When HG Wells saw off the invading Martians at the end of his 1897 science fiction classic War of the Worlds, he didn’t envisage them making a comeback. But that hasn’t stopped a century’s worth of conjecture about what happened next.

It seems that, despite the best efforts of HG Wells and the common cold, you can’t keep a good Martian down: 119 years on, a sequel to War of the Worlds has been announced, to be penned by Stephen Baxter, one of Britain’s brightest high-concept science fiction writers. Co-author with Terry Pratchett of the Long Earth series of novels, the most recent of which was published after Pratchett’s death in March, Baxter has also collaborated with Alastair Reynolds and Arthur C Clarke, as well as having a wide body of solo work under his belt.

With publisher Gollancz unveiling the title of Baxter’s sequel as The Massacre of Mankind, we can safely say this is not going to be any boring summit meeting. Due out in January 2017, The Massacre of Mankind is set in late 1920s London. Thirty years after Wells’s book ended, the Martians have licked their wounds, beefed up their immune systems, and readied themselves for a second round against the bacteria that beat them back the first time. As Britain put up the most resistance to their first invasion, they have made ol’ Blighty the target for their fresh attack. Lucky, lucky us.

While Wells (also known as “the daddy of modern SF” according to Baxter) was drawing on traditions that dated back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and he had important near-contemporaries such as Jules Verne, Baxter says Wells “did more than any other writer to shape the form and themes of modern science fiction, and indeed through his wider work exerted a profound influence on the history of the 20th century.”

Despite not being endorsed by the Wells estate, The Massacre of Mankind is the first sequel to War of the Worlds to be published after the copyright expires on HG Wells’ original tale in December 2016, distinguishing it from all previous unofficial spinoffs and tie-ins. Wells himself never wrote a sequel, or showed interested in doing so, but many other writers have before.

The first of many unofficial sequels to Wells’s novel came out in the US just weeks after the serial publication of the original novel had ended. Perhaps taking a little umbrage that all the action in the original book was in Britain, the Boston Post ran a serial in 1898 called Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P Serviss, which featured the real-life American inventor taking the war back to those pesky Martians on their own turf.

One of the most curious responses to Wells’s tale – if not exactly a sequel – was released in 1962 in the form of a pamphlet by Russian author Lazar Lagin. Major Wellandyou followed a traitorous British army officer and his collaboration with the Martians. Lagin’s interesting title is apparently a Russian pun on what is perceived as a typical English greeting: “Well. And You?”

In 1975, father-and-son writing team Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman took Wells’s story and mashed it with everyone’s favourite pipe-smoking sleuth: the product was Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, in which the Great Detective turns his abilities to solving the conundrum of the invasion (hint: it’s those big three-legged machines throwing people into a basket at the back).

Two decades later, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also mashed up Victorian literature in comic book form, and also including a retelling of the War of the Worlds.

For true sequels, perhaps one of the most innovative is the comic book Scarlet Traces, created by Britons Ian Edginton and D’Israeli and published by Dark Horse in 2003. Like Baxter’s forthcoming novel, Scarlet Traces is set some years after the original invasion, with the added twist that Britain has ingeniously reverse-engineered the left-behind Martian technology to create advances in everyday life – including a devastating heat-ray that the British Empire has found quite useful overseas.

A special mention: Eric Brown’s short story Ulla Ulla (named for the eerie call of the Martian war machines). The short story, which appeared in 2002’s Mammoth Book of Science Fiction, follows the first manned mission to Mars, finding evidence that War of the Worlds was actually rooted in fact.

• This article was amended on 9 December 2015. An earlier version described Stephen Baxter’s book as an “official” sequel to The War of the Worlds. His book has not been endorsed by the HG Wells estate, but it is the first sequel to The War of the Worlds to be published after the copyright in Wells’s novel expires in December 2016.