This book is a novelization of the pilot episode of the 1980s syndicated television series that was a sequel to the 1953 The War of the Worlds film. I've never seen the show, and from reading this book, I'm not terribly encouraged to do so. At least on the page, the characters have the charisma and interest of planks of wood. There's a male scientist undergoing an unconvincing dissolving relationship (it's not unconvincing that the relationship is dissolving; it's unconvincing that it ever existed in the first place, given his fiancée's characterization as a one-dimensional harridan), a female scientist with a daughter and an unconvincing sexual tension with the male scientist, and a Native American Army colonel who spends his time dispensing earthly wisdom and stories (though this is amusingly undercut in one scene where he privately reveals that he's just bullshitting someone, but this is the exception). Then there's all the scenes written from the point-of-view of the aliens (no longer Martians, but that's okay since there was never any clear reason why the protagonists of the 1953 film thought they were Martians anyway) which just go on and on and on with tedious extraterrestrial politics and power plays. The only worthwhile character is Doctor Clayton Forrester, and that's probably just because of my nostalgia for the 1953 movie, not anything this book actually does.

It also suffers from the fact that it's a novelization of a pilot; the whole book is just set up for a series of stories in a completely different medium, rendering the whole thing pretty pointless as an independent reading exercise. It follows the pilot formula to a t-- the characters learn of a threat, try to fight back with limited success (though in this book's case that amounts to about seventeen tedious car trips between California and New Mexico), organize and get introduced to the recurring characters, and then strike back with a definitive victory that's ultimately irrelevant because we have to get a few more seasons out of this concept. (Think of both Stargate pilots, actually.) Yawn. The format shift also makes this book suffer because you can't gloss over unwieldy things in a book the way you can in a TV show, such as the fact that somehow the invasion of the entire Earth by an alien force in 1953 has had no impact on society or history. Everyone acts like the woman scientist (sorry, I can't be bothered to look up her name) should be all gung-ho about fighting the aliens because her second cousin or something was killed by them... but surely almost everyone on the planet would have lost someone close to them in the attack? So much for the "great disillusionment". On the other hand, the prose format means there's some nice flashbacks to the 1953 invasion, but once again that's more success because of nostalgia than anything this book is actually doing. I was surprised at how poor this effort was; J. M. Dillard has certainly taken some pretty crap source scripts and turned them into decent novels before, so I don't know what her problem was here. A really crap source script, maybe? I don't know that I'll ever brave the War of the Worlds TV show to find out after reading this.