When H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1897, the story of a Martian invasion lodged in the cultural imagination as a possible chronicle of catastrophic things to come. Sci-fi master Stephen Baxter faces a formidable challenge in writing an authorized sequel: How might he turn the original readership’s plausible belief in a war between sister planets into a necessary suspension of disbelief for 2017 readers?

As author of collaborative multinovel epics with Terry Pratchett and Arthur C. Clarke, Baxter has the credentials for the task. The thrill of reading The Massacre of Mankind arises from the monumental scope and wild literary conceit of Baxter’s continuation of the story. I would blasphemously suggest an analogy between Scripture (Wells) and Talmud (Baxter): For every scene, every character, every theme in Wells’ account, Baxter provides copious commentary, filling in Wells’ narrative gaps, inventing an entire alternative history for Europe and the world at large, proposing what must have happened after the trauma of a first interplanetary invasion and during the onslaught of a second. (Spoiler alert! In Baxter’s sequel, there’s no World War I, but there remains an uncanny shadow effect of that indelible disaster.) It’s a family affair, too: The ingenious narrator is the sister-in-law of Wells’ original narrator, Walter Jenkins. The feminist edge is delightful and profound. Julie Elphinstone not only tells a broader tale than the hapless and unreliable Jenkins; she actually helps save the world.

There was another reason why Wells’ original story hit a nerve. The tale of a superior technological power (Mars) overwhelming a more primitive civilization (Earth) was a barely disguised allegory for the depredations of the British Empire. The essential truth of The War of the Worlds is that it is not only a possible history; it is the inevitable, tragic fate of all civilizations. Baxter hits the same nerve, and then some.

June is a modern-day anthropologist who repairs centuries-old automatons—mechanized dolls that come to life. Upon her repair of a Russian writing doll that scribbles, “All who breathe do not live; all who touch do not feel, and all who see do not judge. Behold the avtomat,” June is faced with a brutal reality. There is a world running parallel to her own, in which the avtomat have been fighting for their survival for centuries. Her grandfather encountered an “angel” during World War II that demonstrated superhuman strength and left behind a metal relic. June now wears the relic around her neck, and she soon discovers that it connects her to the world of the avtomat—and she may be the only living human who can help them.

Peter is an avtomat created in the likeness of Czar Peter the Great. His tale begins in a workshop in Russia in 1709 and spans centuries as he lives his nearly immortal life among humans. The avtomat have existed for thousands of years, and much of their technology is lost. A war has broken out among them as they seek the technology to save themselves.

Daniel H. Wilson, a seasoned writer of fiction, nonfiction and comics, also possesses a Ph.D. in robotics. The Clockwork Dynasty is bravely imagined and satisfyingly executed. Wilson has woven a brilliant fictional world into history, making this book a great read for lovers of historical fiction as well as fantasy and sci-fi.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Nicholas Espinoza—better known as Hubert, Etc, and later still as Etcetera—is something of a head fake in Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow’s utopian futurist novel, Walkaway. With a name like that, it’s not a wild bet that he’d be the axis around which the novel spins.

But it’s a sucker’s bet. The novel rotates around twin axes, one being a dissection and critique of capitalism in a world that has an excess of unequally distributed resources, the other being Natalie Redwater (aka “Iceweasel”), the daughter of a “zottarich” mover and shaker.

Though Doctorow cites Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as an influence, Walkaway’s paternal grandparents are Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange; on its mom’s side, they’re Stranger from a Strange Land and Walden Two. Like all of those (and the rather less admirable Atlas Shrugged), it can get a little mansplainy as it trots out philosophy.

To wit: Hubert, Etc, dismissively appraises meritocracy by arguing, “‘We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED.’ The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactively obvious bullshit you could spot it in orbit.”

The bohemian dropouts in this society, the “walkaways,” (of which Hubert, Etc, and Natalie are two) march off the grid into abandoned hinterlands in search of their own new world order, and when it appears that they may have solved the riddle of death, the stakes for flipping the bird at the establishment rise dramatically.

