Mars in fiction

Around the same time, the mistaken belief that there are canals on Mars emerged and made its way into fiction, popularized by Percival Lowell's speculations of an ancient civilization having constructed them.

[4][5][6] It also appears briefly in the 1686 work Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle but is largely dismissed as uninteresting due to its presumed similarity to Earth.

[8][9] In the 1758 work De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari (Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System) by Emanuel Swedenborg, the planet is inhabited by beings characterized by honesty and moral virtue.

In the 1899 novel Pharaoh's Broker by Ellsworth Douglass [Wikidata], Martians speak Hebrew as Mars goes through the same historical phases as Earth with a delay of a few thousand years, here corresponding to the captivity of the Israelites in Biblical Egypt.

In the 1920 novel A Trip to Mars by Marcianus Rossi, the Martians speak Latin as a result of having been taught the language by a Roman who was flung into space by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.

[2][24] A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury, a swamp-and-jungle Venus, and a canal-infested Mars, while all classic science-fiction devices, are all, in fact, based upon earlier misapprehensions by planetary scientists.

During the opposition of Mars in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced the discovery of linear structures he dubbed canali (literally channels, but widely translated as canals) on the Martian surface.

[2][13] These were generally interpreted—by those who accepted their disputed existence—as waterways,[31] and they made their earliest appearance in fiction in the anonymously published 1883 novel Politics and Life in Mars, where the Martians live in the water.

[2][35][36] Early works that did not depict any waterways on Mars typically explained the appearance of straight lines on the surface in some other way, such as simooms or large tracts of vegetation.

[13][37] The 1890 novel A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie depicts a society that is so advanced that life there has become dull and, as a result, the humans who visit succumb to boredom and leave ahead of schedule—to the approval of the Martians, who have come to view them as a corrupting influence.

[13] An early work of feminist science fiction, Jones's and Merchant's 1893 novel Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance, depicts a man from Earth visiting two egalitarian societies on Mars: one where women have adopted male vices and one where equality has brought out everyone's best qualities.

[24] Hugo Gernsback depicted a science-based utopia on Mars in the 1915–1917 serial Baron Münchhausen's New Scientific Adventures,[32] but by and large, World War I spelled the end for utopian Martian fiction.

[15][24] The 1913 prequel Engineer Menni (Инженер Мэнни), also by Bogdanov, is set several centuries earlier and serves as an origin story for the Martian society by detailing the events of the revolution that brought it about.

[19][39][41] The 1897 novel The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, which depicts an alien invasion of Earth by Martians in search of resources, represented a turning point in Mars fiction.

Rather than being noble creatures to emulate, the Martians dispassionately kill and exploit the Earthlings like livestock—a critique of contemporary British colonialism in general and its devastating effects on the Aboriginal Tasmanians in particular.

[2][3][15][25] In-depth treatment of the nuances of the concept was pioneered by Kurd Lasswitz with the 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten, wherein the Martians visit Earth to share their more advanced knowledge with humans and gradually end up acting as an occupying colonial power.

[71] Another author who followed Burroughs's lead in the decadent portrayal of Mars and its inhabitants—while updating the politics to reflect shifting attitudes toward colonialism and imperialism in the intervening years—was Leigh Brackett,[22][23][25] the "Queen of the Planetary Romance".

[2][65][76] Inverting the premise of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny sees decadent Martians visited by a preacher from Earth.

[18] The story broke new ground in portraying an entire Martian ecosystem wholly unlike that of Earth—inhabited by species that are alien in anatomy and inscrutable in behaviour—and in depicting extraterrestrial life that is non-human and intelligent without being hostile.

[2][35][61] Contemporary issues touched upon in the book include McCarthyism in "Usher II", racial segregation and lynching in the United States in "Way in the Middle of the Air", and nuclear anxiety throughout.

[2][25] The vision of Mars as a prison colony recurs in Japanese science fiction author Moto Hagio's 1978–1979 manga series Star Red (スター・レッド), a homage to Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

[89] The independence theme was adopted by on-screen portrayals of Mars colonies in the 1990s in works like the 1990 film Total Recall (a loose adaptation of Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale") and the 1994–1998 television series Babylon 5, now both in terms of Earth-based governments and—likely inspired by the emergence of Reaganomics—especially corporations.

[14][32] The theme appeared occasionally in other 1950s works like the aforementioned "Crucifixus Etiam" and Police Your Planet, but largely fell out of favour in the 1960s as the scale of the associated challenges became apparent.

Turner revisited the concept in 1988 with Genesis, a 10,000-line epic poem written in iambic pentameter, and Ian McDonald combined terraforming with magical realism in the 1988 novel Desolation Road.

[97][98] The series explores in depth the practical and ideological considerations involved, the principal one being whether to turn Mars "Green" by terraforming or keep it in its pristine "Red" state.

The opposite approach of modifying humans to adapt them to the existing environment, known as pantropy, appears in the 1976 novel Man Plus by Frederik Pohl but has otherwise been sparsely depicted.

[2][25] The subgenre was later revisited with the 2011 novel The Martian by Andy Weir and its 2015 film adaptation,[3] in which an astronaut accidentally left behind by the third mission to Mars uses the resources available to him to survive until such a time that he can be rescued.

[2][10][96][109] Stephen Baxter's 1996 novel Voyage depicts an alternate history where US president John F. Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963, ultimately leading to the first Mars landing happening in 1986.

For this reason, video games love using Mars-related maps or themes – colonisation, space travel, dying and dystopian societies, scientific research settlements gone wrong, cosmic war, aliens, the unknown.

[116] German astronomer Eberhard Christian Kindermann [de], mistakenly believing that he had discovered a Martian moon, described a fictional voyage to it in the 1744 story "Die Geschwinde Reise" ("The Speedy Journey").