In 1966 a number of life-influencing events occurred. Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India. John Lennon told everyone the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. England won the World Cup. The Battle of Long Tan was fought and Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.
But the most important thing happened on March 30th when, on the evening of my seventh birthday, I travelled to Barsoom for the first time. While the dashing John Carter and beautiful Dejah Thoris made the Rice-Burroughs narrative all the more exciting, it was the sensation of the cold red dust of Mars against my fingertips which had me reading my birthday present under the covers all night with a torch.
I had never before read a story that took me to another place like this story did. Perhaps that evening of my seventh birthday – in my eyes, surely the beginning of adulthood – was the first time I realised both the desire and ability to suspend my disbelief, for until that time everything in the world was relatively concrete and rational.
As the Barsoomian narrative played out for me, Mars became more than an unfamiliar place on the frontier of the solar system. At the ancient age of seven it suddenly represented the entire mystique of the unknown, those dark spaces where humans had never been, where the strangeness of the incredibly different met and engaged with the possibilities of the real. Though an Aries all my life, I was truly born under the aspect of Mars that night.
In this compulsion, I am not, nor have I ever been, alone. While Mars represents many things to me as a reader, a writer and as an inhabitant of the 21st century, recorded history shows it has held a positively transcendent fascination for many of this planet’s most enlightened and regarded figures. Mars is extraordinarily large in terms both physical and metaphoric. It is not simply a red dot in the night skies, or a chunk of cold rock orbiting the periphery of our scientific and cultural awareness. It stands proud as the reality and representation of historic and future importance in the span of our race. It holds and has held, enormous symbolic status which has led us through ancient wars and modern paranoia, to scientific exhilaration, and even, to future hope. Mars is all these things and more as it sails, just out of sight, waiting for us to catch up.
And the human race has been attempting to catch this heavenly body for a long time. While the first recorded descriptions of Mars as a bringer-of-conflict and the God of War rest in the late astral-theological system of Babylonian astrologers where Mars is known as Nergal, a thing of fiery destruction, the red planet is equally Mangala to the Hindi, Ares to the Greeks and Tiu in Old English. In fact to form a clear idea of just how many names there might be for this planet, and of the Earth-cultures from which each name stems, one has only to read the final book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, where he links a dozen different names into a ritualistic anthem of praise[i], a fitting acknowledgment by his Martian colonists to the nations who gave them birth and who paid such early tribute to our solar neighbour.
But it was the Romans who put Mars front and centre on the celestial map. The Roman empire, its vast span predicated on the marching speed of the average foot soldier[ii], demanded nothing less than absolute obedience to the laws of the regime. A mortal emperor might not necessarily compel such dedication and so the Caesars assumed a godhead which would. According to legend, the God Mars sired the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome and the ancient citizens of the city believed they were the children of Mars in many ways, military and martial law evolving into a Roman standard. Much of the training for the armies of Rome took place on Campus Martius, “the field of Mars”, and the month of March, the first month of the lunar year, saw the commencement of many military campaigns. A number of cultures maintain this tradition even today and initiate significant economic and political campaigns in March and April.
At its largest in the third century AD[iii], the Roman empire held political sway over the lands bounded in the far north by the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of England, to the sands of southern Egypt and the Sudan in the south. From the west, Roman authority held what would become Morocco all the way across the Mediterranean to the arid hills of Armenia and Mesopotamia. And these lands were not held by the imperial might of the Caesars for their lifetime, or even for several lifetimes but for almost a millennium, until the ousting of the last emperor, Romulus Augustus in AD476.[iv]
Given that the Roman empire was so influential for so long in those geo-political areas whose later industrialised cultures founded the science fiction genre, it cannot be denied that fundamental underlying connections of respect and wonder for the red planet should remain to this day. This astonishment of Mars has been bred into our bones. We could no more dismiss its resilient magnetism than we could breathe vacuum. The fact of its constant presence, of this red sentry at the gates of our space, has always acted upon human thought and evidence of this is all around us. This paper explores the omnipresent influence of Mars upon the Western weltanschuaang as the cultural and political inculcations of the West have ebbed and flowed. Martian inspiration has moved our imaginations and our armies in equal parts just as it has been incorporated into the ideology of freedom as well as the power of war to secure that freedom. Its presence has coloured our fears and our dreams; in equal parts it has become the archetypal icon of conflict, the seducer of science and the nebulous grail of hope. Through all of our history as a sentient species, the red planet has kept pace with us.
