page_title: Martian
section_title: Martians in fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Martian / Martians in fiction
caption_attribution_description: Interior illustration to H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds from reprinting in Amazing Stories, August 1927.
context_page_description: A Martian is an inhabitant of the planet Mars or a human colonist on Mars. Although the search for evidence of life on Mars continues, many science fiction writers have imagined what extraterrestrial life on Mars might be like.
context_section_description: The earliest known instances of the word "Martian", used as a noun instead of an adjective, were printed in late 1877. They appeared nearly simultaneously in England and the United States, in magazine articles detailing Asaph Hall's discovery of the moons of Mars in August of that year.
  The next event to inspire the use of the noun Martian in print was the International Exposition of Electricity, which was hosted in Paris in the year 1881. During the four months of the exhibition, many people visited to witness such technological marvels as the incandescent light bulb and the telephone. One visitor came away wondering what kind of world such innovations might engender in the next 200 years. Writing anonymously, s/he assembled some speculations in an essay titled "The Year of Grace 2081", which enjoyed wide circulation. The Martians enter the story late in the narrative. During a rest from international conflict on Earth, humans begin telecommunicating with Martians. "After a brief period passed in the exchange of polite messages", says the essayist, humans will decide to war with the Martians on some pretence of honor. The war that results is cataclysmic:
  [Humans] will unite all their energies for the fabrication of mammoth engines which will discharge oceans of water, metal and fire right into the face of Mars.  In return, the Martians will pelt them with aeroliths weighing three thousand tons, which will chip whole mountains off the Himalayas and make a big hole where Mont Blanc now exists.
  W. S. Lach-Szyrma's novel Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds (1883) was previously reputed to be the first published work to apply the word Martian as a noun. The usage is incidental; it occurs when Aleriel, the novel's protagonist, lands on Mars in a spacecraft called an "ether-car" (an allusion to aether, which was once postulated as a gaseous medium in outer space). Aleriel buries the car in snow "so that it might not be disturbed by any Martian who might come across it."
  Fifteen years after Aleriel, H. G. Wells' landmark novel The War of the Worlds (1898) was published by William Heinemann, Ltd., then a relatively new publishing house. The novel was revised numerous times, and has since been translated into many languages. In the story, the Martians are a technologically advanced race of octopus-like extraterrestrials who invade Earth because Mars is becoming too cold to sustain them. The Martians' undoing is a fatal vulnerability to Earth bacteria.
  In his book Mars and Its Canals (1906), astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell conjectured that an extinct Martian race had once constructed a vast network of aqueducts to channel water to their settlements from Mars' polar ice caps, Planum Australe and Planum Boreum. Lowell did not invent this Martian canal hypothesis, but he supported it. The belief that Mars had canals was based on observations Giovanni Schiaparelli made through his reflecting telescope. Although the telescope's image was fuzzy, Schiaparelli thought he saw long, straight lines on the Martian surface; some astronomers came to believe that these lines were structures built by Martians. This idea inspired Lowell, who returned to the subject in Mars As the Abode of Life (1910), in which he wrote a fanciful description of what this Martian society may have been like. Although his description was based on almost no evidence, Lowell's words evoked vivid pictures in his readers' imaginations.
  One of the people Lowell inspired was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who began writing his own story about Mars in the summer of 1911. The story is a planetary romance in which an American Civil War veteran named John Carter is transported to Mars when he walks inside a cave on Earth. He finds that Mars is populated by two species of warring humanoids, and he becomes embroiled in their conflict. In February 1912, an American pulp magazine called The All-Story published Burroughs' story as the first installment of a serial novel, which the editor titled Under the Moons of Mars (retitled A Princess of Mars in subsequent editions). The boo
caption: War of the Worlds reprinted in the August 1927 issue of Amazing Stories
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