RED READS:

A Red Planet Forever in the Orbit of Science and Dreams (KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, 3/13/04, NY Times)

Mars and science fiction came of age together in the 1890's, and ever since they have had a tight relationship, a feedback loop that has made both famous.

It began with the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who built a technically advanced telescope and through it saw straight lines on the surface of the red planet. He explained that these had to be the canals of an alien race whose planet was drying out, forcing them to convey water from the polar caps, also visible.

Of course Lowell's elaborately postulated Martian culture was a kind of self-hypnosis, in effect a science-fiction novel already. But his speculative leap from limited evidence was not that different in method from the archaeology of Schliemann at Troy, or Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. And so his Mars was widely accepted as a possibility based on real data.

The news galvanized the world. Other writers immediately recognized that if there really were a civilization on Mars, it could be anything; Lowell's version was only one guess. Quickly other Martian fictions appeared in all the leading industrial nations, and many had a major impact. In Germany Kurd Lasswitz's "Two Planets" (1897) sold several hundred thousand copies, and clubs formed to discuss it. Lasswitz described a Martian technological utopia, enjoying great domestic comfort through advances in food production, transport, urban planning and space travel. Young men like Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley were greatly impressed, so much so that they later became rocket scientists. It could even be said that it was Lowell's imagination that got us to the moon by 1969.

In Russia the book was "Red Star," by Aleksandr Bogdanov. Here the utopia is political, though also technically advanced. Mars's socialist civilization has been living in peace for five centuries, but when it sends emissaries to Earth, terrible problems arise. Can social progress be imposed on a less developed culture?

This very impressive novel, written in 1908, considers this and other questions while offhandedly predicting much of 20th-century history. It, too, inspired clubs, debates, professional and amateur sequels, and a generation of young scientists, including engineers in the Soviet space program.

A decade earlier in England, H. G. Wells considered what might happen if this advanced Martian civilization decided to come here and take our water, which would be as valuable to Martians as oil is to us. Wells intended "War of the Worlds" to remind British readers of the recent massacre of the Tasmanian aborigines — while putting them at the wrong end of the gun.

In the United States, on the other hand, the pulp-action adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series abjured any heavy political message, except perhaps the idea that it would be fun to live in a fantasy Wild West forever, especially if you could leap much higher than the bad guys.

Thus from the turn of the 20th century through the 1920's, many scientifically literate people considered a Martian civilization quite possible, and fiction speculating about it was widespread and influential. By the end of the 1930's, however, the scientists were shaking their heads. Radio telescopes were revealing that the Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, and had neither oxygen nor water. Not only was civilization unlikely, but life itself looked as if it would have a hard time as well. And then Orson Welles's radio dramatization of "War of the Worlds" scared people and was declared a hoax, and this somehow debunked the whole idea.

I've always found Mr. Robinson's Mars series to be tedious reading, but Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series is fabulous and Greg Bear's Moving Mars offers some interesting ideas about the future political strains of Earthly nations trying to dictate to colonies in space.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2004 1:30 PM