But the Roman Empire ended as did the shorter-lived dynasties which followed the rule of the ancient Caesars through to more recent times when Tsars and Kaisers still reigned over Europe. From a Postcolonial perspective, it is always fascinating to observe that while our various cultures have for some time decried the prospect of political empire as being inhuman and its mechanisms inhumane, we still support and relish economic empires. Mr Bill Gates, the “Czar of Microsoft”, has spent 30 years building an industrial and fiscal empire[v] at a time when “greed was good”[vi]. And like all empires, there is a cycle of purpose which suggests Mr Gates will most likely spend the next 30 years trying to give it away.
At the time of Mr Gates’ paternal grandfather’s birth in Washington in March 1891, Camille Flammarion had just published his work on Mars, La planète Mars[vii], and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was completing his seminal discussion of space travel by multistage rocket in Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices[viii]. There were still empires of all description: political, economic, cultural, social, emotional and even evidence of the early scientific form which would pave the way for NASA and beyond. Percival Lowell (also born in March) was about to set out his vision of the Martian surface in his book entitled simply Mars[ix] in 1895, based in part on the 1877 publication of Giovanni Schiaparelli – another March born – offering the world its first map of the Martian surface: a tantalising glimpse of what the Italian astronomer liked to describe as his ‘canali’[x].
Shortly after this, in 1897, one Herbert George Wells was writing the preface to his new novel The War of the Worlds. The story famously narrates the greatest invasion of England since the Norman-inspired Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by the victorious French[xi] as a document of empire following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. There were many reasons why Wells wrote this story at this time and in the way he did. The British were at the point of establishing a colony in Nigeria and in so doing, gave rein to yet another example of accompanying violence and bloodshed. Wells, a Socialist, a scientist and Fabian reformist, was an adherent of the ideology of ‘creeping change’. As an early member of the Fabian Society which advocated gradual rather than revolutionary change, Wells used his writing skills to harass the British government’s imperial policy by describing the horrific notion of inverted imperialism where for once the English themselves were to suffer the viciousness of an invader’s antagonism. It is generally believed that Wells’ narrative was based in part on the dreadful experiences of the Tasmanian aboriginals decimated by the English in the colonisation of Tasmania in the early 19th century. In the novel’s preface, Wells quite specifically says:
We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction out own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and dodo, but also upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. (H.G.Wells, Preface to War of the Worlds, 1898).
This typical Wellsian reaction is paralleled in the opening lines of the novel, where he writes:
It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
But why Mars? Given the general scientific excitement surrounding the planet at this time, as well as its historical and mythological reputation, it is unsurprising that the red harbinger of war and violence would appear the perfect villain of the piece. Additionally, the previous year saw the publication of Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (trans. Two Planets, 1971[xii]), in which narrative the Martians have not only landed, but have built strongholds at either pole in preparation for a project of global imperialism.
(work in progress)
References:
But the most important thing happened on March 30th when, on the evening of my seventh birthday, I travelled to Barsoom for the first time. While the dashing John Carter and beautiful Dejah Thoris made the Rice-Burroughs narrative all the more exciting, it was the sensation of the cold red dust of Mars against my fingertips which had me reading my birthday present under the covers all night with a torch.
I had never before read a story that took me to another place like this story did. Perhaps that evening of my seventh birthday – in my eyes, surely the beginning of adulthood – was the first time I realised both the desire and ability to suspend my disbelief, for until that time everything in the world was relatively concrete and rational.
As the Barsoomian narrative played out for me, Mars became more than an unfamiliar place on the frontier of the solar system. At the ancient age of seven it suddenly represented the entire mystique of the unknown, those dark spaces where humans had never been, where the strangeness of the incredibly different met and engaged with the possibilities of the real. Though an Aries all my life, I was truly born under the aspect of Mars that night.
In this compulsion, I am not, nor have I ever been, alone. While Mars represents many things to me as a reader, a writer and as an inhabitant of the 21st century, recorded history shows it has held a positively transcendent fascination for many of this planet’s most enlightened and regarded figures. Mars is extraordinarily large in terms both physical and metaphoric. It is not simply a red dot in the night skies, or a chunk of cold rock orbiting the periphery of our scientific and cultural awareness. It stands proud as the reality and representation of historic and future importance in the span of our race. It holds and has held, enormous symbolic status which has led us through ancient wars and modern paranoia, to scientific exhilaration, and even, to future hope. Mars is all these things and more as it sails, just out of sight, waiting for us to catch up.
And the human race has been attempting to catch this heavenly body for a long time. While the first recorded descriptions of Mars as a bringer-of-conflict and the God of War rest in the late astral-theological system of Babylonian astrologers where Mars is known as Nergal, a thing of fiery destruction, the red planet is equally Mangala to the Hindi, Ares to the Greeks and Tiu in Old English. In fact to form a clear idea of just how many names there might be for this planet, and of the Earth-cultures from which each name stems, one has only to read the final book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, where he links a dozen different names into a ritualistic anthem of praise[i], a fitting acknowledgment by his Martian colonists to the nations who gave them birth and who paid such early tribute to our solar neighbour.
