Advanced Utopian Martian Communities, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 904

This futuro-Utopian homage to ET-civilizations and space travel was written just too early to have been sucked up by period-appropriate Hollywood script raptors.  Reading it is a little out of the question and left to the domain of sci-fi archaeologists; the book is stuffy and dry  and very stiff (brittle !) without being terribly interesting and doesn’t stop for the right word when four will do. (See below for an example of the writing.)   The ideas though lurking beneath the surface though are pretty good for its time, though they are hardly the great undertow that rips you away and out of the clutches of the stuff that make this a pretty object rather than a book. 

To Mars via the Moon, an Astronomical Story. written by Mark Wicks and published in 1911, left the Moon quite behind in its literary assault on a super-advanced civilization that the space travelers find on the red planet.  Wicks owes a big nod (and gives it) to the astronomer and faded theorist Percival Lowell and his Mars as an Abode of Life (1908)1.  Wicks’ Mars is enormously advanced techno-superpower filled with telepaths and mega intelligence, as well as a reincarnated version of his own dead son. 
Okay, enough.  I’m really just stopping here because of the noble outsider-like Martian city/landscape, a circular city with canal2-like connectors. It’s a busy environment, with the perspective-challenged city looking vaguely bathed in a holy halo, car-like objects skimming along the canal-roads, and “pre-flying saucers” in the air.  It is lovely in its own way—certainly the publishers thought so, as they incorporated the design right on the spine of the book.   

Notes

 

1.Lowell’s hypothesis was rounding criticized by many, including Alfred Russell Wallace’s  Is Mars Habitable?.

 

2. Giovanni Schiaparelli reported these features first, in 1877, referring to them as canali in his native Italian, which means something more like naturally-occurring grooves or channel; English-speakers like Lowell stopped just short with the word, lopping of the final “I” and going with “canals”,  with its overt implications of intelligent design.  And thus are religions born.

 

The entire book can be found on the Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2763/27633-8.txt

The sample of the writer’s ware is below, the final two paragraphs of the book: the penultimate paragraph being one long run-on sentence including four embedded exclamation points, and the final two sentences of the final graph ending in an exclamation point and a dot dot dot question mark:
 
“Yes, we are doing well--there is no doubt about that; but,
notwithstanding my present very satisfactory circumstances and the certainty of a brilliant future if I stay here, ideas have long and persistently been running in my mind that it would be far better for me to go back to Mars, and--by Jove! strange indeed that I never thought of it before!--perhaps those very persistent ideas are actually the outcome of Martian influences!!”

“The wonderful music I heard upon Mars still rings in my ears; and, at times, so thrilling and peculiar is its effect upon me, that I feel as though I were being almost irresistibly impelled to return to that planet. Well, I should very much like to see the dear old Professor and Merna again, and also my many Martian friends. Then there's Siloni, whom I can never forget, for mentally her image is ever before me. What a nice girl she was! If I were to return to Mars, I wonder whether...?”

First edition spine source: http://www.sumnerandstillman.com/Catalog/sumner.cgi/9691