Adventures with the Bruce

The aphelic opposition of January 18, 1899, was the first of what might be called the H.G. Wells era of Mars, coinciding with the publication of the struggling-school-teacher-turned-writer whose novel The War of the Worlds as a magazine serial in 1897 and between covers in 1898. Lowell’s literary genius struck a sympathetic chord in Wells, though in place of the intelligent, benign and peace-loving folk, struggling for existence on their doomed world by building canals as Lowell had proclaimed, Wells’s Martians were given a more menacing cast. Gazing across space from their dying world, and possessed of technology far beyond that of the canal-builders that even included means of travel across interplanetary space, they had cast their eyes on the lush and verdant world inward toward the Sun: