(Fairly Brief) Game Reviews: Alien Invader

Alien Invader (hacked version linked because I'm lazy) is perhaps the funnest rampage game I've ever seen.

I suspect it'd be a little less fun if I'd played the non-hacked version, where I presume you're more vulnerable and don't get to do some cool things as often, and are more subject to a time limit. But the core of the gameplay is probably pretty fun anyway because it's awesome.

Playing as a tripod is a thing I think I've seen once or twice before in browser games, but my hazy recollection tells me that none of them were this beautiful. I mean seriously, that's a nice tripod. (Reminder: There's no such thing as a "wrong" tripod, or as I put it elsewhere, every tripod is a "right" tripod. But there is a such thing as a great tripod, and this is definitely one of them.) But that only adds to the enjoyment that this game brings to the table.

See, just walking around as a tripod would be kinda boring. Fun at first using your heat ray or whatever to incinerate things and withstanding things with your shields (I don't know how effective they are because I can't be bothered to play the game without infinite health and shielding), but it'd get old quickly. The game designer(s) clearly knew this, because rather than restricting your abilities that way, they threw in a couple of things I've never actually seen attached to a tripod before, and they're actually brilliant choices.

First is a dash step that lets you move about a screen's worth of distance in about half a second, which is really cool to watch, fun to do, and pretty useful if you're actually in a hurry to complete the game objectives (it's also part of the reason I presume the cooldowns slow things down a lot, because with the hacked version I can finish a level in fifteen seconds or so thanks to the dash step).

Second and even better is the shockwave stomp, wherein your tripod can jump, and if you do the highest possible jump will come down and just make a frigging explosion with the landing.

The screenshot only brings across a little of the glory of sticking a landing in the midst of a small army and sending them all flying, but I'd recommend playing the game at least once just for that.

Anyway, after playing this game a little, I found myself thinking "this is the perfect way to spice up tripods if you feel the need to." Because, you see, tripods are a bit played out, even if they're still great when they're just kinda there. If you want to make your tripods more impressive than the baseline by making their assault capabilities scarier, rather than going with concepts built around realistic advancement in technology and the like, come up with superpowers and tack them onto the tripods. It's a lot cooler that way.

Regardless of my alien invasion-centered nerdery, this is a very fun game and I can recommend at least the hacked version. (And you can play the hacked version with the hacks off, FYI, so there's that.)

-Signing off.

Great Martian War

A bunch of things I really like: History of the Great War (World War I; you can tell I'm a nerd because I call it that), War of the Worlds, mock documentaries, all of these things at the same time yes please.



This footage is apparently from some mockumentary that aired in Canada that used actual footage from the real war and something something don't care awesome.

I even particularly like the tripods. (Incidentally, I stumbled across this footage because the wonderful blog Monster Brains put up images from the original French printing of War of the Worlds. I saw one or two of those old pictures once and was fascinated, so it was really nice seeing the artwork at large sizes. There's also some neat surreal stuff, like a building with eyes for windows, that's from the same set of pictures.)

Of course, the thing is, from my perspective there's not actually any such thing as a "wrong" tripod. As long as they have three legs and thus are actually tripods, every tripod is a "right" tripod, and I love seeing every artist's take on the things.

There might be some tripods that are better than others, but no bad ones and I'm pretty sure I've never had a real favorite, either.

-Signing off.

That More Recent War of the Worlds

Yes, that wild, inaccurate update to the original, from the halcyon year of 1953!



When I first became aware of this movie years ago, I was disappointed at the lack of tripods. The tripods are, after all, the iconic machines of the original novels; you can't just leave that out!

Watching it for the first time recently (thanks, Kroger's, for your weird and eclectic selection of not-very-current DVDs), I discovered something that delighted me:

These "flying machines" are actually nothing of the gosh-darned sort-they're actually tripods on invisible legs of electromagnetic force!

That is fantastic.

(My sister was really weirded out by the religious presentation of the ending, but after having watched the film adaptation of The Ox-Bow Incident and that awful sci-fi movie from the same general era that a bunch of people like, I wasn't surprised. Now, I was a bit bothered by just how darned invincible they were, since the original story involved multiple Martian war machines being destroyed... Even if the early shield flicker was sort of neat.)

