{"id":176120,"date":"2025-08-26T04:46:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T04:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/176120\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T04:46:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T04:46:19","slug":"the-martians-review-a-clever-tale-about-a-real-craze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/176120\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Martians\u2019 review: A clever tale about a real craze"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talk about fake news: In 1907 a New York Times banner headline declared, \u201cThere Is Life On the Planet Mars.\u201d Upping the ante the next year, the stodgy Wall Street Journal claimed \u201cproof\u201d of \u201cconscious, intelligent human life\u201d on our red neighbor.<\/a><\/p>\n

A decades-long cultural phenomenon is revisited in the \u201cThe Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the Century America\u201d by science writer David Baron. He explores how a society on the cusp of reality-piercing scientific advances \u2014 global radio communications, X-rays, Einstein\u2019s Theory of Special Relativity<\/a> among them \u2014 bought into what in hindsight seems downright silly.<\/p>\n

The idea of life on other planets had been orbiting the public imagination ever since the realization that the Earth wasn\u2019t alone in the solar system.<\/a> As Baron explains, advances in telescopes provided breakthrough views of an alien landscape that led to unbridled theorizing in extraterrestrial life, even civilization, all sparked by an innocent mistranslation.<\/p>\n

While several astronomers in the late 19th century had observed the large patches of different colors and shades on our closest heavenly neighbor, Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli published them on a map. Projecting Earth-like characteristics, he connected Mars\u2019 larger, darker areas thought to be oceans, with thin, linear features he labeled \u201ccanali,\u201d Italian for \u201cchannels.\u201d Misreported in English as artificial waterways, \u201cCANALS ON THE PLANET MARS\u201d headlined The Times of London in 1882.<\/p>\n

From there, Baron tells a compelling story in which mankind\u2019s greatest power, compelling storytelling, unleashes a tenuous scientific observation that drives premature speculation, and a thin veneer of logic spawns runaway flights of fancy. Incomprehensible experiments and complex mathematics \u2014 boring! \u2014 unlocked the secrets of the atom. But the \u201cMars craze\u201d hooked popular culture with an exciting and understandable narrative. Given someone must have constructed those canals, are Martians folks like us?<\/p>\n

No one was more spellbound than a Boston Brahmin armed with a Gilded Age fortune, Percival Lowell. Following a distinguished stint as a diplomat in the Far East, Lowell devoured the emerging Mars debate in print in the early 1890s. Dedicating his life and resources to further study of the nearby planet, the 39-year-old travelled to Flagstaff in the Arizona territory \u2014 the elevation and dry climate improved telescopic performance for the namesake observatory he financed \u2014 to spend countless nights peering at the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Over the following years, Lowell did more than anyone to gather what he claimed was visible evidence of engineering on Mars. Though an amateur scientist, he deployed his Harvard erudition to write well-received books and deliver sold-out lectures, all to broaden the acceptance of the canal theory and the possibilities it opened. Most trained, reputable astronomers refused to speculate on the dark markings and did not think they held water \u2013 literally or figuratively. Where others were content to acknowledge a lack of reliable data, Lowell stated, \u201cImagination is the soul of science.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the soul of science fiction as well. While many envisioned a hardy Martian society clinging to life thanks to massive public works projects, author H.G. Wells conjured aliens with \u201cintellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarding this earth with envious eyes.\u201d His 1897 classic, \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d brought the Martians across the void to his own London suburb where he gleefully imagined them \u201ckilling my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Well\u2019s climax, nature\u2019s microbes decimated his Martians, but Baron deftly explains how human nature may have birthed them. Despite purportedly bigger and better sightings of the canals in 1907 \u2014 prompting the newspapers \u201cof record\u201d to finally accept Lowell\u2019s claims \u2014 the scientific community eventually rallied to convince the public that the rectilinear structures he championed were merely optical illusions.<\/p>\n

With the most honorable intentions, Schiaparelli, Lowell and their disciples subconsciously perceived Mars like a planet-size Rorschach test and thereby joined their ancient forebears who connected the dots in the night skies to create constellations animated with myths. When in 1971 the American spacecraft Mariner 9 photographed Mars\u2019 first close-ups proving the absence of canals, sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke responded, \u201cWhatever we can say about Lowell\u2019s observational abilities, we cannot deny his propagandistic power.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Martians,\u201d Baron captures the milieu spanning the ends of the Victorian and Edwardian eras without jeering at their lack of modern sensibilities. He leaves most opportunities for media criticism or parallels to today\u2019s conspiracy theories to the reader, and judges Lowell gently by focusing on the many researchers and writers his works inspired. A later Mars enthusiast, author Ray Bradbury claimed, \u201cThere\u2019s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I\u2019ve met who wasn\u2019t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or as Percival Lowell himself observed, \u201cIdeas are as catching as scarlet fever.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Douglass K. Daniel is the author of \u201cKill \u2014 Do Not Release: Censored Marine Corps Stories from World War II\u201d (Fordham University Press).<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP book reviews: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/book-reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Talk about fake news: In 1907 a New York Times banner headline declared, \u201cThere Is Life On the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":176121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[5643,100077,2122,1578,4514,33973,1022,2731,100078,171,30042,100075,100074,492,27902,100076,159,167,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-176120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-arizona","9":"tag-arthur-c-clarke","10":"tag-arts-and-entertainment","11":"tag-associated-press","12":"tag-astronomy","13":"tag-book-reviews","14":"tag-books","15":"tag-boston","16":"tag-david-baron","17":"tag-entertainment","18":"tag-flagstaff","19":"tag-giovanni-schiaparelli","20":"tag-percival-lowell","21":"tag-physics","22":"tag-planets","23":"tag-ray-bradbury","24":"tag-science","25":"tag-space-exploration","26":"tag-united-states","27":"tag-unitedstates","28":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115093253953548171","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}