Mars in fiction

alt=An illustration of the alien invasion in The War of the Worlds|thumb|[[H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, depicting Martians invading Earth, is one of the most influential works of science fiction. It also appears briefly in the 1686 work Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle but is largely dismissed as uninteresting due to its presumed similarity to Earth. Mars is home to spirits in several works of the mid-1700s. In the anonymously published 1755 work A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth, it is a heavenly place where, among others, Alexander the Great enjoys a second life. In the 1758 work De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari (Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System) by Emanuel Swedenborg, the planet is inhabited by beings characterized by honesty and moral virtue. It later appeared alongside the other planets throughout the 1800s. In the anonymously published 1839 novel A Fantastical Excursion into the Planets, it is divided between the Roman gods Mars and Vulcan. In the 1883 novel Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds by W. S. Lach-Szyrma, a visitor from Venus relates the details of Martian society to Earthlings. The first work of science fiction set primarily on Mars was the 1880 novel Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg.

Mars became the most popular extraterrestrial location in fiction in the late 1800s as it became clear that the Moon was devoid of life. Humans are reborn on Mars in the 1889 novel Uranie by Camille Flammarion as a form of afterlife, the 1894 novel Journey to Mars by Gustavus W. Pope features Martians with different skin colours (red, blue, and yellow) subject to strict anti-miscegenation laws, a balloon as in A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont among the Planets, or use a long-range communication device while staying on Earth as in Braine's Messages from Mars, By Aid of the Telescope Plant and the 1894 novel W nieznane światy (To the Unknown Worlds) by Polish science fiction writer Władysław Umiński. Anti-gravity is employed in several works including Greg's Across the Zodiac, MacColl's Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet, and the 1890 novel A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie. Occasionally, the method of transport is not addressed at all. |width=400px

During the opposition of Mars in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced the discovery of linear structures he dubbed (literally channels, but widely translated as canals) on the Martian surface. Schiaparelli's observations, and perhaps the translation of as "canals" rather than "channels", inspired Percival Lowell to speculate that these were artificial constructs and write a series of non-fiction books—Mars in 1895, Mars and Its Canals in 1906, and Mars as the Abode of Life in 1908—popularizing the idea. Early works that did not depict any waterways on Mars typically explained the appearance of straight lines on the surface in some other way, such as simooms or large tracts of vegetation.

Utopias

alt=Book cover for A Plunge into Space|thumb|[[A Plunge into Space, an 1890 piece of utopian fiction set on Mars]]

Because early versions of the nebular hypothesis of Solar System formation held that the planets were formed sequentially starting at the outermost planets, some authors envisioned Mars as an older and more mature world than the Earth, and it became the setting for many utopian works of fiction. This genre made up the majority of stories about Mars in the late 1800s and continued to be represented through the early 1900s. The 1890 novel A Plunge into Space by Robert Cromie depicts a society that is so advanced that life there has become dull and, as a result, the humans who visit succumb to boredom and leave ahead of schedule—to the approval of the Martians, who have come to view them as a corrupting influence. The 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten (Two Planets) by German science fiction pioneer Kurd Lasswitz contrasts a utopian society on Mars with that society's colonialist actions on Earth. The book was translated into several languages and was highly influential in Continental Europe, including inspiring rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, but did not receive a translation into English until the 1970s, which limited its impact in the Anglosphere. Another prominent example is the 1922 novel Aelita (Аэлита) by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy—along with its 1924 film adaptation, the earliest Soviet science fiction film—which adapts the story of the 1905 Russian Revolution to the Martian surface. The novel set the tone for the majority of the science-fictional depictions of Mars in the decades that followed in portraying the Martians as malevolent and Mars as a dying world. and inspired rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard. According to science fiction essayist Bud Webster, "It's impossible to overstate the importance of The War of the Worlds and the influence it's had over the years." as was a parody by and E. V. Lucas titled '. less famously, a 1949 broadcast in Quito, Ecuador, also resulted in a riot. Several sequels and adaptations by other authors have been written since, including the 1950 Superman comic book story "Black Magic on Mars" by Alvin Schwartz and Wayne Boring where Orson Welles tries to warn Earth of an impending Martian invasion but is dismissed, the 1976 novel The Space Machine by Christopher Priest which combines the story of The War of the Worlds with that of Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine, the 2002 short story "Ulla, Ulla" by Eric Brown which reframes the invasion as a desperate escape by a peaceful race from a dying world,

Life on Mars

The term Martians typically refers to inhabitants of Mars that are similar to humans in terms of having such things as language and civilization, though it is also occasionally used to refer to extraterrestrials in general. These inhabitants of Mars have variously been depicted as enlightened, evil, and decadent; in keeping with the conception of Mars as an older civilization than Earth, Westfahl refers to these as "good parents", "bad parents", and "dependent parents", respectively. Conversely, Martians are the descendants of humans from Earth in some works such as the 1889 novel Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet by Hugh MacColl, where a close approach between Mars and Earth in the past allowed some humans to get to Mars, in the 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis, Martians are depicted as Christian beings free from original sin, and the 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein revolves around a human raised by Martians who brings a religion based on their ideals to Earth as a prophet.