-Signing off.

Game Reviews: Central Alien Agency

(As I'd rather anticipated, I wasn't in the mood to do a Star Wars post, so instead here's a post about killing a different kind of imaginary aliens than the ones I'd have been talking about.)

Central Alien Agency is a game where you play as what's pretty blatantly a derivation of the Men in Black, with heavy influence from the movie/cartoon/comic franchise of the same name.

You're actually defending a crashed UFO or something, and when you're not actively fighting off the near-endless waves of alien monsters, you can take time to repair the ship; once it's fixed, you win.

As the above implies, you're a lone gunguy, and hordes of aliens coming in waves are trying to get you. You control the character with the WASD-arrow key substitution and the mouse (to aim and fire), and can buy new gear and other upgrades. (Ironically enough, none of the screenshots I took actually show projectiles being fired, though one does show an explosion.)

It's not exactly rocket science (other than the ship repairs, I suppose); it is, however, a lot of fun.

Below you can see four of the various types of aliens (of which there's a nicely animated bunch), including some kind of vaguely wolfish creatures, blue hovering entities, green airbag creatures, and big armored arthropod things.

And below you can see pretty much the same bunch and also a little bug that's the most basic enemy, blue bipeds with bazookas, and some rhinosaurish things.

And here we can see big hovering eyeball-worm-things that shoot eyebeams.

If you're wondering at the degree of influence from the MIB films beyond visuals, here's the most extreme instance, a gun that nearly exactly resembles the "Noisy Cricket" except for the recoil (and the fact that it appears to be as long as the user's forearm, which is probably a visual convention because the character model is so tiny).

It's also just as powerful as that massive explosion suggests. (Moreso, actually, because it's got a pretty decent firing rate.)

This is a pretty simple game that manages to capture an extremely fun formula and do that formula very, very well, that formula being "shooting game where you have a lot of targets." I could play this game for days on end.

Obviously, I recommend it.

-Signing off.

It's Apparently "R 'ha" With A Space (The Space Is Important When Searching Your History)

Okay, the plot for this is simple (albeit interesting), but for something animated by one dude?



This is amazing. I particularly love the character designs (the alien and the robot).

-Signing off.

But Hopefully You Figured That Out For Yourself

A note to my readers: This video is a work of fiction.



Thank you.

-Signing off.

Those Martian Guys From Sesame Street?

They're still awesome.



Incidentally, shame on whoever hacked the Sesame Street YouTube account and made them feel they needed to put up the "safe environment" statement on all their videos. Don't be such a broody joy-hating teenager, whoever you are.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Empire From the Ashes

Empire From the Ashes (find it for free here) is a trilogy-turned-collected-volume that is one of the earliest works by David Weber, who is probably best-known for his Honor Harrington series. (His earliest credit on Wikipedia's list of his published works is for some book in 1990; his next is Mutineer's Moon in 1991, which was the first part of this story.)

It's pretty good, especially since you can read it for free, but its quality in and of itself is not specifically the reason why I felt like reviewing it.

No, that would be because it reads like a checklist of his favored plot points and story features.

Here's just a few of the things I've noticed, based on things entirely off the top of my head and only from books of his that I've randomly read:

Numerous and extremely powerful ancient aliens who nonetheless never advance technologically in time periods spanning millions of years. (This book has the Achuultani; the later Safehold series, of which I have read one book, has the Gbaba, which may be an even more extreme example of this. It should be noted that Weber does not use many advanced aliens in his works.)

Humanity has fallen back from being extremely advanced spacefarers to stuck on a single primitive colony world. (Notably, Empire From the Ashes has two worlds shown which this applies to, and it actually happened at least two more times; this is the central precept of the Safehold series.)

A contrast between huge-scale combat between spacefaring civilizations and smaller-scale warfare in medieval/Renaissance-class cultures. (Earth's moon turns out to have been destroyed by Dahak, a massive warship from an ancient human civilization, in order to camouflage itself as the moon, and it was a ship tasked with picket duty [it was also stated that it could have vaporized Earth itself]. On the other hand, the planet Pardal was stuck in a sort of medieval stasis for about 45,000 years. Safehold, again, has a lot of this; a certain amount of it can also be found in the Empire of Man/Prince Roger series.)

