Melbourne and Mars: My Mysterious Life on Two Planets

by Joseph Fraser, Alexandra Roginski (Editor), Zachary Kendal (Editor)

When editor Joseph Fraser is asked to publish the diaries of a local merchant, he can hardly believe what he is reading. Adam Jacobs has been leading a strange double split between the harsh struggles of colonial Melbourne, and the wonders of a technologically advanced, harmonious existence on Mars - where diminutive 'Martials' promenade along clean streets, travel in flying machines, and enjoy bountiful produce. Here nature is contained, and social order is complete.

Originally published in 1889, Melbourne and Mars is at once a fascinating early example of Australian science fiction and a utopian socialist manifesto. It dreams of a society without money, social disadvantage or crime; where free education, electricity, and everyday comforts are provided to all. As we astro-travel with the narrator between the opposing realities, the question how will Adam Jacobs reconcile his different worlds?

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

Fraser was a professional phrenologist and physiognomist in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn during the 1880s. He produced a number of books and pamphlets, including Physiognomy Made Easy: The Art of Reading Faces (1889) and How to Read Men as Open Books, first published by A H Massina in the early 1890s with a new edition by E W Cole in 1911. In the late 1870s he toured New Zealand, visiting Parihaka where he examined the Maori spiritual leader Te Whiti, with the intention of giving lectures on his findings. His utopian novel, Melbourne and Mars: My Mysterious Life on Two Planets (1889) is regarded as one of the most significant works of early science fiction to be produced in colonial Australia.

Reviews

[Janne Wass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the plethora of socialist utopias that followed in the wake of "Looking Backward", this Australian entry is among the most interesting from a pure SF and literary point of view. What it lacks in detailed description of how a socialist society would be organised, it makes up for with vivid imagination and a kindly nature.

The book is presented as an "edited diary" of the protagonist. At the age of 45 he finds that he leads a double life through some form of transmigration of the soul: one on Earth and one on Mars, where we follow him growing up, going to school and becoming a noted scientist. His grand deed is discovering a great underground "river" of electricity, making Mars forever abundant with free energy with which to power their machines, trains and "flying fish", or airplanes.

I will spare you the details of Fraser's socialism, instead I find it interesting that he is obviously inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideas on electricity as an all-encompassing natural force, "Vril", as laid out in "The Coming Race".

Joseph Fraser was a sort of self-help guru and health lecturer, alongside his wife, in New Zealand and Australia, and a proponent of the later debunked pseudo-science of phrenology, or skull measuring, as well as a sort of benevolent form of eugenics. When he wrote "Melbourne and Mars", at the age of 45, he was on his death bed, and in hos story imagined a sort of paradise in his own afterlife.

My 2020 edition is probably the first modern reprint of Fraser's novel.