Evil

There is a long tradition of portraying Martians as warlike, perhaps inspired by the planet's association with the Roman god of war. It quickly became regarded as a cliché and inspired a kind of countermovement that portrayed Martians as meek in works like the 1933 short story "The Forgotten Man of Space" by P. Schuyler Miller and the 1934 short story "Old Faithful" by Raymond Z. Gallun.

Outside of the pulps, the alien invasion theme pioneered by Wells appeared in Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel Last and First Men—with the twist that the invading Martians are cloud-borne and microscopic, and neither aliens nor humans recognize the other as a sentient species. In film, this theme gained popularity in 1953 with the releases of The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars; later films about Martian invasions of Earth include the 1954 film Devil Girl from Mars, the 1962 film The Day Mars Invaded Earth, a 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars and three different adaptations of The War of the Worlds in 2005. Comical portrayals of evil Martians appear in the 1954 novel Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown, where they are little green men who wreak havoc by exposing secrets and lies;

Decadent

alt=Refer to caption|thumb|Decadent portrayals of Martians were popularized by [[Edgar Rice Burroughs, inspiring many authors such as Leigh Brackett. Seen here is the March 1951 cover of Planet Stories, featuring Brackett's "Black Amazon of Mars".]]

The conception of Martians as decadent was largely derived from Percival Lowell's vision of Mars. The idea was developed further and popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1912–1943 Barsoom series starting with A Princess of Mars. inspiring the works of many other authors—for instance, C. L. Moore's stories about Northwest Smith starting with the 1933 short story "Shambleau". Another author who followed Burroughs's lead in the decadent portrayal of Mars and its inhabitants—while updating the politics to reflect shifting attitudes toward colonialism and imperialism in the intervening years—was Leigh Brackett,

Decadent Martians appeared in many other stories as well. The 1933 novel Cat Country (貓城記) by Chinese science fiction writer Lao She portrays feline Martians overcome by vices such as opium addiction and corruption as a vehicle for satire of contemporary Chinese society. In the 1950 film Rocketship X-M, Martians are depicted as disfigured cavepeople inhabiting a barren wasteland, descendants of the few survivors of a nuclear holocaust; in the 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis a survivor of nuclear holocaust on Mars comes to Earth for refuge but finds it to be similarly corrupt and degenerate. Inverting the premise of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny sees decadent Martians visited by a preacher from Earth.

Past and non-humanoid life

In some stories where Mars is not inhabited by humanoid lifeforms, it was in the past or is inhabited by other types of life. The ruins of extinct Martian civilizations are depicted in the 1943 short story "Lost Art" by George O. Smith where their perpetual motion machine is recreated and the 1957 short story "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper in which scientists attempt to decipher their fifty-thousand-year-old language; In particular, one Martian creature called Tweel is found to be intelligent but have thought processes that are utterly inhuman. This creates an impenetrable language barrier between the alien and the human it encounters, and they are limited to communicating through the universal language of mathematics. Asimov would later say that this story met the challenge science fiction editor John W. Campbell made to science fiction writers in the 1940s: to write a creature who thinks at least as well as humans, yet not like humans.

Three different species of intelligent lifeforms appear on Mars in C. S. Lewis's 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet, only one of which is humanoid. In the 1943 short story "The Cave" by P. Schuyler Miller, lifeforms endure on Mars long after the civilization that used to exist there has driven itself to extinction through ecological collapse.

Lifeless Mars

alt=A photograph of Mars from the Mariner 4 probe|thumb|Data returned from [[Mars exploration missions in the 1960s and 1970s, such as this photograph by the Mariner 4 probe, led to stories of life on Mars becoming unfashionable.]]

In light of the Mariner and Viking probes to Mars between 1965 and 1976 revealing the planet's inhospitable conditions, almost all fiction started to portray Mars as a lifeless world. A handful of authors still found ways to place life on the red planet: microbial life exists on Mars in the 1977 novel The Martian Inca by Ian Watson, and intelligent life is found in hibernation there in the 1977 short story "In the Hall of the Martian Kings" by John Varley. Unlike later works on this theme, The Martian Chronicles makes no attempt at realism (Mars has a breathable atmosphere, for instance, even though spectrographic analysis had at that time revealed no detectable amounts of oxygen); Bradbury said that "Mars is a mirror, not a crystal", a vehicle for social commentary rather than attempts to predict the future. There are also several allusions to the European colonization of the Americas: the first few missions to Mars in the book encounter Martians, with direct references to both Hernán Cortés and the Trail of Tears, but the indigenous population soon goes extinct due to chickenpox in a parallel to the virgin soil epidemics that devastated Native American populations as a result of the Columbian exchange. and the scarcity of oxygen even after generations of terraforming forces the colonists to live in a domed city in the 1953 novel Police Your Planet by Lester del Rey. The 1952 novel Outpost Mars by Cyril Judd (joint pseudonym of Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril) revolves around an attempt at making a Mars colony economically sustainable by way of resource extraction. The independence theme was adopted by on-screen portrayals of Mars colonies in the 1990s in works like the 1990 film Total Recall (a loose adaptation of Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale") and the 1994–1998 television series Babylon 5, now both in terms of Earth-based governments and—likely inspired by the emergence of Reaganomics—especially corporations.