Characters are apparently killed and believed missing for a period of months or years, but they're protagonists and still alive, struggling for the entire time to make their way back with limited resources. (Five of the characters were nearly assassinated by the self-destruction of a ship similar to Dahak, mentioned above, but the ship jettisoned them beforehand because it had special programming not to harm them [it's too much of a story to explain], and they spent about two years traveling to the nearest solar system, and found that it was inhabited by primitive humans who were controlling a quarantine system [ditto], but which had what they needed to get home if they could just get a hold of it. In Empire of Man/Prince Roger, a trilogy's worth is about the journey across a planet with varying levels of cultural sophistication to get a spaceship, only to discover that they're now wanted outlaws. And in Honor Harrington, the titular character was once thought dead but managed to escape to a prison planet, where she was able to stage a prison break.)

Religion is used as a tool to hold back technological development. (I'm not going to go too deeply into this, but it's a feature shared, again, with Safehold. It's almost as if the Pardalian sequences intrigued Weber enough that he wanted to do more with them than he had space for, and so he decided to write an entire series about a variation of them. It should be noted that these religions were generally ironically paired with technology to help maintain them.)

Extensive explorations of the implications of differences between the less advanced cultures and both our own counterparts to them and the advanced cultures encountering them are a must. (The planet Pardal, stuck in medieval stasis, had a number of native animals that made for differences in military development between their cultures and ours. Safehold, surprisingly, doesn't explore this aspect much [as far as I recall], but it's a pretty big deal in Empire of Man/Prince Roger. As for advanced versus less advanced, there's usually a lot of adding to the primitive side's tech base in sustainable ways and limited, careful use of the advanced side's limited technological resources and transhuman abilities. It should be noted that this was usually hidden in Empire From the Ashes and the Safehold series and given a mystical explanation when revealed to the "primitives," but in Empire of Man/Prince Roger, they don't bother doing anything but using it. Of course, the people of Marduk, who happen to be the only nonhuman example of "primitives," know a bit better than those others, but still...)

There are probably (well, definitely, actually) plenty more comparisons that could be made, but I don't want to list everything because 1) you could read it for yourself quite easily, and 2) I'm tired right now and I think I'm pretty close to done.

Empire From the Ashes is definitely a good read; if you don't mind reading a long text on the computer and like military science fiction, it's a darned good deal.

-Signing off.

Sesame Street Martians Investigate Mysterious Device

I think the surest sign that Sesame Street has gone in a direction I don't like is probably the rarity of segments like this on the modern program.



I mean, those guys are awesome.

It gets funnier if you imagine that this must be playing in their heads starting around 2:27.

-Signing off.

Golden Age Moment of the Day (74)

From Outer Space #21...

...aliens with bubble pipes.

You're welcome.

-Signing off.

DISTRACTION (AGAIN)

I don't remember a specific instance of titling a post "Distraction," but it sounds like something I'd do.



Gotta love those aliens.

-Signing off.

Golden Age Moment of the Day (45)

From Planet Comics #73 (the same issue as yesterday's adventure) comes this... interesting event:

A flying saucer stealing moisture from the stratosphere and then... apparently shooting it up into orbit like a firehose?

Martians always want something from us, huh?

-Signing off.

The Three Branches of Sci-Fi

Popular science fiction has developed three major branches, each derived from a certain science fiction tradition. Each "school" or "family" is distinct and tends to gather a certain number of mutual fans... thought that's hardly a rock-solid rule, and some fans of some works look at anything similar to "their" work is automatically a rip-off.

The three branches are:

The future will be terrible (or terribly cool, or both).
Exploring space will be terrible (or terribly cool, or both).
Let's have war in space. (And it will be terrible, or terribly cool, or both.)

The Future Will Be Terrible: The oldest vein of science fiction is where this finds its roots. H. G. Wells wrote a lot of stories about how tomorrow is going to be terrible. "The Sleeper Awakes" and others strike me as typical of his works in this area. Pop culture approaches to this are almost any science fiction work that doesn't take place in space, such as Terminator, Robocop, Minority Report (never seen it and don't know much about it, but from what I've heard it fits this category perfectly), and Soylent Green.

