It’s this same narrative strategy of the surviving manuscript that Edgar Rice Burroughs deploys to relate John Carter’s teleportation to Barsoom in The Princess of Mars (1917), the first of an 11-book series, which Disney brought to our screens in 2012. Greg’s traveller finds a Martian civilisation which he marries into, but tragedy and revenge force him to return to Earth where he apparently crash lands with only his metal-bound manuscript to survive him. But there’s a rich array of novels and short stories imagining not only Martian invaders, but also journeys to Mars and what life on Mars might be like.Īs early as 1880, Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac envisaged a traveller journeying to Mars in a specially engineered vessel, an “astronaut”, powered by an anti-gravitational substance called “apergy”. H G Wells’s monumental The War of the Worlds (1898) is perhaps the first novel that springs to mind when we think of Martians. For the present though, science fiction offers some clues as to the form a book from Mars might take.
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