Terraforming

alt=Artist's impression of the hypothetical phases of the terraforming of Mars|thumb|Some works depict Mars being [[Terraforming|terraformed to enable human habitation.]]

Clarke's The Sands of Mars features one of the earliest depictions of terraforming Mars to make it more hospitable to human life; in the novel, the atmosphere of Mars is made breathable by plants that release oxygen from minerals in the Martian soil, and the climate is improved by creating an artificial sun. By the 1970s, Martian literature as a whole had mostly succumbed to the discouragement of finding the planet's conditions to be so hostile, and stories set on Mars became much less common than they had been in previous decades. Kim Stanley Robinson was an early prolific writer on the subject with the 1982 short story "Exploring Fossil Canyon", the 1984 novel Icehenge, and the 1985 short story "Green Mars". Turner revisited the concept in 1988 with Genesis, a 10,000-line epic poem written in iambic pentameter, and Ian McDonald combined terraforming with magical realism in the 1988 novel Desolation Road.

By the 1990s, terraforming had become the predominant theme in Martian fiction. The 1993 novel Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley portrays Mars in the process of reverting to its natural state after an abandoned attempt at terraforming it.

Alternatives to terraforming have also been explored. The opposite approach of modifying humans to adapt them to the existing environment, known as pantropy, appears in the 1976 novel Man Plus by Frederik Pohl but has otherwise been sparsely depicted. The conflict between pantropy and terraforming is explored in the 1994 novel Climbing Olympus by Kevin J. Anderson, as the humans that have been "areoformed" to survive on Mars do not wish the planet to be altered to accommodate unmodified humans at their expense. Other works where terraforming is eschewed in favour of alternatives include the 1996 novel River of Dust by Alexander Jablokov, where the settlers create a liveable environment by burrowing underground, and the 1999 novel White Mars, or, The Mind Set Free: A 21st-Century Utopia by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose where environmental preservation is prioritized and humans live in domed cities.

Nostalgic depictions

alt=Refer to caption|thumb|Globe of Mars based on drawing by [[Percival Lowell, featuring the purported Martian canals]]

Although most stories by the middle of the 1900s acknowledged that advances in planetary science had rendered previous notions about the conditions of Mars obsolete and portrayed the planet accordingly, some continued to depict a romantic version of Mars rather than a realistic one. The 1965 novel The Alternate Martians by A. Bertram Chandler is based on the premise that the depictions of Mars that appear in older stories are not incorrect but reflect alternative universes; the book is dedicated to "the Mars that used to be, but never was". Later higher-quality images (such as this one by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001) do not resemble a face. It was popularized by  Richard C. Hoagland, who interpreted it as an artificial construction by intelligent extraterrestrials, and has appeared in works of fiction including the 1992 novel Labyrinth of Night by Allen Steele, the 1995 short story "The Great Martian Pyramid Hoax" by Jerry Oltion, and the 1998 novel Semper Mars by Ian Douglas. Stories collected in Peter Crowther's 2002 anthology Mars Probes pay tribute to the works of Stanley G. Weinbaum and Leigh Brackett, among others.

First landings and near-future human presence

Stories about the first human mission to Mars became popular after US president George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989, which proposed to accomplish this feat by 2019, Among these are the 1992 novel Beachhead by Jack Williamson and the 1992 novel Mars in Ben Bova's Grand Tour series, Stephen Baxter's 1996 novel Voyage depicts an alternate history where US president John F. Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963, ultimately leading to the first Mars landing happening in 1986. The 1999 novel The Martian Race by Gregory Benford adapts the Mars Direct proposal by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin to fiction by depicting a private sector competition to conduct the first crewed Mars landing with a large monetary reward attached. Zubrin would later write a story of his own along the same lines: the 2001 novel First Landing.

Beyond the events of the first crewed landing on Mars, this time period also saw an increase in portrayals of the early stages of exploration and settlement happening in the near future, especially following the 1996 launches of the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor probes. In the 2003 novel Ilium by Dan Simmons and its 2005 sequel Olympos, the Trojan War is reenacted on Mars, Tom Chmielewski's 2014 novel Lunar Dust, Martian Sands is a piece of noir fiction set partially on Mars. The Martian—book and film—is hard science fiction; the film adaptation was described by the production team as being "as much science fact as science fiction". Mars has also made frequent appearances in video games; examples include the 2001 game Red Faction which is set on Mars and the 2014 game Destiny where Mars is an unlockable setting. Says Crossley, "Where imagined Mars will go as the twenty-first century unfolds cannot be prophesied, because—undoubtedly—improbable, original, and masterful talents will work new variations on the matter of Mars." The 1752 work Micromégas by Voltaire likewise mentions two moons of Mars; astronomy historian surmises that Voltaire was inspired by Swift. compared to 194 for Mars itself and 131 for Venus in The Gernsback Years alone.