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Feeling blue about that alien invasion of Earth?

It looks like the Fox Channel is shutting down in the UK, with most of its content being yanked from Sky and getting dumped instead into Disney Plus.

This is a personal windfall for me – Sky was too expensive for a humble starving author, but I Disney’d up for The Mandalorian. Now, at last, I get to have a look at the Canal+ ‘War of the Worlds’ TV series, shortly about to enter its second season.

This is a contemporary remake of the H. G. Wells novel set in France and the UK. You can tell the French Canal+ input. It’s shot like a duotone and resembles a monochrome film with a blue filter added to it. Also, everyone seems to be married and having an affair with each other before the invasion. Bon feu, bonne mine, c’est la moitié de la vie.

No death-dealing tripods, this time. All of those alien spheres crash-landing around the cities are a magnetic pulse weapon designed to cause a fatal embolism/stroke in the majority of humanity.

Then there’s something like a cross between a Cyberman/and the Boston Dynamics Robot Dog dropped into the atmosphere to finish off anyone (un)lucky enough to be in a subway/tube/bunker/faraday cage (lifts count) when the pulse finished 98% of the rest of us off. I think this is a CGI, rather than a repurposed Boston Dynamics model, but it’s hard to tell.

I’m only a couple of episodes into the beast, at the moment, but it seems to be heading more into dystopian survival series territory – with echoes of Walking Dead, Falling Skies, and Colony. A large ensemble cast of survivors trying to keep their remaining family and friends alive, while wandering around shell-shocked, trying to avoid getting run down by cyber-wolves.

It’s not much like the recent BBC Victorian-set series, which is probably a good thing, on balance.

Not too shabby. I’ll continue with the pain perdu, brioche, and mega-death for a few more episodes, I think.

Stephen

www.StephenHunt.net

Voyage of the Void Lost
Voyage of the Void Lost

Stephen Hunt

Stephen Hunt is a fantasy and science fiction author published in English the UK, Canada and Australasia by HarperCollins and in the USA by Tor. For all the foreign translations of his works, check out his web site at http://www.StephenHunt.net

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