The Martians:
The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
By David Baron (Liveright)
This book is a history of what the author dubs the Mars craze. For about two decades starting just before the 20th Century, Mars was treated as inhabited. This is due in part (but not in whole) to Schiaparelli’s observations, the story of which is better known than the general mania that followed.
For those years, the topic of the intelligent life on Mars was treated as conventional wisdom, and Mars and martians (once it was decided on what to call them) was treated both as accepted scientific marvel of the era and cultural product, spawning comics, plays, jokes, and other material.
At the center of this fad is Percival Lowell, amateur anthropologist turned amateur astronomer, with two streams of textile wealth (pay no attention to those picking the cotton) in his family to fund his adventures in founding astronomic institutions and explorations.
…except that it was a consensus that also was not. There never was as much of a scientific agreement with Lowell as to his observations, nor is it Lowell as the sort of lonely mis-translator that the story gets reduced to, as there were other supporters, both scientific and wackadoodle, seeing an inhabited Mars. So it is a weird situation: there is consensus without consensus.
The book reads much as a biography of Lowell, with the author injecting his own personal experiences and the tale of his investigation along the way. This does not work. To address the latter, the conclusion of the book focuses on the long tail of this enthusiasm and its positive effects in inspiring many different people towards art, science, and engineering. This journalism with internal narrativecan work, but here it does not do anything. It is not bad; it is not good.
As to the former, a focus on Lowell seems to miss the relevance of the cultural history. Real history refutes narrative, usually, so it is understandable that the culture’s turn away from Lowell is not necessarily a thing of meaning, but such an understanding is not ever proposed or considered. There is a scholar who seems to come in with the last word, but I did not understand why he had the last word.
I am frustrated by it. The history is neat in its revelation of a cultural shift then reversal that we still see the legacy of each time aliens have antenna. But this is a highly relevant moment for the contemporary world. Bad science won out, then lost. How that happened is interesting as a cultural study but also as a practical matter of how to fight the anti-science perspective of the current U.S. administration. Instead, the book is more interested in personality.
The press was deeply convinced of this rightness of Martian civilization, then as quickly convinced of the silliness of it. That is the book I wanted to read. Instead, it serves up a sort of consolation prize, that we at least get some good ideas coming from the bad ones. I do not buy that.
Some sort of question of the NTD to RFK ratio…well, it is not silly, but it is dismissable as not a useful quantification. But I think that a lot got left on the table here in an attempt to understand the way that culture processes science information, and what this particularly outsized event might be able to tell us about that. And while I know that I cannot fault a book for what it is not, the fact that the argument could correlate to something like sure, COVID denial killed a lot of people in ’20, and lead to the plague decade, but it got a lot of people into medicine, and someone made some neat art tracing measles rash, is, maybe, not the sort of thing that I can get too excited about.
Lots of great information, but I want a more serious study of the process of the cultural event.
CITATION HEEDED 