The Horsell Transmissions

They came. They conquered. They filed the paperwork.

When H.G. Wells described the Martian invasion of 1898, he told the story from the human side - panic, flight, survival. The Horsell Transmissions tells it from the other side of the beam.

Recovered from the wreckage of the Martian command network and painstakingly translated, these documents reveal the invasion as its architects experienced it: as an administrative project. Field reports. Priority assessments. Inter-departmental memos about fuel forecasting and road-use declarations. Compliance notices from units that would not survive to receive them.

The Martians were not monsters. They were, in many ways, something more troubling: a vast, technically superior civilisation that had perfected the art of explaining away evidence that contradicted its assumptions.

The Horsell Transmissions is a comic novel about bureaucracy, overconfidence, and the particular blindness of intelligent systems - told through the official record of history's most catastrophic failed invasion.

Perfect for fans of: Terry Pratchett · Douglas Adams · Max Brooks · Jasper Fforde · epistolary and found-document fiction · classic science fiction retold