I loved Felix J Palma’s first US published novel, The Map of Time (my review), where we followed the adventures of Jack the Ripper, HG Wells and a man who advertises journeys to the year 2000. It was a fun book with a lot of twists and turns and an inventive story and structure. Palma’s new novel The Map of the Sky, is a direct sequel that features several players from the first book. Only, where the first book dealt with Wells’ The Time Machine, this book is more focused on Wells’ The War of the Worlds. So, let’s check out what happens.

HG Wells is living the successful writerly life when he is approached for a meeting by Garrett Serviss, an astronomer who wrote an unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds called Edison’s Conquest of Mars*. Wells isn’t thrilled about it, but is charmed by Serviss and then when Serviss offers to show Wells a real Martian, our story is afoot. And we flashback a number of years to an arctic expedition with a young Edgar Allen Poe to find a hole to the center of the Earth, but instead the ship gets trapped in ice and finds the Martian after it crashes on Earth.

*And you must read the Cracked article on this book where they list out all the science fiction tropes that were invented by Serviss for this book.

Meanwhile, Gilliam Murray (our future travel agent from the first book) has killed himself off and reinvented himself in New York as millionaire Montgomery Gilmore. Gilmore is in love with a young lady (Emma Harlow) who has rebuffed his advances, but Gilmore isn’t one to give up. In a last ditch effort to make him give up, Ms Harlow agrees to marry Gilmore if he can make a Martian land in London. She picks this because she was disillusioned by her great grandfather Richard Locke (who was probably the author behind The Great Moon Hoax) when she realized that the handed down Map of The Sky is a fraud On the appointed day, everyone (including Gilmore) is shocked when a Martian rocket (very closely resembling Wells story) appears in London. But this is no sideshow and the invasion has started.

The book is a great deal of fun with historical characters littered throughout the story and an interesting take on The War of the Worlds. The book slows down a lot when we are trapped in the arctic, but the later scenes more than make up for this. The characters are wonderful and we revisit some of our friends from the first book along the way. The only problem I had was with the ending. I wasn’t thrilled with how Wells was used to fight the invasion. It felt too deus ex machina (even though it was setup slightly in previous chapters). But don’t let that dissuade you from this book. I love Palma’s inventiveness and his use of historical characters and settings to make a wonderful novel. Highly recommended.