I suddenly come awake at three a.m., reliving my imprisonment with Reverend Lesley, and wondering what I could have done differently.
Why did I live while so many others died?
I see the Black Death darkening the silent streets of Dead-Francisco, and the contorted bodies scattered in its gutters; they rise up as one to accuse me, tattered and ragged and dog-bitten, they gibber at me and shake their fists, growling unintelligible mutterings of accusation. I know what they’re saying: “You lived, Smith. You survived!”
Those pale, ugly, even insane distortions of humanity are all I have left in the dungeons of the night; and when I finally come to my senses, cold and wretched in the damp, tossing sea of my bed, my heart galloping (ooh-lah, ooh-lah, ooh-lah), my lungs gasping, I find my wife sleeping the sleep of the just right next to me. She doesn’t understand these things. She doesn’t know the terror of my dreams. She can’t parse “ooh-lah.”
Then I go down to San Francisco and see the busy multitudes, the human ants, rebuilding their businesses in Market Street and the Embarcadero; and it seems to me that they’re nothing more than the pale riders of the past, ghosts and goblins haunting the streets that I have walked silent and empty, phantasms and zombies perambulating through a dead city, mocking the lives of real folks.
It’s strange, too, to stand on Mount Sutro, as I did the day before finishing this book, and see the great rows of townhouses, dim and blue through the haze of smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vagueness of the sky; to view the people ambling to and fro among the flower beds in Golden Gate Park; to spy the sightseers gathering there about the stark Martian fighting-machine that still stands erect and silent by the empty Martian pit; to hear the tumult of playing children; and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day, the day when I was preparing myself to die.
What really happened to me—and to us? All these questions that I have, and so very few answers. All I know is that my role in this great melodrama has yet to be concluded. Mindon, a wiser man than I, says that I spend way too much time contemplating my own navel, and he may be right.
Why did I live while so many others died, if not to bear witness to what happened to us?
Becky and I did decide on one possible answer, at least for ourselves—and one adopted by a great many others as well—to bring a new life into this world. Mélusine Elizabeth was born a few days ago, less than a year after the events recorded in this book. She’s different somehow than I ever expected, with strange dark eyes and an understanding beyond her age.
But the strangest thing of all, the one thing that I could never account for, was my wife’s unexpected reappearance in my life, and the miraculous fact that it happened to me twice. Most men only get one chance in life.
So I reach out and touch my Becky’s face again, and I take her warm hand in mine, and I feel the beating of her heart—and I marvel to think that I counted her, and that she counted me, among the disassociated dead.
AFTERWORD
“H.G. AND ME”
It started in the Fall of 2004 with a phone call from Tim Underwood, Publisher of Underwood Books, whom I’ve known for thirty-five years or more. He was considering publishing an illustrated, coffee-table-style volume as a tie-in to the then forthcoming motion picture version of War of the Worlds—itself a very loose adaptation of the classic science-fiction novel by H. G. Wells—and wanted me to write the commentary. The project never developed, for a variety of reasons; and I’ve never viewed the Spielberg film, again for a variety of reasons.
Late in the Spring of 2005, Tim called me out of the blue, and asked me to do a quick rewrite of the second half of Wells’s 1898 original novel, which Tim had already started recasting into a modern-day version set in the San Francisco Bay Area. I agreed, and quickly finished the job on a rush-rush basis. After seeing my work, he then asked me to revamp the entire book into one consistent, unified voice, and to use what I could of both his contribution and H. G.’s seminal work. Shortly thereafter, I proposed—and Tim agreed—that I pen two sequels to War of Two Worlds, as it was now called. These would be set some years after the action in the first novel, and would be entirely of my own devising.
The first two books in the sequence were announced for publication in the Fall of 2005. Covers were designed and orders solicited. I rewrote Volume One in its entirety, with an eye towards creating the sequels; and then promptly plunged into Volume Two, Operation Crimson Storm, completing it at the end of July. The books were typeset and I approved the galleys. I also prepared a brief outline of Volume Three, which was due to be written and published the following year, depending on the sales of the first two.
Once again, however, fate intervened, and the titles never appeared as scheduled. Well, c’est la vie—I’d been paid an advance and I’d done the work, and my publisher liked my work, more to the point. Maybe the novels would eventually see the light of day in some other venue. Indeed, I’ve never yet penned a book that wasn’t eventually released in some professional forum.
There the matter rested for several years. And then, early in 2007, I again heard from Tim, and he suggested that we do all three novels as an omnibus (mind you, número tres had yet to be written!). So, I reread and re-edited the first two books, to familiarize myself again with the material, and then wrote The Martians Strike Back! as the concluding volume to the trilogy. The books were published under a new title, Invasion! Earth vs. the Aliens later that year—to a resounding clap of silence from the critics.
When the three-in-one version was declared out-of-print in 2010, I asked Tim for a reversion of the rights, and decided to have the novels reissued in the way that they were originally intended to be published—as separate works. So here they are, released finally as individual fictions—but with the titles of the first novel and the series switched, at the urging of my publisher. I hope you enjoy their new incarnations.
* * * *
Recasting a famous book by an equally famous deceased author presents the writer with an interesting set of challenges. On the one hand, you enter the forum knowing full well that some of the original creator’s fans will never be reconciled to any tampering with sacred writ, and will either find fault with one’s poor efforts, or dismiss them out-of-hand as being unworthy of the master. Then, too, the rewriter runs the risk of moving so far beyond the intent of the creator or the basic concept of his story as to warp it out of any semblance with the material that inspired it.