Exploring Space Will Be Terrible: Space exploration in fiction has always been far too exciting. It probably, however, is derived from travel literature of the Age of Exploration; works like Marco Polo's journals and Gulliver's Travels (admittedly a satire) are the ancient roots, but there's a more recent category, found in works such as The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The early pop culture explorations had enough strong similarities to Voyage, in fact, that author A. E. van Vogt sued their creators for infringement. What were these early works? Star Trek and Alien. (And if you read this, a story that was later integrated into a longer narrative as part of Voyage of the Space Beagle, it's easy to see where he got the idea.) Works such as Predator, where space comes to Earth (in small scale), are similar.

Let's Have War in Space: The first work that can be said to really fit into this category is The War of The Worlds, which was followed shortly by a schlocky, unauthorized (and completely hilarious) sequel that sort of qualified as the first space opera. Other works that set up for this type were the Lensman series and other space operas, and military science fiction such as Starship Troopers. The best-known example of this in pop culture is certainly Star Wars, and there are plenty of others, like Flash Gordon and, well, almost any other thing that has a science fiction label and takes place in space.

I could go on and on, but for now I'm done.

-Signing off.

Commentary on a Good Book and a Link

(Ah, finally! A new post at the Writing Blog! It's short, but it's enough.)

I recently read The Domino Pattern, the latest novel in the Quadrail series, which I mentioned in this post back during the Alien Invasion theme week I did last July.

I'd do a more typical review of the subject, but reviewing something written by Timothy Zahn is hard. (I do so here, but, well, that's different.) This is mostly because it's hard to explain very much about his work (or any mystery-oriented work) without completely ruining it for any future would-be readers.

I will say I had a blast reading it-I finished it pretty quickly (I could easily have had it sent back to the library first thing the next morning, and I got it somewhat late in the afternoon). I will also add that the time estimates I gave in my previous commentary were greatly exaggerated, as the time they spend on a space train at one point is about a month and a half-but the time is still disproportionate, especially when one considers that they're talking about traveling to the opposite side of the galaxy.

Anyway, good stuff (as if I would say anything else about Zahn's work), and I recommend it.

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: The Greater Jovians

From Outer Space #20 comes "The Greater Jovians."

The story opens on Jupiter, where there's a severe food shortage. Both the Lesser Jovians, small, dome-headed guys, and the Greater Jovians, giant bearded guys, are suffering severely.

The Greater Jovian ruler asks if the Lesser has a plan. His people, after all, are more inventive than the Greater Jovians. (If that's so, why is the story named after the Greater Jovians? Weird.)

The Lesser Jovian leader admits that he does indeed have a plan: His people invented a rocket engine of some kind. How convenient.

Why were they investing all these resources in this instead of food production? Who knows?

The Greater Jovian promises all the help and resources he can provide...

...though in the most terrifying way possible.

The rocket is to be crewed by the giant king and five other giants for some reason. Their destination? Earth.

Oh, snap.

And they don't plan on taking no for an answer.

Fortunately, there's a twist that we've seen before.

And so, after the fashion of ants, the nearly microscopic Greater Jovians drag away some bread crumbs.

Holy cheese, either there aren't that many Jovians, or they don't need much food.

-Signing off.

Cartoon Profiles: Roswell Conspiracies

Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths, and Legends was a very good series that blended numerous disparate elements smoothly and fluidly into a beautiful whole.



Just about everything in the show reeks of quality and/or fun. (My sister complains that the main character's employer carried a villain ball of epic proportions, but what ya gonna do?)

Some things about this series that are good:

They manage to attain a rather adult vibe despite censorship.

They create a synthesis of legends and modify them into interesting alien species. (Sure, it tended to be cartoony, but hey, it's a cartoon.)

They had all kinds of cool transforming vehicles that could hide in plain sight, including a battlemech that could be disguised as a VW Beetle-like car. (Hm...)

And last but not least, the production crew included Bob Forward (who cut his teeth on the classic He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series, producing several of the best episodes, and went on to Beast Wars Transformers, another good series-and now has his own low-budget film company), Tom Tataranowicz (worked on the same episodes of He-Man that Bob Forward did as director, and is generally agreed to be the best director that Filmation had), and Susan Blu (who did voice work for G1 Transformers, but probably is more notable as a voice director for a number of series, including every post-G1 Transformers series produced in the US). (There's also Scott McNeil, but I can't figure out what voices he did. Not that anybody ever can.)

