Imagining Mars ; A Literary History

386 Pages·2011·5.172 MB·English

by  Robert Crossley

ImaGInInG Mars
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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
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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
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