Book review
The Martians: The True Story of the Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
David Baron
Liverlight: 336 pages, $30
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In the early 20th century, it was widely believed that there was intelligent life on Mars and that we actually knew something about the inhabitants. Fringe theorists and tabloids spread this view, but so did respected scientists and the New York Times. The United States and much of the rest of the world had Martians on the brain. The mania could be summed up by the philosophy of Fox Mulder, the paranormal investigator played by David Duchovny on “The X-Files”: “I want to believe.”
How it happened is the subject of “The Martian.” David Baron’s deeply researched and witty book explores what happened when “we, the people of Earth, crashed hard on another planet and projected our fantasies, desires, and ambitions onto an alien world.” As Baron writes, “this romance was captivating before it turned to oppression, and it sparked children because we—the first humans who could actually sail to Mars—are its descendants.”
Okay, before there was Elon Musk, there was Percival Lowell. A misanthropic Boston Brahmin, Lowell came to see himself as a scientist with a poet’s soul, or a poet with scientific instincts. He was also filthy rich, and he poured a lot of his money into equipment and research that could help him prove that there was life on Mars.
David Baron, a Colorado science writer, approaches his subject with clarity, style, and narrative drive.
(Dana C. Meyer)
He was hardly alone. Other movers and shakers in the Mars movement included the French astronomer and philosopher Camille Flammarion, who inspired missionary zeal to convince the world of extraterrestrial life; and Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian color astronomer who observed “a profusion of narrow streaks” on Mars “that seemed to connect the seas one with the other.” He called them “canali,” which is Italian for “channels.” But in English the word was translated as “canals,” and it was quickly and widely accepted that these canals were strategically created by Martians engaged in agriculture. Lowell, Flammarion, and Schiaparelli collaborated and communicated with each other throughout their lives to spread the word of life on Mars.
The Colorado-based science writer Baron approaches his subject with clarity, style, and narrative direction, focusing on the social currents and key figures in his story rather than scientific concepts that might be beyond the reach of a layperson (including this one). The Martian craze, unfolding in time, was defined by evolutionary theory, which expanded our notion of gradualism and inexorable progress, and tabloid journalism, which was quick to present enthusiastic postulation and speculation as fact, whether the subject was the Spanish-American War or life on other planets. Science fiction also began, thanks in large part to a prolific Englishman named H.G. Wells, whose widely serialized Martian attack “The War of the Worlds” ignited the Western imagination. All of the above contributed to Mars fever.
One by one, the baron introduces his heroes, including Musk’s hero Nikola Tesla. An innovator in wireless communication and what would now be called the remote control, Tesla won over the press and the public with his enigmatic charm, which made his statements taken seriously and literally by those who should have known better. “I have an instrument with which I can receive with precision any signal that could be made to this world from Mars,” he told a reporter in the area. Tesla briefly had a powerful benefactor in Wall Street kingpin J.P. Morgan, who funded Tesla’s wireless research before deciding that his Mars obsession was a bit much and calling it quits.
Baron comes not to bury the Mars mania, but to explore the reasons why we choose to believe what we believe. Lowell, who was a romantic in his life, and his dynastic family treated him as a black sheep, Mars’ calling, its raison d’être. As Baron writes, “Mars gave him a purpose in life; it offered him the means to prove himself successful, which is Lowell’s pedigree.” Mars believers were dreamers and misguided, all with something to prove (or, in the case of some publishers, to sell).
As Baron points out, the scientific method often fell by the wayside in Hullabaloo. Lowell’s Bemoaned Lowell’s habit was to “jump to some general idea or theorem,” after which he would “select and bend the facts so as not to enlarge that generalization.” Lowell himself once advised an assistant, “It is never better to admit that you are wrong.” Or later, when he was looking for photographic evidence of Martian canals: “We will require to fix some canals to confound the skeptics” — which today carries eerie echoes of “Find me the voices.”
No one should belittle the dreams of space exploration. After all, no one imagined that we would actually walk on the moon. Carl Sagan, the great science communicator and member of the Mariner 9 crew that captured the groundbreaking images of Mars in 1971, concluded that these canals were, as the Baron put it, “mere chimeras, an amalgam of misconceptions due to atmospheric distortion, the errors of the human eye, and the unbridled whim of one man.” But this imagination, Sagan added, had its value: “Even if Lowell’s conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabulous canals, turned out to be bankrupt, his depiction of the planet had at least this virtue: it encouraged generations of eight-year-olds, including us, to consider planetary exploration as a real possibility, to wonder if we were on the right track.
An LA Times contributor, Vogar recently joined the staff of the Boston Globe.