It's an interesting series to watch if only because it does many things rather differently than would be expected. As one example, the aforementioned transforming vehicles are treated as being much more advanced and sophisticated than normal vehicles, but this doesn't mean they're more durable. In fact, the number of random high-tech vehicles that get blown to itty-bitty action movie fodder bits by ordinary weapons or less than super-powerful ones is far greater than the number that get obliterated by big, heavy weapons. Even the huge headquarters used by the MIB-style organization is no tougher than a relatively ordinary building.

Then there's the real charm of the series, "Detail." Detail is the department in the Alliance (the MIB) that helps keep things on the down-low. Rather than using the cheap mindwipe tech found in the Men In Black movies/cartoons/comics, Detail comes up with absurd conspiracy theories and misleading stories and evidence to throw truth-hunters off the trail.

The series is a lot of fun, one of the best nearly forgotten series of Western animation. You can probably find parts of it on Digiview DVD. On the one hand, this is nice, as Digiview is essentially the bargain bin company for DVD releases, selling almost everything for a dollar; on the other hand, it's pretty unlikely that the entire series will be released this way.

Which is a darned shame.

-Signing off.

Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Final Days of Planet Earth

Final Days of Planet Earth is a surprisingly good sci-fi/horror made for TV movie/miniseries.



What's good about it?

Well, first off, while it's a smidgen slow, it's not slow like Supernova. Supernova was terminally slow.

No, FDoPE (F'dope!) is slow in a tension-building, suspenseful way.

At the beginning, we join some astronauts on a futuristic moon mission. There's surprisingly good microgravity effects as they come home, and then, all of a sudden, one of the astronauts wakes up alone. Then, a splatter of gore tells us that he's probably the only one left.

A few years later (supposedly, anyway), we join the main plot. A cast of characters gradually get gathered together and drawn to "Room 86." (I rather had the feeling that the original title would have been "The Secret of Room 86," and they changed it to FDoPE for the sake of sounding more exciting.) There, they discover that there's a room behind Room 86 (actually the ombudsman's office) where some guys in white suits with retractable bug claws are butchering human beings. (They discover this without dying because one of their number, an archaeologist, carries a semi-automatic pistol.) It's all very disturbing and grisly-obviously, this isn't for the fainthearted. (Originally, it aired on the Hallmark channel, if what I've read around is correct. Huh?)

What are the bugs butchering humans for? To make people suits, of course! They also want to use some part of our bodies for "fertilizer." It turns out that they need to get chitin from our bodies to feed a fungus which will let them eat/drink it and harden their shells with it. (Why not use some other animal? It turns out they just really hate us, as we learn in a speech from their queen, because we're a horrible abomination to them, what with all our bug-spraying and stuff. In fact, we get the impression that one of the people was sent to Room 86 purely because she's an exterminator.)

Anyway, it was split into two parts, totaling about three hours, probably for the sake of special effects. The aliens in their true forms are giant praying mantids which can kill people with a simple blow to the gut from their big scythe arms, but they're still vulnerable, conveniently, to bullets, stun guns, and machetes. (At one point, some characters went to buy guns; the 3-day wait kept them from picking any up, so he got some machetes instead. Don't tell me it's too easy to get a gun in this country.)

The real problem isn't that they're giant, scary bugs. The real problem is that they're giant, scary bugs that have infiltrated the government, particularly the bureaucracy. I will allow you to momentarily contemplate the horrors of praying mantis bureaucrats.

...

Okay, let's continue. They turn out to have a secret weapon of sorts-for some reason, they're deathly allergic to the astronaut they didn't kill on the space mission. Why? Who knows? Anyway, they can't even touch him without protection, or they'll die horribly. Eventually, they successfully destroy the hive, blah blah whatever.

So what else is there to say about this? Well, the actress who plays the queen is apparently "hungry," because her performance is almost as hammy as the villains from the two Power Rangers movies. This is not a bad thing-I think it's pretty funny.

Then there's the astronaut, who after being held and tortured by the aliens pulling off his fingernails and stuff (yes, I already said this was a rather grisly movie, didn't I?), was loopy in a funny kind of way.

