THE MARTIANS: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, by David Baron
Marvin the Martian of Looney Tunes. Men being from there and not Venus. That defunct, dumb but missed theme restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
The world is gaga for Mars. Its richest man, Elon Musk, is actively scheming to colonize the red planet over the next decade (imagine if he’d simply named a cologne for himself). And NASA, having sent robots and probes, hopes to follow with astronauts. “No place for the fainthearted,” the agency acknowledges of the usually frigid temperatures.
Under the long, dark shadow cast by this ambition, the science journalist David Baron has produced a short, twinkling book about the origins of Mars mania. It’s yet another angle on the Gilded Age, refracted through telescopes from grand hilltop observatories, back when Conrad and Kipling wrote “romances” and “visionary” was a pejorative word.
Not to be confused with the best-selling novel “The Martian” that was made into a Matt Damon movie, “The Martians” is the true story of a feverish group of astronomers and astronomer-adjacent people at the turn of the 20th century who believed they’d found clear evidence of life millions of miles from Earth.
Their excitement suffused polite society in America, with vivid depictions of aliens appearing in soap and liquor ads, on Broadway and at dinner parties. The then vigorous yellow press, and eventually even more sober outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, published all kinds of speculation about the red planet as fact.
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