Mars in fiction
Based on Wikipedia: Mars in fiction
In 1656, a Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher published a work that would set the tone for centuries of speculative wanderings: Itinerarium exstaticum. In this early fictional tour of the cosmos, Kircher did not envision a world of green valleys or bustling cities. He portrayed Mars as a volcanic wasteland, a barren, hostile place that offered little comfort to the human imagination. This stark, desolate vision stood in sharp contrast to the romanticized utopias and terrifying alien invasions that would soon dominate the literary landscape. For over two hundred years following Kircher's account, Mars remained a footnote in fiction, a mere stopover on celestial journeys rather than a destination in its own right. It was a planet dismissed as uninteresting, presumed to be too much like Earth to hold mystery, or too unlike it to support life.
The narrative of Mars in fiction is not merely a history of entertainment; it is a mirror reflecting humanity's deepest anxieties about its own place in the universe, its technological hubris, and its moral capacity. The trajectory of Martian fiction tracks the evolution of planetary science with uncanny precision. As our telescopes improved and our probes landed, the stories we told about the Red Planet shifted from spiritual allegories to sociological critiques, and finally to hard-nosed engineering challenges. To understand the history of Mars in fiction is to understand the history of human hope and human fear.
The Age of Utopia and the Canal Myth
The late 19th century marked a seismic shift in how the world viewed Mars. As the 1800s drew to a close, it became increasingly clear that the Moon, once the favored setting for lunar fantasies, was a dead, airless rock. The spotlight of the imagination swung violently toward the next closest neighbor. Mars became the most popular celestial object in fiction, a blank canvas upon which humanity could project its idealized societies. The predominant genre of the time was utopian fiction. If the Moon was a graveyard, Mars was a promised land.
This literary boom was fueled by a catastrophic scientific error. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described features on the Martian surface as canali, or channels. When translated into English, this word was interpreted as "canals," implying artificial construction. The American astronomer Percival Lowell seized upon this misinterpretation with evangelical fervor. He built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and spent decades mapping a global network of irrigation ditches, which he claimed were built by an ancient, dying civilization trying to survive the planet's aridification. Lowell's speculations were not just scientific theory; they were a narrative engine that powered a generation of writers.
The most enduring legacy of this era was H.G. Wells's 1897 novel, The War of the Worlds. While the canals suggested a dying society, Wells inverted the narrative. His Martians were not desperate survivors; they were a technologically superior, hyper-rational, and utterly ruthless imperial force. The novel depicted an invasion of Earth by these sinister beings, turning the utopian dream into a nightmare of colonial reversal. Wells forced his readers to confront the reality of what it felt like to be the colonized. The book went on to have a major influence on the science fiction genre, establishing the trope of the alien invasion as a metaphor for human warfare and the fragility of civilization. The human cost in Wells's vision was absolute; London was not just bombed, it was extinguished, and the Martians viewed humanity with the same detached cruelty that humans often reserved for ants.
The Golden Age of Decadence and Racial Hierarchies
As the 20th century dawned, the portrayal of Martians evolved from the enlightened utopians of the turn-of-the-century or the evil invaders of Wells into something more complex and often more disturbing. The figure of the Martian became decadent, a characterization popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Barsoom series. Beginning with A Princess of Mars in 1912, Burroughs created a world that was a pastiche of pulp adventure, filled with sword fights, lost civilizations, and exotic romance. But beneath the swashbuckling surface lay a disturbing undercurrent of social commentary that reflected the worst prejudices of its time.
Burroughs's Mars was a place where life was brutal and survival was the only law. He populated his world with Martians of different colors—red, green, yellow, and black—and organized them into a rigid racial hierarchy. The white race, once the masters of the planet, had become extinct, leaving the remaining factions to war endlessly. This was not a subtle allegory; Burroughs's works were explicit in their depiction of racial stratification. In A Trip to Mars by Marcianus Rossi (1920), the author described a portion of the Martian population as "our inferior race, the same as your terrestrian negroes," a direct importation of American racial ideologies onto an alien world. Similarly, Gustavus W. Pope's 1894 novel Journey to Mars featured Martians with different skin colors subject to strict anti-miscegenation laws.
These stories often employed a convenient literary device to make the alien relatable: the Martians spoke English, or Hebrew, or Latin. In Pharaoh's Broker (1899), Martians spoke Hebrew because their history was just a delayed version of Earth's. In A Honeymoon in Space (1901), they spoke English because it was deemed the "most convenient" language. In Rossi's work, they spoke Latin because a Roman cast into space by the eruption of Mount Vesupius had taught them. These explanations, varying in their levels of preposterousness, served to center human culture as the universal standard. The alien was only interesting if it mirrored the human, and specifically, the human of the writer's own time and biases.
Yet, there were moments of genuine innovation. Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1934 short story "A Martian Odyssey" broke the mold by introducing truly exotic lifeforms that were not human-like at all. Weinbaum's Martians were silicon-based, thinking in ways that were fundamentally alien to human logic. This story marked a turning point, suggesting that the universe might contain life that did not just look different but thought differently. It was a rare glimpse of a future where science fiction could move beyond anthropomorphism.
The Shift to Colonization and the Death of the Native
The second half of the 20th century brought a harsh reality check. As space exploration began in earnest, the romantic image of Mars began to crumble. Data from early probes and increasingly sophisticated telescopes revealed a planet that was cold, dry, and irradiated. The canals were optical illusions; the civilization that built them never existed. The evidence was mounting that Mars was inhospitable to life as we knew it.