There's a thing or two that are highly dissatisfying about it, like an unresolved plot point or two (presumably, the aliens are all dead, but at least one character's fate was disturbingly ambiguous), but overall, there are worse things to eat up three hours of your time with. Not for the squeamish, but not a bad movie at all, especially compared to the stuff I got it with.

-Signing off.

Random Video Post

Well, that was anticlimactic...

Another theme week next week.

-Signing off.

The Other Invasion

Thus far, I've talked primarily about the type of invasion that tends to involve the greatest possible number of explosions-the war invasion. Basically, the aliens show up, use guns or bombs, and kill everything in sight.

Then there's the other type of invasion, infiltration. Subtle manipulation, usually combined with mimicry, symbiosis/parasitism, and/or messages of peace are every bit as effective, if considerably less dramatic, than the explody kind of invasion.

In fact, they're probably considerably more efficient and effective, especially in circumstances that preclude using faster than light technology and warfleets (and if the invaders just want to kill us all and they can already build huge spacecraft, why don't they just drop rocks on us from orbit? It's not like we could do anything about it).

I like the first kind of invasion, but I'll admit that it's pretty stupid, all in all. With a few exceptions, most explody invasions don't make much logical sense.

It's just that the other kind of invasion is usually too boring to bother watching.

Sure, there are classic horror films and all that... but you can only do that so often before it gets repetitive and unintentionally self-parodic.

So if you see it done well and in original fashion, be sure to take note.

Yesterday (in essentially two sittings) I read Timothy Zahn's Odd Girl Out. It is the third in a series of books about a setting which I will refer to, for convenience, as the Quadrail setting.

I'll mention that Zahn is one of my favorite authors; he's probably my outright favorite among those who are still writing as of now. (This has little to do with Star Wars; while his Heir to the Empire trilogy introduced me to him, by this point that's just the icing on the cake of reading his works.) It's like reading mystery novels, except with more science fiction and (usually) fewer detectives and crime-solving.

Which makes the Quadrail setting ironic, because the main character of the setting, Frank Compton, is a private investigator.

Now, see, the brilliant thing about the setting is, interstellar travel is easy-radically so, in fact. To use a metaphor, travel within a solar system is like riding an ocean liner. Travelling from star to star is like riding an excessively fast train.

Yes, it takes days to travel around solar systems, but hours to go from here to the far end of the galaxy. Almost. (You actually have to go to the edge of any given solar system to reach the Quadrail, which is the space train, and implicitly, hitting the far end of the galaxy might take a day or two.)

Part of the point of this is that, in this case, there's no parallel between the void of space and the oceans. There are no fleets of battle craft, because spacecraft can't travel that far. (Don't ask me how the setting got built-I've only read the third book.)

So all international conflict must occur through the space trains.

And it turns out that there's a hive-minded alien intelligence who uses the space trains to get around just as easily as anyone, because it is based on nearly undetectable parasites that can control their hosts' minds (anything from subtle twists of behavior to full out hostile takeovers).

And of course, the scary thing is that the only people who are fighting against it are the private investigator and a few of his friends. And the hive mind doesn't care much about its individual tools.

That's some enjoyable reading right there, and I'm not even a big fan of detective stories, Sherlock Holmes aside.

-Signing off.

The Other War of the Worlds: Edison's Conquest of Mars

Back in the day, "copyright" meant something very different from what it means now. It referred specifically and only to the right to publish a certain book-notions of intellectual property verged on nonexistent.

So when the (illegitimate and at least somewhat mangled) adaptation of the original serial version of The War of the Worlds (published under the name "Fighters From Mars-additional obscenely long subtitle") proved hugely popular, it was decided that a sequel should be commissioned, since none were forthcoming from Wells himself.

Edison's Conquest of Mars (yes, really) was written by one Garret P. Serviss, an astronomer and science fiction author... who pretty clearly had never read The War of the Worlds (at least, not enough of it to write a sequel). What resulted was eighteen chapters of what can be best described as insanity.

Well, perhaps that's doing it a disservice. But it's no TWotW.

Now, I don't know how similar "Fighters From Mars" was. Perhaps the differences between Edison's Conquest of Mars and TWotW are the fault of the adaptation, rather than some other factor. Certainly, the Martians of ECoM feel something like a tidied up, sanitized version of the other Martians.

