different times; some before and some after the incident. So the first thread starts with Essun in the comm (community) of Tirimo, a middle-aged woman who is secretly an orogene. Then we start to follow the life of Damaya, a lonely young girl, from the time that her orogenic ability is discovered through the early part of her training in the Fulcrum. The final major thread follows a few years in the life of Syenite, a female orogene, and her relationship with Alabaster, a senior orogene with whom she works and who has a curious link to Antimony, a stone eater. The chapters follow each of these threads in rotation.

The story is cleverly constructed and well-written. One unusual feature is that it is told in the third person except for Essun's chapters which are related in the second person – the identity of the narrator, who refers to Essun as "you", does not become apparent until the end.  I found it slow to get going and didn't really become engaged with it until about half-way through, when the action accelerates to the point that I was eager to return to the book each day to discover what happened next. The story does not disappoint, but I admired it more than I liked it. The author has a habit of killing off not just characters but entire comms after describing them well enough to make the reader begin to care about them, the overall effect being rather depressing.

The Fifth Season is the first book of The Broken Earth trilogy. The sequel, The Obelisk Gate, is already available – and won the Hugo Award in 2017.

The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells; and The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter

I first (and last) read The War of the Worlds at least half a century ago, but still recalled the basic plot and the outcome – although not much else. I was prompted to read it again by the emergence last year of a sequel, "authorised by the H. G. Wells Estate": The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter. So I decided to read them one after the other.

I'm sure I don't need to say much about the plot of WoW. The scene is set in the first paragraph with some of the best-known writing in SF:

"No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water…… Yet across the gulf of space, minds that to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

Thus began the Martian invasion, with several massive steel cylinders fired at Earth and landing in southern England. At first this was not taken too seriously, the humans being confident that the massive surface gravity of the Earth would immobilise creatures used to Mars's much lighter pull. But while people looked on in curiosity, the Martians assembled towering, tripedal war machines armed with destructive heat rays and, later, poisonous gas projectors, and proceeded to destroy all opposition until they were suddenly and unexpectedly defeated.

The story is told by an anonymous narrator (hardly any of the characters are named), an educated man but otherwise ordinary, who observes the first landing and the major events which followed. He becomes caught up in the panicked mass evacuation of the area as the truth about the invasion emerged, and plays no part in the war against the Martians, being simply focused on survival. The utter helplessness and despair of people faced with such a disaster is well portrayed. The story is obviously dated in some respects – little was known about conditions on Mars at that time, and how living things could cope with the acceleration and deceleration forces involved in being fired from a huge gun and then slammed into the Earth on arrival is not considered – but it is still a gripping read today and well deserves its classic status.

I was struck by a certain familiarity in the writing, which might put the story into context. I have recently read a fascinating book: Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749 by I. F. Clarke (second edition, 1992) which describes how future wars have been treated in fiction since such stories were first written. One novella which is given special prominence is The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, by G. T. Chesney, published in Blackwood's magazine in 1871 (and still available – I recently bought a copy). This was a year after the Franco-Prussian War in which the French, regarded as the greatest Power in Europe, were easily defeated by the Prussians, who in 1871 formed the core of a united Germany, clearly a huge new factor in European politics. Many stories about a future war between the British and German Empires promptly emerged, those written in Britain almost invariably predicting an easy British victory.  Chesney was an exception; a colonel in the Royal Engineers, he knew what war was like, and he wrote his story with the intention of jolting into action a government which had been running down the armed forces to save money. Chesney also turned out to be a very good story-teller, and his account of the successful German invasion of England from the viewpoint of a British volunteer soldier was gripping and realistic; the courage and enthusiasm of the volunteers was shown to be useless against the professionalism of the Prussians. The story was a huge best-seller and it seems more than likely that Wells read it at some point (it was first published when he was five). The panic, lack of information, confusion and errors of Chesney's account are remarkably similar to those in WoW. And while Wells did conclude with the failure of the invasion, this was not achieved by force -  the British military were swept aside by the Martians.

Now we come to The Massacre of Mankind, set fourteen years after WoW. One clear difference of approach with the passage of time is obvious in the length of the two books: WoW is just under 200 pages, MoM over 450; but then, the sequel covers a wider field as we shall see.

The first half of MoM can be summed up as "more of the same": the Martians make a second attempt at invading Earth, and this time both sides are much better prepared (although accepting how the Martians manage to overcome their previous difficulties requires a rather large suspension of disbelief). In the meantime, the UK has become a militarised state in reaction to the invasion and has Germany as an ally, but has avoided getting involved in the European war which is grinding on in the background. Most of the main characters from WoW reappear, although with different degrees of significance in the story, and all are given names. The narrator of WoW, Walter Jenkins, has become famous due to the publication of his account of the 1907 invasion, but he has only a secondary (although ultimately still significant) role in MoM; he is suffering from shell-shock, and there is a rather amusing analysis of his personality as revealed in his book, in an interview with his psychoanalyst. The narrator is now Julie Elphinstone, who had a peripheral role (as "Miss Elphinstone") in WoW. In the intervening years she has married and divorced Frank Jenkins, Walter's brother whom she met in WoW. As in the original story, while the narrator's voice is the first-person one we hear throughout, some chapters are written in the third person to describe events for which the narrator was not present but was relying on reports from others.

I was amused to note that one of the technical issues in WoW – how the Martians survived such a violent landing – is retrospectively explained by reference to retro-rockets being fired just before impact. However, the description of Martian seas and canals, plus its thin but breathable atmosphere, are left intact (well, they more or less had to be or the story would have made no sense). In fact, Baxter evidently decided that he might as well double down, and transforms Venus into a habitable planet as well, albeit very hot and wet. Then he goes for broke and involves the mysterious inhabitants of Jupiter (these are not spoilers – they are flagged up very early in the story).

In the second half of the story, the plot increases in complexity as Martian landings take place in major cities around the world. Meanwhile, the narrator becomes involved in a plan to undermine the invading forces, who are establishing themselves in a redoubt in southern England and practicing selective breeding of humans in order to domesticate them as a food source.  As in WoW, MoM ends with the defeat of the invasion, again by unexpected means which I found a lot less plausible than in Wells's story.

Baxter has some fun with some of the historical figures who appear in the story. Churchill features, of course, and H. G. Wells is referred to a few times (without being named) as "an odd, bouncing sort of fellow with a squeaky voice, but full of ideas". A more obscure example: mention is made of a courageous attack by a fighter pilot on one of the Martian war machines; the pilot is named as William Leefe Robinson, who in reality won the Victoria Cross for his successful attack on a German Zeppelin in September 1916. There are other cultural references buried in the story, doubtless including a lot more than I spotted, but one I did notice was the scene in the German Frisian Islands, the setting for The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers' great spy/sailing adventure first published in 1903.

So, to my conclusions.  The War of Worlds holds up very well; obviously, the writing style is rather dated in some respects but it is still a gripping and original drama. The Massacre of Mankind is much more difficult to evaluate. Baxter has tried to match some of the style of the original, and succeeds in making the transition quite seamless. It is evident that he has been very thorough in researching the historical background of the period. The considerable increase in page count allows more attention to be paid to characterisation as well as for developing a much more complex and detailed plot, which takes the story into very different areas. Readers should also note that a number of loose ends are left at the end of MoM, practically inviting further sequels. 

Was it worth writing? Many will feel that WoW is a perfect story as it is, with no need for a sequel. On the other hand, it is reasonable to ask the question: given that their world is dying, would not the Martians make a second, more determined, attempt at an invasion? And what might happen then? To conclude: I enjoyed reading both books, but would not argue with those who feel that Wells's classic tale should stand alone.