But it was the Romans who put Mars front and centre on the celestial map. The Roman empire, its vast span predicated on the marching speed of the average foot soldier[ii], demanded nothing less than absolute obedience to the laws of the regime. A mortal emperor might not necessarily compel such dedication and so the Caesars assumed a godhead which would. According to legend, the God Mars sired the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome and the ancient citizens of the city believed they were the children of Mars in many ways, military and martial law evolving into a Roman standard. Much of the training for the armies of Rome took place on Campus Martius, “the field of Mars”, and the month of March, the first month of the lunar year, saw the commencement of many military campaigns. A number of cultures maintain this tradition even today and initiate significant economic and political campaigns in March and April.
At its largest in the third century AD[iii], the Roman empire held political sway over the lands bounded in the far north by the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of England, to the sands of southern Egypt and the Sudan in the south. From the west, Roman authority held what would become Morocco all the way across the Mediterranean to the arid hills of Armenia and Mesopotamia. And these lands were not held by the imperial might of the Caesars for their lifetime, or even for several lifetimes but for almost a millennium, until the ousting of the last emperor, Romulus Augustus in AD476.[iv]
Given that the Roman empire was so influential for so long in those geo-political areas whose later industrialised cultures founded the science fiction genre, it cannot be denied that fundamental underlying connections of respect and wonder for the red planet should remain to this day. This astonishment of Mars has been bred into our bones. We could no more dismiss its resilient magnetism than we could breathe vacuum. The fact of its constant presence, of this red sentry at the gates of our space, has always acted upon human thought and evidence of this is all around us. This paper explores the omnipresent influence of Mars upon the Western weltanschuaang as the cultural and political inculcations of the West have ebbed and flowed. Martian inspiration has moved our imaginations and our armies in equal parts just as it has been incorporated into the ideology of freedom as well as the power of war to secure that freedom. Its presence has coloured our fears and our dreams; in equal parts it has become the archetypal icon of conflict, the seducer of science and the nebulous grail of hope. Through all of our history as a sentient species, the red planet has kept pace with us.
But the Roman Empire ended as did the shorter-lived dynasties which followed the rule of the ancient Caesars through to more recent times when Tsars and Kaisers still reigned over Europe. From a Postcolonial perspective, it is always fascinating to observe that while our various cultures have for some time decried the prospect of political empire as being inhuman and its mechanisms inhumane, we still support and relish economic empires. Mr Bill Gates, the “Czar of Microsoft”, has spent 30 years building an industrial and fiscal empire[v] at a time when “greed was good”[vi]. And like all empires, there is a cycle of purpose which suggests Mr Gates will most likely spend the next 30 years trying to give it away.
At the time of Mr Gates’ paternal grandfather’s birth in Washington in March 1891, Camille Flammarion had just published his work on Mars, La planète Mars[vii], and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was completing his seminal discussion of space travel by multistage rocket in Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices[viii]. There were still empires of all description: political, economic, cultural, social, emotional and even evidence of the early scientific form which would pave the way for NASA and beyond. Percival Lowell (also born in March) was about to set out his vision of the Martian surface in his book entitled simply Mars[ix] in 1895, based in part on the 1877 publication of Giovanni Schiaparelli – another March born – offering the world its first map of the Martian surface: a tantalising glimpse of what the Italian astronomer liked to describe as his ‘canali’[x].
Shortly after this, in 1897, one Herbert George Wells was writing the preface to his new novel The War of the Worlds. The story famously narrates the greatest invasion of England since the Norman-inspired Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by the victorious French[xi] as a document of empire following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. There were many reasons why Wells wrote this story at this time and in the way he did. The British were at the point of establishing a colony in Nigeria and in so doing, gave rein to yet another example of accompanying violence and bloodshed. Wells, a Socialist, a scientist and Fabian reformist, was an adherent of the ideology of ‘creeping change’. As an early member of the Fabian Society which advocated gradual rather than revolutionary change, Wells used his writing skills to harass the British government’s imperial policy by describing the horrific notion of inverted imperialism where for once the English themselves were to suffer the viciousness of an invader’s antagonism. It is generally believed that Wells’ narrative was based in part on the dreadful experiences of the Tasmanian aboriginals decimated by the English in the colonisation of Tasmania in the early 19th century. In the novel’s preface, Wells quite specifically says:
We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction out own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and dodo, but also upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. (H.G.Wells, Preface to War of the Worlds, 1898).
