Gabriel Mesta

This book is something of an homage to H. G. Wells. We meet him in school in 1884 with his professor T.H. Huxley who we learn is about to retire. They spend an evening on a cold London rooftop to watch a Leonid meteor shower. With Mars in the sky Wells speculates with his professor about life arising there. Herbert is living on the edge, nutritionally, and wears paper thin clothes not suitable for the event and comes down with a nasty fever. In his fever dreams is born the images and some ideas of "War of the Worlds".

I had very modest, if any(!), expectations for this book and it really surprised me how readable and enjoyable it was. It is a mix of reality and a lot of fiction to not give us an historical fiction of how Wells created "War of the Worlds", but a very mashed-up imagined idea of maybe the way that it should have happened. What we find is that Wells stories of the Martians and Dr. Moreau, cavorite and other things may have not been entirely products of his imagination.

This book was very enjoyable and a lot of fun. Sometimes I need to suspend my disbelief and let imagination run. Written in something of a Victorian style, some people will probably hate this book but as a 60 year old teenager I found this alternative history extremely entertaining.

The author's name, Gabriel Mesta, is a pseudonym for Kevin J. Anderson. This 2005 novel has recently been reissued under the author's actual name.… (mere)