It may take a beat or two for the non-Wired reader to spool up to speed, but Doctorow has crafted the sexiest egalitarian radical hacktivist squatter-culture philosophical techno-thriller of the year, if not the decade.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and has a mere two middle names.

When a comet drive-by leaves a cloud of purple dust in space, altering the familiar view from Earth, the collective response of the nations, of course, is to reach it: to explore, collect, research. The Czechs rocket a man to the Chopra cloud first, sending professor of astrophysics Jakub Procházka as their first astronaut. Thus Spaceman of Bohemia begins with a proud achievement for a country so battered by the machinations of others, now making momentous history of its own. 

Several weeks after Jakub’s solitary launch, a (possibly imaginary) memory-probing space spider appears aboard the JanHus1 space shuttle. The spider, whom Jakub names Hanuš after a medieval astronomical clock maker from Prague, probes his thoughts and eats his Nutella in his own scientific exploration to learn about “humanry.” Jakub unearths his childhood fears surrounding the fall of the Communist Party, who his father informed for, and memories: his move to Prague with his grandparents to start anew, his chance first meeting with wife Lenka over whiskey and sausages, their consuming love affair. Now, however, they are estranged, literally, by space and time, and maybe something more permanent. As Jakub travels farther into the depths of space, he reminisces and philosophizes with Hanuš. Themes of freedom, death, the fleetingness of life, violence, oppression, lust and love, revenge, legacy and fear link together the memories along his life’s path, from his youth through his university years and the now fateful decision to become the Spaceman of Bohemia.

Set in a not-so-distant 2018, the first novel by Czech-American author Jaroslav Kalfař defies neat categorization. It is both an adoring ode to and an insider’s critique of the land of Bohemia, chronicling its past subjugations and future possibilities. It’s irreverent and thoughtful, tragic and comic, deadpan and poignant. Writing outside his native tongue, the author creates vivid, occasionally disturbing vignettes. Spaceman Jakub’s rhetorical questions do become tedious at points in the novel; at times, his wonderings overwhelm, making it hard for the reader to digest one round before Kalfař moves on to other musings. Though the narrative seems to come full circle, it felt slightly unfinished, abruptly truncated. These caveats, and my personal arachnophobia aside, Spaceman of Bohemia entertains and enlightens.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Amid the deluge of unreliable, devious narrators that compose so much of recent fiction, meet Tom Barren. He’s refreshingly truthful, completely forthright—and an abject failure. In the debut novel from Toronto author and screenwriter Elan Mastai, Tom would like to tell you how he screwed up the future.

Tom’s self-effacing memoir opens with a dose of physics, as our apologetic hero does his best to explain just how he got stuck in the “dank, grimy horror” that is our 2016. Tom is from an alternate reality, the kind of utopian future that Americans dreamed of in the 1950s. In this technological paradise, the groundbreaking Goettreider Engine uses the Earth’s rotation to power all of humanity. Below-average Tom might be a disappointment to his genius father, but things are generally pretty good for humankind in his 2016. That is, until—in a fit of rage, guilt and grief—Tom defiantly hops into the time machine his father has built and accidentally halts the creation of the Goettreider Engine.

Mastai’s utopian worldbuilding is complex and imaginative, but some of the book’s most memorable sections are when Tom attempts to navigate our “retrograde” world. Here, his family is different: His mother is still alive, his father is kind, and he has a sharp-witted sister. His love is different, and his failures are different. This isn’t your typical time-travel story where the wrong reality needs to be righted.

An entertaining rom-com of errors, All Our Wrong Todays backflips through paradoxes while exploring provocative questions of grief and the multitudes we contain within ourselves. Ultimately, it’s a story about love—and the stupid things we’ll do for it.

Read more: Elan Mastai on ‘All Our Wrong Todays.’

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.