Marcus Fenix. War hero. Decorated Gear. Loyal son. Traitor. As the Locust Horde advances into one of humanity's last bastions, Marcus does the unthinkable: he defies Colonel Hoffman's orders and abandons his post in the middle of the battle in a bid to rescue his father, weapons scientist Dr Adam Fenix. As the Coalition struggles to defend Sera's surviving humans from the invading 'grubs', Marcus faces a court martial - and a possible death penalty. In the Slab, there are no rules and no mercy. Marcus must learn to survive in an institution populated by the most dangerous dregs of society. Meanwhile, COG scientists continue the race against time to find a weapon to defeat the Locust - but there's another traitor - one of the most trusted men in the COG, who knew the Locust existed long before the creatures erupted from their underground warrens. Worse, there's an even bigger threat emerging: a life-form called the Lambent, which drove the Locust to the surface and that will eventually destroy all life on Sera. As the Locust infiltrate deeper into COG territory, the Slab is in danger of being overrun. All the prisoners are released ...except Marcus. The Locust close in while Dom Santiago mounts a last-ditch rescue bid to free the one man who can save humanity.

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own . . . ” And so H. G. Wells opened his thrilling The War of the Worlds in 1897. Since then millions of readers have shivered and shrieked at his depiction of a Martian invasion of Earth. The tale has become part of our cultural memory, but Wells didn’t tell the whole story. He never gave us the Martian side of the conflict. Now, Joseph Dougherty, the Emmy-winning writer, reports on the invasion of Earth from an up-close-and-personal Martian point of view. Dougherty views Wells’s epic battles from an all new, painfully modern perspective. Our narrator is Vvv, a reluctant conscript on board The First Cylinder to reach Earth in the invasion. Vvv is the Martian incarnation of all reluctant warriors, from Yossarian in Catch-22 to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. War is hell . . . for aliens and humans alike. Sardonic and heartrending, tragic and comic, The First Cylinder is a breakout science fiction novel in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury.