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Imagining Mars ; A Literary History PDF

386 Pages·2011·5.172 MB·English
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ImaGInInG Mars This page intentionally left blank (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:76) (cid:76) (cid:0) (cid:74)(cid:76) (cid:110)(cid:98)(cid:72)(cid:74)(cid:111)(cid:74)(cid:111)(cid:72)(cid:33) (cid:78)(cid:66)(cid:83)(cid:84) y r o t a l i t e r a r y h i s (cid:83)(cid:112)(cid:67)(cid:102)(cid:115)(cid:85) (cid:68)(cid:115)(cid:112)(cid:116)(cid:116)(cid:77)(cid:102)(cid:90) e y a n u n i v e r s i t y press (cid:76) Middletown, Connecticut l s e w Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress 2011 ∫ Robert Crossley All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crossley, Robert. Imagining Mars: a literary history / Robert Crossley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8195-6927-1 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Mars (Planet)—In literature. 2. Science fiction—History and criticism. 3. Mars (Planet) I. Title. pn3433.6.c76 2010 809%.93329923—dc22 2009052182 5 4 3 2 1 To Andy & Corinne Crossley This page intentionally left blank ConTenTs List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 l The Meaning of Mars 1 2 l Dreamworlds of the Telescope 20 3 l Inventing a New Mars 37 4 l Percival Lowell’s Mars 68 5 l Mars and Utopia 90 6 l H. G. Wells and the Great Disillusionment 110 7 l Mars and the Paranormal 129 8 l Masculinist Fantasies 149 9 l Quite in the Best Tradition 168 10 l On the Threshold of the Space Age 195 11 l Retrograde Visions 222 12 l Mars Remade 243 13 l Being There 263 14 l Becoming Martian 284 l afterword Mars under Construction 307 Notes 311 Index 341 ILLusTraTIons 12 Pears’ Soap advertisement, ‘‘The First Message from Mars,’’ 1901 22 Galileo and Milton by Annibale Gatti, late nineteenth century 39 Portrait of Giovanni Schiaparelli by Robert Kastor, c. 1900 66 Photograph of Camille Flammarion, c. 1890 79 Photograph of Percival Lowell, c. 1900 113 Photograph of H. G. Wells, undated, 1890s 132 Cartoon of Flammarion as Flimflammarion, by Gordon Ross, 1906 198 Photograph of Ray Bradbury, 1950 206 Space suit on cover of Collier’s Magazine, February 1953 209 Photograph of Arthur C. Clarke at his telescope, c. 1952 248 Portrait of Frederick Turner by Michael Osbaldeston, 1994 Plate 1 Five pencil and gouache drawings of Mars by Étienne Lêopold Trouvelot, spring 1873 Plate 2 Cover of sheet music for Raymond Taylor’s ‘‘A Signal from Mars,’’ 1901 Plate 3 ‘‘First Word of Science as to Life on Mars,’’ Boston Herald, November 1906 Plate 4 Percival Lowell’s hand-carved and hand-painted globe of Mars, 1911 Plate 5 Muse of Astronomy contemplates Lowell’s Mars, cover of Cosmopolitan, March 1908 Plate 6 H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in Amazing Stories, August 1927 Plate 7 Approaching Mars by Chesley Bonestell and Ron Miller, 1991 Plate 8 Our Place on Mars by William K. Hartmann, 2006 Color plates follow page 170. PreFace Of what value is the history of an error? That was the question that first prompted me to undertake the research that led to the writing of Imagining Mars. A century ago, Percival Lowell, convinced of the reality of the Martian ‘‘canals’’ that he thought he had seen from his observatory at Flagsta√, was keeping up a relentless campaign—in books, lectures, popular articles, and widely reproduced maps—on behalf of his notion of a Mars populated by a heroic race staving o√ extinction through the monumental engineering feat of a global irrigation system. Although challenged and discredited by most scien- tists, Lowell was the principal figure in the so-called ‘‘Mars mania’’ at the turn of the twentieth century and he had a strong popular following that persisted long after his death in 1916. Lowell never accepted that the work he produced was itself a dexterous if somewhat willful blending of science and fiction, but his eloquently articulated and beautifully illustrated figments took hold on the public imagination in spite of the scorn of astronomers and generated a flood of literary fantasies that lasted well into the 1960s. Even in the aftermath of the mechanical exploration of Mars by nasa’s evocatively named Mariners, Vikings, and Pathfinders, which shredded the last vestiges of Lowell’s theories, writers have continued to pay homage to Lowell by naming Martian cities and space- ships after him and by crediting him with awakening their imaginations. As the scientific exploration of Mars has accelerated since the first flyby photo- graphic missions of the 1960s and as public interest in that exploration has grown, the time seems to have come for a history of the literary images and narratives of Mars. In exploring the literary history of Mars—and particularly that history from 1877 to the present—I have had three aims: (1) to chart the ways in which the literary and scientific perspectives on the planet have intersected and diverged; (2) to explore how specific literary texts have used and abused, ignored and deployed science in order to create usable myths and parables; and (3) to find in the record of fiction about Mars glosses on modern cultural history. The very large body of imaginative writing on the subject of Mars contains genuine ix

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