Dear Cecil,
Why is it that in pretty much all the stuff written for books or movies, that which involves aliens, always have those otherlifeforms come from Mars? Once in a while, can’t they come from somewhere like oh…URANUS?
p.s. Maybe Pluto is too far out, but I always thought "Aliens from Saturn had a nice ring to it.
Cuz the only things that come from Uranus are Klingons. Get it? Uranus…Klingons…awww nevermind!
-David
Mitch,
Last sci fi movie I saw, “Star Wars”, No martians. Before that, some trek film, nary a martian there either. On tv, Babalon 5, Farscape and the myriad Trek clones, hardly ever mention mars, and when they do, speak of human colonies there.
It’s been a while since my last sci fi read, but I don’t recall martians as aliens in anything more recent then Bourroughs or Verne. There may have been a few, but I’ll wager martians are rare in paperbacks as well.
Your choice of Saturn and Uranus are interesting as both are gas giants with no solid surface. Not that it’s all that important in fiction…
You may be interested to know Cecil rarely answers questions in this fourum personally. Quite frankly, I don’t think your thread has much chance of getting a reply from the most wise one. Better to adress your questions to us, the teeming millions for now.
At the beginning of this century, the American astronomer Percival Lowell popularized the idea that Mars was a dying planet. He had mistaken the dark striations that appear on the surface of Mars for man-made canals. From that, he postulated that a great civilazation had once lived on Mars, and built the canals when the water source began to dry up.
Both Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.G. Wells used this information to form the backgrounds for their stories (the John Carter novels and “War of the Worlds”, respectively). These authors, in turn, influenced decades of science fiction authors.
It was difficult to dispute Lowell’s version of Mars because of the difficulty of seeing the surface of Mars. Because of its thin atmosphere, Earth bound telescopes could not get a clear view of the Martian surface. Not until the 1970’s did unmanned space probes finally show that Mars was uninhabited and uninhabitable.
As far as stories about aliens from other planets, you’ve obviously never read classic science fiction. Up until the late 50’s/early 60’s, you could find stories with Venusians, Mercurians, Jovians, Saturnians, Uranians, Neptunians, and Plutonians. These other aliens fell of favor after it became pretty obvious life couldn’t survive on those planets. Mars was the last hold-out.
Guy:
You are so right about classic sci-fi. I have a collection of Space Cabby comics from the 50’s, containing characters from all 9 solar planets, but my collections of Star Hawkins and the Star Rovers, published in the 60’s, either has Martians or people from other stars. And on occasion, from a moon of one of the gas giants, Titan being the most often-used.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller@compuserve.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
It probably partly stems from H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds”, which, as far as I know, was the first work of science fiction dealing with aliens invading Earth, and partly from the proximity of Mars from Earth. I heard that the guy who first saw the trench looking structures on Mars through a telescope called them channels, but it got lost in translation (I think he was French), and it got mistranslated as canals, which would imply someone had to dig the darn things. That’s when public speculation about life on Mars began, and then “War of the Worlds” was published shortly after, and the idea of Martians has just kind of stuck in peoples minds.
Are the people from Mars, PA called Martians? 
I looked in the mirror today/My eyes just didn’t seem so bright
I’ve lost a few more hairs/I think I’m going bald - Rush
Monkey Boy–his name was Shiaparelli, he was Italian, and the word that was mistranslated was canali. It actually means “channels” (as in naturally occuring), but Lowell et al took it to mean “canals” (as in man-made).
Schiaparelli wrote about the canali in 1877. Lowell published “Mars” in 1895. Wells published “The War of the Worlds” in 1898. Burroughs published “A Princess of Mars” in 1911.
As far as the first alien invasion book, Voltaire wrote a short novel about Earth being visited by natives of Saturn and Sirius; this would have been in the late 17th century. Cyranno deBergerac wrote about visiting the moon in his novel, “A Journey to the Moon”, also in the 17th century.
Out of curiousity, did you even read my (or any other) answer? Does anybody?
So what’s the Italian word for “canal?”