This scientific revelation triggered a profound shift in fiction. The theme of colonizing Mars replaced the stories about native inhabitants. The Martians of Burroughs and Wells were gradually written out of existence, or relegated to the realm of myth. The focus shifted to the human struggle to survive on a hostile world. The question was no longer "What are the Martians like?" but "Can we make Mars like us?"
A significant minority of works persisted in portraying Mars in a nostalgic way that was by then scientifically outdated. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, is the most famous example. Bradbury wrote a melancholy elegy for a civilization that science had already declared dead. His Martians were ghosts, haunting a planet that humans were rapidly destroying. The book was not a prediction of the future, but a lament for the loss of wonder. It captured the tension between the scientific truth of a dead world and the human need to believe that we are not alone.
Terraforming—the process of transforming a planet to make it habitable for humans—became a major theme, especially in the final quarter of the century. The most prominent example of this was Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), published in the 1990s. Robinson's work was a masterclass in the intersection of hard science and political philosophy. He did not shy away from the human cost of terraforming. The trilogy explored the ethical dilemmas of altering an entire planet, the political conflicts between those who wanted to preserve Mars in its natural state and those who wanted to colonize it, and the long-term consequences of human expansion.
In Robinson's vision, the struggle was not against monsters, but against the sheer indifference of nature. The characters in the trilogy had to contend with the brutal reality of life on Mars: the low gravity, the radiation, the psychological toll of isolation. The human cost was not just in the casualties of accidents, but in the slow erosion of identity and the fracturing of society. The trilogy asked a question that remains relevant today: Just because we can terraform a planet, should we? And what happens to the people who are forced to live in the interim, in a world that is neither Earth nor Mars?
The Modern Era: Realism and the First Mission
Stories of the first human mission to Mars appeared throughout the 1990s, often in response to the Space Exploration Initiative and the renewed interest in the Red Planet from NASA. As the decade progressed, the launches of other Mars exploration probes, such as the Mars Pathfinder and the Mars Global Surveyor, provided a wealth of new data. Fiction began to incorporate this data with increasing fidelity. The near-future exploration and settlement became increasingly common themes, moving away from the fantastical and toward the plausible.
In the year 2000, science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl estimated the total number of works of fiction dealing with Mars to exceed five thousand. This staggering number underscores the planet's enduring appeal. It has continued to make frequent appearances across several genres and forms of media, from blockbuster films to video games. Yet, the tone of these works has changed. The alien invasion is no longer the dominant narrative; instead, the focus is on the human endeavor to reach the planet and survive there.
The contrast between the popularity of Mars and the near-total absence of its moons, Phobos and Deimos, is striking. Despite their proximity to the planet, these small, irregularly shaped bodies have made only sporadic appearances in fiction. They lack the romantic allure of the planet itself, serving more as backdrops or obstacles rather than settings for grand narratives. This disparity highlights how the human imagination is drawn to the possibility of life, even when that possibility has been scientifically extinguished. Mars, with its reddish hue and its resemblance to Earth in size and day length, remains the ultimate symbol of the unknown. Phobos and Deimos are just rocks.
The Legacy of the Red Planet
The history of Mars in fiction is a testament to the power of storytelling to shape our understanding of the world. From Kircher's volcanic wasteland to Bradbury's ghostly chronicles, the planet has served as a laboratory for human ideas. It has been a place of reincarnation, a canvas for racial hierarchies, a site of colonial nightmare, and a destination for human expansion.
The recurring theme of reincarnation on Mars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflected an upswing in interest in the paranormal. In Camille Flammarion's 1889 novel Uranie, humans are reborn on Mars as a form of afterlife. In James Cowan's 1896 novel Daybreak, Jesus is reincarnated there. In Louis Pope Gratacap's 1903 novel The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars, the protagonist receives a message in Morse code from his deceased father. These stories reveal a deep-seated human desire to believe that death is not the end, and that there is another world where our loved ones wait for us. Mars, in this context, was not a physical place but a spiritual destination.
The question of how humans would get to Mars was also addressed in a variety of imaginative ways. Before the advent of the rocket, travel to Mars was achieved through flying carpets, balloons, dream journeys, and astral projection. In Edwin Lester Arnold's 1905 novel Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, the protagonist uses a flying carpet. In A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont among the Planets, a balloon is the vehicle of choice. In the 1899 play A Message from Mars, the journey takes place in a dream. These methods of travel highlight the limitations of human technology at the time and the boundless nature of the human imagination. They remind us that before we could build the machines to go to Mars, we had to build the stories that made the journey possible.
Today, as we stand on the brink of actual human missions to Mars, the fiction of the past serves as both a guide and a warning. The utopian dreams of the 19th century remind us of our capacity for hope. The nightmares of Wells and the racial hierarchies of Burroughs remind us of our capacity for cruelty. The hard-nosed realism of Robinson and the modern writers remind us of the immense challenges that lie ahead.
The human cost of Mars exploration, both in fiction and in reality, cannot be overstated. In the stories, it is the cost of the first astronaut who never returns, the colonist who succumbs to the cold, the society that fractures under the pressure of a new world. In reality, it is the cost of the lives lost in the pursuit of knowledge, the resources diverted from Earth's problems, and the ethical dilemmas of altering another world. As we prepare to take the next step, we must remember that Mars is not just a setting for our stories. It is a real place, with a real environment, and the decisions we make about it will have real consequences.
The planet has been a setting for our greatest hopes and our darkest fears. It has been a mirror for our racism, our colonialism, our spirituality, and our scientific ambition. As we look to the future, the question is no longer what Mars can do for us, but what we can do for Mars, and what Mars can do for us in return. The stories we tell about Mars are the stories we tell about ourselves. And as long as we look up at the red dot in the night sky, we will continue to write them.