Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Mars in fiction" in English language version.
Klaatu is also a Christ figure
War of the Worlds is an archetypical piece of science fiction, and one of the most influential books in the canon.
But Mars holds little interest for the Marquise and the philosopher. The few data generated by seventeenth-century science suggest that Mars is so similar to Earth that it "isn't worth the trouble of stopping there". Martians, it would seem, are probably too much like us to afford many of the pleasures of novelty that other habitable worlds promised.
Mars was defined by the ecological constraints dictated by the nebular hypothesis. The planet dominated fantasies of a plurality of worlds during this period [...] If Darwin and Lowell were correct, then the inhabitants of this older world should have evolved beyond nineteenth-century humanity—biologically, culturally, politically, and perhaps morally as well.
But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a discernible shift of locale took place. Fictional goings and comings between Earth and Mars took precedence over all other forms of the interplanetary romance.
In some cases, however, the method of passage to Mars is ignored altogether.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs's novels, John Carter travels to Barsoom by means of "astral projection," a way of moving the mind without moving the body.
In those days the Solar System was thought to have been born by the accretion of a rotating cloud of gas and dust according to a "nebular hypothesis" proposed by the German Immanuel Kant and developed further by the Frenchman Pierre Simon de Laplace. The main difference with the current theory is that the cloud was thought to have condensed and cooled down starting from the outer edge so that the outer planets are older than the inner ones and thus evolved further.
The three books [of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy] indeed enact a forward-moving history, a utopia-in-progress, rather than an achieved ideal state.
a number of popular novels saw Mars as the perfect place for a utopian society. Examples are [...] Bellona's Bridegroom: [sic] A Romance
[...] Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P Serviss which was written as a more upbeat American sequel—unauthorised, naturally—to H G Wells's Martian invasion story The War of the Worlds
By the early 1950s, scientific assessments of Mars had made the colonization of an earthlike twin seem unlikely. Although the composition of the atmosphere would not be understood until the Mariner era, best-guess estimates of available water and oxygen placed the inventories of those resources far below what would be necessary to sustain human life.
In a way, the word 'Martian' has become synonymous with 'alien'
This introduced the idea not only that some aliens might be friendly or helpful or even cute, but also that they might just be really different, neither humanoid nor monstrous—and that some of them might simply be indifferent to us.
Robinson's trilogy is structured ideationally as a series of conflicts between competing visions of terraforming Mars and, therefore, opposing views of politics, economics, and social organization.
At the same time as they attempt to settle this debate, the colonists have to sort out the political relationship between their new home and Earth.
Meanwhile, two recurring themes in SF treating Mars is that of Mars as a locale for building Utopia (James 1996: 64–75) and of Martian societies gaining independence from Earth (Baxter 1996: 8–9).
War of the Worlds is an archetypical piece of science fiction, and one of the most influential books in the canon.
[...] Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P Serviss which was written as a more upbeat American sequel—unauthorised, naturally—to H G Wells's Martian invasion story The War of the Worlds
[...] Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P Serviss which was written as a more upbeat American sequel—unauthorised, naturally—to H G Wells's Martian invasion story The War of the Worlds