In this month’s National Geographic, author John Updike offers an essay on the Red Planet, Mars. In the article, Updike chronicles humanity’s fascination with the Red Planet, not only in terms of scientific research but it’s role and use in science-fiction.
“In the coming half century of Martian fancy, our neighboring planet served as a shadowy twin onto which earthly concerns, anxieties, and debates were projected,” Updike writes. Â “Such burning contemporary issues as colonialism, collectivism, and industrial depletion of natural resources found ample room for exposition in various Martian utopias. A minor vein of science fiction showed Mars as the site, more or less, of a Christian afterlife; C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938) invented an unfallen world, Malacandra. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s wildly popular series of Martian romances presented the dying planet as a rugged, racially diverse frontier where, in the words of its Earthling superhero John Carter, life is “a hard and pitiless struggle for existence.” Following Burroughs, pulp science fiction, brushing aside possible anatomical differences, frequently mated Earthlings and Martians, the Martian usually the maiden in the match, and the male a virile Aryan aggressor from our own tough planet. The etiolated, brown-skinned, yellow-eyed Martians of Ray Bradbury’s poetic and despairing The Martian Chronicles (1950) vanish under the coarse despoilment that human invasion has brought.”
The article looks at the history of people studying Mars, from its mythology to its elliptical orbit and topography. It also includes a gallery of photos from various Mars exploration missions as well as an interactive timeline on humanity’s study of Mars.
The article is fascinating, compelling and definitely worth spending a few minutes reading.
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