This typical Wellsian reaction is paralleled in the opening lines of the novel, where he writes:
It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
But why Mars? Given the general scientific excitement surrounding the planet at this time, as well as its historical and mythological reputation, it is unsurprising that the red harbinger of war and violence would appear the perfect villain of the piece. Additionally, the previous year saw the publication of Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (trans. Two Planets, 1971[xii]), in which narrative the Martians have not only landed, but have built strongholds at either pole in preparation for a project of global imperialism.
(work in progress)
References:
Mars image: http://www.scitech.ac.uk/Resources/Image/Mars.jpg
[i] (insert pg no.)
[ii] as stated by Vegetius, during the summer months the soldiers were to be marched twenty Roman miles (18.4 miles/29.6 km), which had to be completed in five hours. http://www.roman-empire.net/army/training.html . Last viewed 30/11/07.
[iii] Map of the Roman Empire at its largest extent may be viewed online at: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/maps/basicmap.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[iv] The earliest time Rome could be said to possess an empire was approximately 260BC. Romulus Augustus was deposed in 476AD, an approximate span of 736 years: http://www.roman-empire.net/diverse/faq.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[v] “Microsoft Czar Bill Gates is Celebrated for Business and Charitable Achievements” http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-12/2005-12-19-voa47.cfm?CFID=155308021&CFTOKEN=65844448 . Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vi] The words of Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street (1987), and said to be based upon the activities of real-life corporate raider, Carl Icahn. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vii] Flammarion, C., La planète Mars, et ses conditions d'habitabilité, 2 vols. Gauthier-Villars et Fils, Paris, , vol. 1, p. vii. (1892)
[viii] Tsiolkovskiy, K. E., "The Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices," in Works on Rocket Technology by K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, M. K. Tikhonravov et al., eds., NASA translation TT F-243 (Washington, 1964). See also, A. A. Blagonravov, ed., Collected works of K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, vol. 3, Reactive Flying Machines, Faraday Translations, NASA TT F-237 (Washington, 1965). The paper, published in Vestnik vozdukhoplavania (Herald of Aeronautics) in 1911, is described in a subtitle as "A Summary of the Works of 1903."
[ix] Lowell, P., Mars, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA (1895)
[x] A term used by Schiaparelli (March 14, 1835 – July 4, 1910) to describe features observed on the surface of the planet: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/canali.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[xi] Often attributed to William's wife Matilda, the Bayeux Tapestry was more probably commissioned by William's half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux for display in the Bayeux Cathedral.
[xii] Kurd Lasswitz Two Planets, trans. Hans H. Rudnick, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, USA, 1971.
[i] (insert pg no.)
[ii] as stated by Vegetius, during the summer months the soldiers were to be marched twenty Roman miles (18.4 miles/29.6 km), which had to be completed in five hours. http://www.roman-empire.net/army/training.html . Last viewed 30/11/07.
[iii] Map of the Roman Empire at its largest extent may be viewed online at: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/maps/basicmap.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[iv] The earliest time Rome could be said to possess an empire was approximately 260BC. Romulus Augustus was deposed in 476AD, an approximate span of 736 years: http://www.roman-empire.net/diverse/faq.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[v] “Microsoft Czar Bill Gates is Celebrated for Business and Charitable Achievements” http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-12/2005-12-19-voa47.cfm?CFID=155308021&CFTOKEN=65844448 . Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vi] The words of Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street (1987), and said to be based upon the activities of real-life corporate raider, Carl Icahn. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[vii] Flammarion, C., La planète Mars, et ses conditions d'habitabilité, 2 vols. Gauthier-Villars et Fils, Paris, , vol. 1, p. vii. (1892)
[viii] Tsiolkovskiy, K. E., "The Investigation of Universal Space by Means of Reactive Devices," in Works on Rocket Technology by K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, M. K. Tikhonravov et al., eds., NASA translation TT F-243 (Washington, 1964). See also, A. A. Blagonravov, ed., Collected works of K. E. Tsiolkovskiy, vol. 3, Reactive Flying Machines, Faraday Translations, NASA TT F-237 (Washington, 1965). The paper, published in Vestnik vozdukhoplavania (Herald of Aeronautics) in 1911, is described in a subtitle as "A Summary of the Works of 1903."
[ix] Lowell, P., Mars, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA (1895)
[x] A term used by Schiaparelli (March 14, 1835 – July 4, 1910) to describe features observed on the surface of the planet: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/canali.html. Last viewed 17/11/07.
[xi] Often attributed to William's wife Matilda, the Bayeux Tapestry was more probably commissioned by William's half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux for display in the Bayeux Cathedral.
[xii] Kurd Lasswitz Two Planets, trans. Hans H. Rudnick, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, USA, 1971.
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