And to the list of “Martian” writers, let us not forget Edwin Lester Arnold, who (IMHO) might well have provided the inspiration for ERB’s “John Carter” series.
I read your answer, Guy. And, a very informative and interesting answer it was.
Thanks, Minxmom. I was starting to get the feeling that my answer were being posted in the HTML equivalent of disappearing ink.
Mjollnir, do you mean Edwin Lester Arnold, author of “Gulliver of Mars”, a.k.a. “Lieut. Gulliver Jones” (1905)?
Anyone interested in reading both this novel and “A Princess of Mars” can check them both out at the Project Gutenberg site (http://promo.net/pg/index.html).
Let us not forget that Burroughs also wrote a slightly less popular series about a hero (Carson) who gets taken to Venus and ends up doing all sorts of wonderful things there, too. Don’t forget Pellucidar, the center of the earth.
Heinlein included Venusians in some of his futures.
“Zontar, the Thing from Venus”
But what I really miss are Moon Men, as in old Dick Tracy comics, or the first season of Rocky and Bullwinkle…
Guy Propski
Most definitely. And to extend the “inspiration,” I will submit that Burroughs’ “John Carter” is similar to Arnold’s “Phra.”
Along the same lines, DSYoungEsq mentioned Burroughs’ “Pellucidar” series. OK, now, I’ll admit this is a bit of a stretch, but. . .
The word “pellucid” (as in “Pellucidar”) is a good English language word. In all my reading, I have encountered it exactly once–once.
And where was that one time? Arnold’s “Gulliver Jones.”
(I already mentioned in a another thread the “coincidence” of “She/Kor” (OK, different writer) and “La/Opar.” One of the responses was “Edgar Rice borrows.”)
Mitch said:
Did I pick up a joke that wasn’t meant to be? Saturn…ring…ehehe? Ahem. Never mind.
Most modern SF doesn’t write about intelligent aliens from the solar system simply because we haven’t seen any sign of them. So aliens generally come from other suns.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
Dear Mitch,
Cecil almost never, perhaps never, takes a question from this forum for his column unless someone can prove otherwise.
Martians come from Mars.
Plutoians come from Pluto.
Jupiterians come from Jupiter.
Virgins come from Venus.
I’d go even further than RealityChuck (or maybe his definition of “modern” is just wider than mine).
[rant]
I’m a real live working SF editor (you know, that old fashioned words-on-paper stuff?), and not only can’t I remember the last story I saw that involved the dreaded “Invaders from Mars,” I’m hard pressed to mention anything in written form on the hoary trope “they came from outer space…to take our women!!!” trope. (Well, there’s Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar/Colonization series, but that’s more Harry wanting to write scenes featuring Chairman Mao talking to Lizards from Space…)
And you know why? Because the idea of alien invasion only makes the slightest bit of sense if the invaders came from close by (say, from Mars). Travel from anywhere further than our solar system (which we can be pretty sure is otherwise uninhabited, certainly by major technological civilizations) would cost so much (in resources and time) that conquering a little mudball would either be laughably simple or totally beside the point. Anyone with half a brain can work this out for themselves. Either the BEMs would be able to take the planet without fuss (and, even in that case, they’d be more likely to want it for a cosmic game of football or because it disrupts the feng shui of the Spiral Arm than for resources or slaves) or we’d only be of interest in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud’s equivalent of a 3rd grade Science Fair project.
Hollywood, on the other hand, has long proved that it barely has one-half brain to go 'round the whole town, which is why we get things like INDEPENDENCE DAY (and, even there, they weren’t from the Red Planet, were they?)
BAH, I say, BAH!! The topic only actually makes sense to me if spoken by a young chinless man perusing his brand-new copy of the February 1936 issue of Planet Stories. Practically everything written since then (excusing some few misbegotten scrawlings done in crayon or the functional equivalent) has had to make a least some sense.
Again, BAH!!
[/rant]
I need to go lie down now…
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
handy:
C’mon, handy, Jupiter is populated by Jovians.
Virgins (if there were any such thing), would come from Diania. Venus was no virgin.