Mars in Science Fiction

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Gulliver's Travels, Illustrations by Milo Winter Windermere series. New York, Chicago : Rand McNally & Co. 1912.

One of the earliest references to Mars in "science" fiction is in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. In his travels, Gulliver goes to Laputa in Book 3, and there the Astronomers have discovered that Mars has two satellites.

They have likewise discovered two lesser Stars, or Satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the Center of the primary Planet exactly three of his Diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten Hours, and the latter in Twenty-one and an Half; so that the Squares of their periodical Times, are very near in the same Proportion with the Cubes of their Distance from the Center of Mars; which evidently shews them to be governed by the same Law of Gravitation, that influences the other heavenly Bodies. (Jonathan Swift, 1726).

Curiously, for the book was written in 1726, Mars actually has two satellites, but they were not officially discovered until 1877 by Asaph Hall. Neither satellite is very circular. Phobos, the larger moon is about 27 x 22 x 18 km across and rotates about Mars every 7.7 hours, while the smaller, Deimos, is 15 x 12 x 11 km and takes 30.3 hours per revolution. Is it possible that earlier astronomers had actually discovered the moons of Mars with their fairly primitive telescopes? If not, then it is an amazing coincidence that Swift predicted their properties so accurately, for the moons described by Swift have approximately the correct orbital periods. Yet the moons are so small that it was extremely difficult to find them, even in the late 1800's.

A concerted effort to find the moons in 1862 failed. When they were discovered by Hall in 1877, some people suggested that they had not been there in 1862, but were in fact artificial satellites launched by the Martians. Of course, we know now that they are pretty ordinary pieces of rock that could quite probably be captured asteroids. It was simply bad luck that they weren't found in 1862.

War of the Worlds, a classic story by H. G. Wells of the invasion of Earth by Martians, was published in 1898. However, it is most famous for the Halloween 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles, in which the story was dramatized, and terrorized the eastern seaboard of the United States. Although Welles announced at the start of the play that it was a dramatization, the fact that the broadcast interrupted a regularly scheduled music program made it seem like a real news event. Panic ensued as descriptions of the Martians heat rays and their effect on the population played out over the radio.

During the 1950's, invasion from Mars seemed to become less of a threat. Instead, authors such as Robert Heinlein, who has a crater on Mars named for him, began to describe the colonization of the Red Planet. As near-earth space became less and less a place of strange alien creatures, science fiction became more concerned with characterization, as evidenced by Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Mars still is the subject of science fiction, though now the topic of choice is terraforming, as described in the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

For discussion:

1. In what ways does does the portrayal of Mars, the plot, and the actions of the characters in science fiction novels reflect the circumstances on Earth of the time in which they were written?

2. While the aliens no longer come from within our solar system, in what way are H. G. Well's Martian invaders the same or different from those in the movie Independence Day?