The action opens hard on the heels of the original's conclusion. At the close of the first book, it had just been revealed to our hero, Jommy Cross (son of slan master inventor Peter Cross and somehow the most important slan in the world) that his antagonist, world president Kier Gray, was likewise a slan, and also that Jommy's lost, murdered love, Kathleen, was alive and Gray's daughter!

Imminent is an invasion from Mars by "tendrilless slans," a separate faction of the mutant race. As the new book commences, Jommy, Kathleen and Gray are stymied in their attempt to defend against this invasion when they are arrested by the dreaded John Petty, the chief of the secret police and head "slan hunter." Imprisoned, the trio are helpless as Martian rockets bombard the city of Centropolis. But Jommy masterminds a daring escape. Bearing Petty along, half hostage, half reluctant ally, they escape the flaming city to a secret rural redoubt of Jommy's.

Meanwhile, on Mars, Jem Lorry, a tendrilless former double agent who had once been Gray's councillor, pushes for destruction of all humans and all "true slans." Joanna Hillory, another tendrilless slan who was once Jommy's enemy but is now his secret ally, tries to moderate the brutality. She sets out for Earth to help Jommy.

But Jommy has gone back into the center of danger, Centropolis, looking for a lost secret weapon. And due to treachery, human ignorance and savagery, and inaction by the missing true slans, he seems unlikely to emerge alive.

Hard-to-overcome handicaps

Any time a classic work gets a new appendage after a long interval of inactivity, the changes that have accumulated in the culture since the original appeared invariably weigh heavily on the project. The original book has accrued a mantle of nostalgia and a literary stature that any new book would be hard-pressed to match. And a younger generation of readers is asked to mentally transport themselves back to a time they never personally knew.

If the original writer is helming the project, as when Jack Williamson issued The Queen of the Legion in 1982, almost 50 years after One Against the Legion (1939), there's a residue of extra goodwill. But when the sequel is by someone else, as with Scarlett,
Alexandra Ripley's 1991 relaunch of Gone with the Wind (1936), fussy readers feel extra free to quibble.

Any such project must do four things: match the voice and tone of the original; not betray the characters; extend the plot and concept; and avoid unnecessary continuity problems.

So, how does Anderson do here?

Matching the tone and voice of a nonpareil like van Vogt is almost impossible. His Jack-Kirbyesque disjunctions, non-sequiturs and odd leaps of logic can't be faked by the lesser minds of mere mortals. So while Anderson tries for some similar triple somersaults, he wisely avoids the most excessive of van Vogt's tics. What he does do pretty well is capture a generic sense of 1940s SF that could limn a future featuring big-finned cars and no computers. Anderson's language is pretty scrupulous, though he does use a few anachronistic terms such as "DNA" and "black money in the budget." The stylistic result is dilute van Vogt at best.

As for fidelity to the characters, Anderson walks a straight line, hewing to what van Vogt set out. Jommy is neither deepened nor diminished. But his love affair with Kathleen—one of the more poignant parts of the first book—gets rather short shrift until deep in the action. (Admittedly, they've got a lot on their minds.) The new character, Anthea Stewart, and her nameless baby add some zest to the subplot.

As for his pacing and extension of van Vogt's concepts, Anderson zips mightily along, carrying the tripartite war to a satisfying conclusion, and manages to spring some good surprises along the way. But his biggest development—coming in the last line of the book and hence opening the way for a third volume—involves some serious continuity finesses that not everyone might approve of.

Ultimately, I'd have to say that this volume honors its predecessor in a fairly commendable manner—but it's not, and possibly never could be, the Slan II from some imaginary 1943 that we all dream of.