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The Dust of Mars Book Jacket

Welcome to Harry Cobb's Mars

Why do we harbor such deep felt emotions concerning the red planet? The Romans branded a geologically interesting planet, Mars, (Ares in Greek Mythology) as "the god of war".
His sister was Eris, a name meaning discord. Her son had a wonderful name, too: Strife. Mars' bird was the vulture. Mars got off to a bad start.

Schiaparelli's canali meant channels not canals

Schiaparelli's Map (1877)

Percival Lowell didn't help matters

Mars Fever

Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell believed that Mars was criss-crossed with a connected canal network, signifying the handiwork of a high advanced and technologically proficient civilization. And he blabbed this theory to a sympathetic (or pathetic) press.

Lowell sketches of Mars

The writers stir up the mess

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) provided a spectacular view, from John Carter's perspective, of Mars. The idea of Martians took hold on unsuspecting readers.

H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds posited the idea of a more intelligent, but malevolent civilization surreptitiously studying the little earthlings:

Chapter 1 - The Eve of the War

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water ... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

__________________________

It all seemed so real
Halloween, October 30, 1938
Orson Welles and the Mercury Radio Mercury Theatre on the Air scared the daylights out of the country...

Audio

Mr. Welles
The Perpetrator

The real Mars of Harry Cobb and Inspector Jahn Patenaude

I'm sorry, folks, the world of my intra-solar system investigator, Harry Cobb, is not inhabited by green skinned Martians.

Olympus Mons
The largest known mountain in the solar system

Mars is a fascinating place. There are deep valleys and prodigious mountains, the likes of which are not seen on earth. Self-contained domes are plopped all over on Harry's Cobb's Mars. If your name is Turcotte, you have incredible wealth and your dome is an earth-like little world.
Cobb's travels take him around the solar system. The world of the future contains space colonies, lunar settlements, and fast space ships, but human emotion and actions do not change.
Cobb is half-retired and still dabbling, able to access good people, yet he retains his street wise knowledge, garnered from years of intelligence work.

Further reading:

The Greening of Mars, James Lovelock and Michael Allaby, Warner Books, 1984, New York


Ray Bradbury :

The Martian Chronicles, 1950


H. G. Wells:

The War of the Worlds


Edgar Rice Burroughs :

A Princess of Mars, 1917
The Gods of Mars, 1918
The Warlord of Mars, 1919
Thuvia, Maid of Mars, 1920
The Chessmen of Mars, 1922
The Master Mind of Mars, 1928
A Fighting Man of Mars, 1931
Swords of Mars, 1936
Synthetic men of Mars, 1940
Llana of Gathol, 1948
John Carter of Mars, 1964


Robert A. Heinlein :

Podkayne of Mars

_____________________

Future of Mars Today

Copyright c 2000
by Robert P. Fitton

Book Price: $5.95

Free Chapter [text] - Read Online [pdf]  - Adobe Reader [pdb] - Palm Pilot