History

David Baron, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America (Liveright), 336 pp. Hardcover, $29.99.

In the wake of his award-winning American Eclipse, David Baron returns to the nineteenth century with The Martians, an expansive depiction of the roots of America’s keen, perhaps obsessive, interest in Mars and extraterrestrial life. It follows the public and personal life of Percival Lowell, a member of a wealthy Boston family, and his life-long dedication to proving that there were, indeed, canals on Mars (inspired by the mistranslation of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observation of canali—Italian for “channels”—on Mars’s surface) made by sentient life forms transporting water seasonally from the polar ice caps. Despite the consistent refutation of his theories by other astronomers, Lowell’s efforts led him to cross paths with many scientific figures of the period, some of whom were likewise engaged in their own personal projects that consumed both their wallets and professional lives. While writing The Martians, Baron served as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation, a program dedicated to the development of “high-level scholarship to understand the interface between human society and the scientific exploration of the cosmos.” This is precisely the orientation of The Martians—that the story of Mars and of space really is a story of human beings. The Martians is not only an “entertaining” history of Mars where the author “evidently had good fun” in writing it, as a Kirkus review states. It is also an intimate look at how one man’s most private desires turned into a public obsession.

The Martians opens with a description of Percival Lowell’s graduation from Harvard in 1876, where he gives a speech describing the origins of the universe not from the creative hand of God but as part of an evolutionary process; this astronomical interest would lead, eventually, to his lifelong pursuit of proving that the lines he documented on the surface of Mars were indeed canals and signs of intelligent—even superior—extraterrestrial life. Baron’s book is split into three parts and spans four decades, from 1876 to 1916. Each section narrates a specific phase, so to speak, of Lowell’s life—from young scion of an elite family to world-famous astronomer to disgraced fraud. In doing so, the book also traces the history of the study of Mars and space at the turn of the century as it relates to both the United States and the broader international scientific community. Scientific discoveries such as advances in telescopes and the use of photography in planetary research were, in part, made possible by the funding of wealthy socialites and accelerated by the frenzied competition for scientific immortality among Lowell and others. While their efforts supported important scientific and social developments, their need for recognition sometimes clouded their legacies.

What makes The Martians particularly appealing is the way that Baron is able to parse out, identify, and then summarize the narratives that motivated and propelled Lowell and others in their quest for knowledge and, perhaps most importantly, meaning. Baron succeeds in this endeavor through deep research and the incorporation of source material not as static objects for analysis but rather as characters, with quotations from news sources and excerpts from scientific publications acting in dialogue. He thus highlights the human hands in their creation and pulls on the connective relational threads that bind the main actors not just to one another but also to the world they inhabit. While focusing largely on Lowell’s life and research, he also details “the supporting cast in Earth’s Martian drama,” including figures such as Giovanni Schiaparelli (who first observed what he called canali in 1877) and French astronomer Camille Flammarion (who maintained an obstinate belief in extraterrestrial life), both of whom greatly influenced Lowell personally and professionally across all three phases of his life.

Whereas Lowell demonstrated “an astonishing lack of self-awareness,” Baron himself incorporates snippets of the process and experience of his own research, as he traveled the world to see the places and visit the archives of those influential in this story of Mars. These reflective moments document important shifts in Baron’s thinking and illustrate that history is as much about how we tell it as about how it happened. For example, Baron interrupts his narration of the early days of Lowell’s Martian observations to describe a research trip to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona where many of the astronomer’s papers and drawings of the planet’s surface remain. Here, Baron speculates about Lowell’s thoughts, emotions, and mental states. In these moments of living in his subject’s shoes, so to speak, the experience of learning and discovering Lowell’s story becomes central to the history of Mars that Baron undertakes; the history of America’s interest in Mars doesn’t stop when Lowell’s theories are disproven, or even after his death, but continues on in the lives of people like Baron himself. This reflection, in conjunction with the precise style of Baron’s prose, makes The Martians a particularly accessible history, narrativizing complexities clearly and articulately.

“The Martians” is a delightfully detailed and shockingly tender history that captures the converging powers of imagination.

As a review in Publishers Weekly states, The Martians is an “enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe.” Indeed, the media ecology that Baron describes in The Martians seems strikingly similar to the digital landscape we live in now. Social media and digital platforms enable amateurs to conduct and document their own experiments, with homegrown projects such as Planet Weird’s Hellier (which documents cases of “high weirdness” from Kentucky goblins to interstellar figures) picking up distribution through streaming services such as Amazon Prime. Perhaps taking the place of the treatises, articles, and public lectures that Lowell and others offered at the turn of the century, these stories of potentially superior extraterrestrial life have absorbed quasi-religious coding, blending the scientific with the metaphysical. It is to this point that a review in Pop Matters critiques Baron’s failure to “find a dark side to this craze” of Lowell’s pseudoscience turned popular phenomenon, suggesting that the book ignores the ongoing social strife of Lowell’s day and, by extension, our own. Baron’s history instead focuses on the very personal element of obsession, tracing the negative impacts on Lowell and his contemporaries rather than making sweeping statements about society at large.

Baron ends his history by tracing the influence of Lowell’s imaginative theories of canals formed by sentient life on Mars to contemporary science and media, arguing that “one lesson of the tale” is that “human imagination is a force so potent that it can change what is true.” Lowell’s theories and the very public debates about them led directly to the media depictions of Martians with antennae, Nikola Tesla’s obsessive efforts to communicate with Mars via radio, and cultural images of uncannily humanoid extraterrestrial lifeforms. These ideas likewise inspired novelists like Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose A Princess of Mars (1912) in turn inspired young dreamers and scientists such as Carl Sagan and David Baron himself. Lowell’s work continues to leave its mark on public interest and scientific discovery. The Martians is a delightfully detailed and shockingly tender history that captures the converging powers of imagination—suggesting that humanity’s desire to know, understand, and connect with the world around it, while potentially flawed in execution, can lead to profound and lasting societal change.