SF discovers reason and chaos on Mars

Since HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, the genre has used the red planet as a theatre for the battle between utopian science and violent nature

Mars has always been, as cosmologist Carl Sagan wrote, a “mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears”. For the ancient Greeks, the red dot in the night sky was an aspect of Ares, god of war, who unleashed conflict when the balance was lost between Apollo – god of reason – and Dionysus, god of the irrational and chaos. This conflict between Apollonian reason and Dionysian chaos has been projected onto Mars ever since.

The canals that the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed in 1877 to see on the surface of Mars were taken as evidence that, like newly industrialised nations of Europe, “Martians” might be reasoning, civilised creatures. Later observations proved the canals to be illusions, but the idea of a Martian civilisation took hold, and became the mainstay of stories about the red planet.

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.

They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

Related: The Martian review – Matt Damon shines as stranded astronaut

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