However, I had several things working in my favor. I really liked War of the Worlds, as well as many other of Wells’s fictional prognostications; I not only felt that they were the crème de la crème of the science fiction stories of his era, but that they still remained highly readable more than a century later. In particular, H. G.’s early works possess a vividness, a fictional presence, if you will, matched by few writers of any period.
I was also well aware of his defects as a wordsmith. His female characters, particularly in these early creations, are mere stick-figures, having no personalities whatsoever. Even his strong-minded protagonists often display no personal identities (or names) beyond their professions.
Moreover, Wells is often so intent upon scoring points against his perceived enemies in society—the social ills and classes against which he railed in nonfiction form—that his fiction can easily descend into diatribe. This doesn’t happen as frequently in these early fictions as in some of his later work—but it’s there nonetheless.
Each writer carries with him- or herself certain prejudices, preconceived notions, favorite phrases, and personality traits that taint one’s fiction, or perhaps make it distinctive, to use a kinder term. I am no more exempt from such authorial displays than H. G. was.
Still, it seemed to me entirely feasible to regarb the 1898 version of War of the Worlds with modern dress. Tim Underwood had already started the process in the first half of the new version, by setting it in a region that he
personally knew quite well; and since I had at least visited the area on occasion, and had a general feel for the geography and layout there, I felt comfortable leaving the initial setting in the country just north of San Francisco—as well as in the city itself. I also maintained some of the character assignments that Tim had made in his initial rewrite of Part One, as a nod to my hidden collaborator.
As to how much of Tim’s original contribution yet remains, I really can’t be sure at this point. I rewrote the first half of the book (the section on which Tim worked) at least twice in its entirety, and later did some additional heavy edits of selected passages there; and I also inserted a new storyline set in the Inland Empire region of Southern California), and added several new characters, plus a new Prologue (the last piece to be created for the omnibus edition).
Similarly, I do recognize some of H. G.’s prose echoing in selected passages, but here again, much of what Wells wrote has been so altered that it’s now very much a blend of “me and thee.” The book sounds like one of my novels, at least to me; and it certainly shares the themes common to my other fictions, particularly the issue of communication. Alex Smith (the 1898 narrator has no name) is my Everyman, although he’s not quite an “everyman” as most folks would define that term.
In rereading my version of Wells’s vision again this past week, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it flowed, considering the choppy and occasionally chaotic history of its creation. War of Two Worlds is indeed the result of two worlds clashing, two cultures separated by a century of constant change. My world is wholly unlike H. G.’s in so many respects; but we at least share a common tongue and some common visions; and the resulting collaborative fiction is, I hope, a blend of the best of both worlds.
Well, that’s something that you, the reader, will have to judge for yourself. I’ve made very few changes in the text for this new release—its first publication, I might add, as a separate work—because I felt that none were needed. I hope you agree.
Robert Reginald
San Bernardino, California
23 January 2011
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERT REGINALD started writing as a child, and penned his first book during his senior year in college. He’s been infected with terminal logorrhea ever since, churning out more than twelve million words of professional fiction and nonfiction. He settled in Southern California in 1969, where he served as an academic librarian for 40 years. He currently edits the Borgo Press Imprint of Wildside Press, and has also penned more than 120 published books and 13,000 short pieces.
His recent works of fiction include four Nova Europa historical fantasy novels, The Dark-Haired Man; or, The Hieromonk’s Tale (2004), The Exiled Prince; or, The Archquisitor’s Tale (2004), Quæstiones; or, The Protopresbyter’s Tale (2005), and The Fourth Elephant’s Egg; or, The Hypatomancer’s Tale (forthcoming); two science-fiction novels, Invasion!: Earth vs. the Aliens (2007; a trilogy comprising The War of Two Worlds, Operation Crimson Storm, and The Martians Strike Back!) and Knack’ Attack: A Tale of the Human-Knacker War (2010); two Phantom Detective mysteries, The Phantom’s Phantom (2007) and The Nasty Gnomes (2008); a comic mystery, The Paperback Show Murders (2011); and three story collections, Katydid & Other Critters: Tales of Fantasy and Mystery (2001), The Elder of Days: Tales of the Elders (2010), and The Judgment of the Gods and Other Verdicts of History (2011).
Recent nonfiction works include an anthology, Choice Words: The Borgo Press Book of Writers Writing About Writing (2010); two collections, Xenograffiti: Essays on Fantastic Literature (1996 & 2005) and Classics of Fantastic Literature; or, Les Épines Noires (with Douglas Menville, 2005); three guides to the Deryni world, Codex Derynianus I and II and III (with Katherine Kurtz, 1998 & 2005 & forthcoming); four histories, San Quentin (ed. with Bonnie Petry, 2005), ¡Viva California!: Seven Accounts of Life in Early California (ed. with Mary Burgess, 2006), The Eastern Orthodox Churches (2005), and The Coyote Chronicles: A Chronological History of California State University, San Bernardino, 1960-2010 (2010); a short autobiography, Trilobite Dreams; or, The Autodidact’s Tale (2006); a cookbook, Cal State Cooks (ed. with Johnnie Ralph, 2006); and several bibliographies: BP 300 (2007), CSUSB Faculty Authors (2006), Murder in Retrospect (with Jill Vassilakos, 2005), and Draqualian Silk (with William Maltese, 2010). In 1993 he received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association. You can find him at:
http://www.millefleurs.tv
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