But first things first. Let's talk about Thomas Edison's role in Edison's Conquest of Mars.

Apparently, all Edison did in real life was rubberstamp his name being in the book. Otherwise, he wasn't the least bit involved in production. (Wikipedia does describe it, quite amusingly, as "perhaps the most literal of the Edisonades.") In the book itself, well, it's pretty crazy.

First off, Edison was able to examine the antigravity devices in the Martians' flying machines (he immediately understood their functionality because they work via electricity, and if there's one thing Thomas Alva Edison understands, it's electricity![/sarcasm]), and determined how to make a super-powerful version of it that could be used to travel from planet to planet. Yes. It took him, like, fifteen minutes.

(Images of scans from the serial borrowed from here.)

Then, he made a disintegrator ray. This ray only destroys specific substances it's attuned to. As is typical of Edison, he tested it on an animal first for no good reason. (If you think I'm being a little harsh on Edison, well, I'll be frank-I'm not a big fan of the man. That's probably because I've read too much about him and his publicity campaigns.)

So then he and all the world's governments put their resources together and made a warfleet of a hundred spaceships crewed by two thousand guys or so (exact figures escape me-it's not like it's important) and set out to make sure the Martians can never attack Earth again.

The Martians are, as noted, very different from those of TWotW, but one doesn't actually notice this at first. This is mainly because the book takes its time to get to them. Once you get there, the differences couldn't be more obvious.

First, while some general bits of technology (heat rays, explosively propelled "cars"-that is, spacecraft, etc.) exist in common, there's one pretty radical difference-the Martians are essentially big, ugly humans.

Ugh. In fact, all dominant species from all inhabited worlds in this weird universe are essentially humans with some difference. The entirety of the difference in natural genetics? Size.

For instance, the Martians are fifteen feet tall on average (Martian women average more like twelve to thirteen). A member of an exinct race of Moon men left a five-foot-long footprint. And there was a woman from the asteroid Ceres who was forty feet tall.

Note that every single female of any species that qualifies for a mention (not counting governmental figures, who weren't described anyway) was extremely beautiful.

Why were Martian men ugly while Martian women were beautiful? Because Martian men had their brains artificially stimulated to be smarter in specific fields, while Martian women were given very broad, general educations. (Debunked pseudoscience, of course-the cranial deformation idea was based on phrenology.)

Anyway, supposedly, the Martian scientist caste didn't even need to do research-they simply knew all the natural laws. Therefore, 1) they weren't technically scientists (a scientist is fundamentally a researcher, y'know), and 2) they had developed the most sophisticated technology it was possible to develop... on Mars.

This of course begs the question of why they had to build cruddy cannon-launched spaceships, while Edison could build craft that were far superior to modern (by which I mean, modern in the present) spacecraft, ones that could make the journey to Mars in a matter of a month and a half or so, which is pretty incredible. There is an explanation, but it's a lame one: Earth has certain elements Mars doesn't, and these proved necessary for construction of the disintegrators (which were much deadlier than heat rays, since they turned stuff to vapor in an instant) and antigravity devices. Earth is better than Mars, nyeah nyeah nyeah!

Ahem. Ultimately, that's sort of the message we get-Earth is better than anyone else. (The story is pretty unabashedly imperialistic, so this isn't terribly surprising.) Of course, there's an issue with this-the Martians used to rule Earth.

Yeah. In ancient times, Mars invaded Earth, kidnapped a bunch of people, built the Great Sphinx and the pyramids, and then... um, left when Earth germs started killing them... or something?

Sheesh, the Martians were dummies if that's true.

The book has a lot of surprisingly strong points-it describes space better than you'd think, for one. (On the other hand, it turns out that a comet has a gigantic electrical charge and traps the electrically driven spaceships in its tail. So, yeah, what?) It also can claim the title of "first space opera."

So, if you like TWotW, well, you might consider reading this, and finding out about the numerous other things I didn't mention, like the asteroid made of gold. (Oops, mentioned it!) But don't be surprised if you feel a need to throw it to the floor when he starts talking about Aryans being the people from the Garden of Eden... Um, yeah.

-Signing off.