Martian Speculation

My friend John Wilson, the editor of Books & Culture , knows about my recent obsession with Mars , and so he asked me to review a science-fiction book about a flight to the planet, which I was glad to do.

I’m not sure, however, that he was glad to receive the review, since I used it as an excuse to walk through the entire history of fiction about Mars:

It all started with Schiaparelli, I suppose—Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who aimed his telescope at Mars in 1877 and saw craters and canyons and dust storms, all the albedo features, linking up in lines that looked, from 36 million miles away, just like, you know, canals .

From there it passed into the hands of that fine American eccentric, Percival Lowell, from the Boston brahmin family of Lowells that seemed, in every generation, to rear up both a staid set of Harvard University presidents and a lunatic set of goofballs. In a series of books he wrote after the 1894 establishment of his Lowell Observatory in Arizona, Percival explained how the Martians had built the huge canals to access the ice caps at the poles, one of the final sources of water for an advanced civilization on a planet slowly dying.

Now, there’s a picture: a failing people on a dehydrating world, alien and yet so near, an extraterrestrial vehicle for almost any allegory or message a writer could want. And for the next forty years or so, the world of popular fiction responded to the new maps of Mars with an almost indecent joy. In the 1897 War of the Worlds , H.G. Wells didn’t bother with the canals, but he kept the notion of a desiccated Mars, whose vicious denizens decide to invade Earth in order to seize its oceans. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 A Princess of Mars features Mars as a desert crisscrossed with giant irrigation canals. For his 1938 allegory Out of the Silent Planet , C. S. Lewis decided that the canals were deep watery canyons that made life possible on an otherwise completely dried-out Mars. ( more . . . )

The review did serve one good purpose: It prompted a reader to write and complain about how such works are a waste of time—and a distraction from the effort that should be directed toward understanding the Bible. “Remember,” he demanded, “we are being saved from sin and speculation.”

I can’t quite agree that genre fiction is so worthless, but still: Sin and speculation . What a great, almost Augustinian phrase.