Panel Title
Peace on Mars: Late-Victorian Speculation about the Red Planet and Its Canals
Location
DIGS 222
Discussant
Ginger Williams
Panel
Historical Perspectives on Water Usage, Sustainability, and Representation
Category
Historical
Start Date
7-11-2015 3:30 PM
End Date
7-11-2015 4:30 PM
Description
I propose to explore late-Victorian speculation about Mars – and its presumed inhabitants – that sprang from the hypothesis that the planet had been shaped, both geologically and culturally, by an ever-decreasing water supply.
Ever since Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to have seen "canali" on the face of Mars in 1877, the red planet has played a special role in the popular imagination of the western world. At no time was this role so prominent as during the Victorian fin de siècle, when the American and French astronomers Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion relentlessly publicized – in the US, the UK, and elsewhere – the concept of intelligent Martian life. During this same era, the texts generated by astronomy as a whole gained a much wider readership; and while the professionalization of the discipline was already well under way, significant discoveries were still being made by a legion of amateur star-gazers. Celestial wonders, in short, were well within the intellectual grasp of the common man and woman.
Given the context, it should be only mildly surprising that, sometime between 1890 and 1910, a telling linguistic shift took place in the English language: the term for an inhabitant of Mars changed from a “Martial” to a “Martian.” This reset marks the birth of a new myth about the Red Planet; no longer a symbol of the god of war, the planet was reimagined as a peaceful (albeit dehydrated and dying) world. In short, it became a harbinger of possible things to come on Earth, both good and bad.
It was the task of Lowell, Flammarion, and a few others to popularize Mars as the abode of an advanced race of canal-builders. From the modest bloom of Martian texts that followed, some, of course -- like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds or Garrett P. Serviss’s sequel, Edison’s Conquest of Mars -- were adventure/future war novels. But others were much more sentimental in tone, and still others (both fiction and nonfiction) sought to spread the gospel of Mars as a world that had responded to what Lowell called “desertification” – a process of desiccation that he believed was already taking place planet-wide here on Earth – not with belligerence or internecine competition, but rather by surmounting differences and generating, out of hardship, a cooperative culture that spanned a world. As such, this vision of “our ruddy neighbor planet” serves as a useful precursor, or historical reference point, to the narratives about water and conflict that we see today on this green Earth.
Peace on Mars: Late-Victorian Speculation about the Red Planet and Its Canals
DIGS 222
I propose to explore late-Victorian speculation about Mars – and its presumed inhabitants – that sprang from the hypothesis that the planet had been shaped, both geologically and culturally, by an ever-decreasing water supply.
Ever since Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to have seen "canali" on the face of Mars in 1877, the red planet has played a special role in the popular imagination of the western world. At no time was this role so prominent as during the Victorian fin de siècle, when the American and French astronomers Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion relentlessly publicized – in the US, the UK, and elsewhere – the concept of intelligent Martian life. During this same era, the texts generated by astronomy as a whole gained a much wider readership; and while the professionalization of the discipline was already well under way, significant discoveries were still being made by a legion of amateur star-gazers. Celestial wonders, in short, were well within the intellectual grasp of the common man and woman.
Given the context, it should be only mildly surprising that, sometime between 1890 and 1910, a telling linguistic shift took place in the English language: the term for an inhabitant of Mars changed from a “Martial” to a “Martian.” This reset marks the birth of a new myth about the Red Planet; no longer a symbol of the god of war, the planet was reimagined as a peaceful (albeit dehydrated and dying) world. In short, it became a harbinger of possible things to come on Earth, both good and bad.
It was the task of Lowell, Flammarion, and a few others to popularize Mars as the abode of an advanced race of canal-builders. From the modest bloom of Martian texts that followed, some, of course -- like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds or Garrett P. Serviss’s sequel, Edison’s Conquest of Mars -- were adventure/future war novels. But others were much more sentimental in tone, and still others (both fiction and nonfiction) sought to spread the gospel of Mars as a world that had responded to what Lowell called “desertification” – a process of desiccation that he believed was already taking place planet-wide here on Earth – not with belligerence or internecine competition, but rather by surmounting differences and generating, out of hardship, a cooperative culture that spanned a world. As such, this vision of “our ruddy neighbor planet” serves as a useful precursor, or historical reference point, to the narratives about water and conflict that we see today on this green Earth.