Destination Mars by Rod Pyle Read Free Book Online

worlds in meteorlike spacecraft, the aliens fell to Earth and dispatched three-legged machines of war as invincible as they were fantastic. And to make matters worse, they did not only lust for our planet, but further insulted humanity by feeding on our blood through small tubes inserted directly into their stomachs on one end, and into human bodies on the other. Wells was a known critic of the British penchant for colonial adventures and empire, and was, as later charted by academia,quite consciously commenting upon the decimation of less advanced societies by warlike technological powers such as Britain. He could not have done so in a more colorful fashion. The book remains in print today, over a century later, in dozens of languages.
    Regardless of Wells's motives, The War of the Worlds , along with the ideas of Lowell, set the stage for popular thinking about Mars for almost seventy years. Adding to this was an offshoot of Wells's work, the 1938 radio dramatization of the book by Orson Welles (no relation) on his Mercury Theater of the Air radio program, which created a panic throughout the parts of the American East Coast within reach of the radio station.
    No literary conversation about Mars would be complete without mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Prior to his most famous literary invention, Tarzan, Burroughs penned a deeply imaginative suite of tales about Mars. The planet was known as Barsoom to its inhabitants. And what inhabitants they were. Barsoom teemed with a multitude of beings (some red and some green), eight-legged fighting steeds, airships and castles, kings and queens, princes and princesses, and classic bad guys and good guys—all at war with one another. In the latter category fell John Carter, quite literally. The hero of the tales, Carter was a veteran of the US Civil War who was working in the US frontier in Indian territory. Losing his way, he found himself hunted by angry Apache warriors. Hiding in a sacred Apache-owned cave, he was mysteriously transported to Mars, where he was introduced to the fighting races of the planet and, more memorably, the barely clad Princess of Mars. He began a series of deeply involving adventures, eventually returning to Earth. If only NASA could find that cave in the Western states, its annual budget would go much, much further…
    As late as the 1950s, an inhabited Mars still glowed brightly in the popular imagination due to a spate of motion pictures (notably, 1953's The War of the Worlds and Angry Red Planet in 1959) and fast-selling popular literature such as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950). This last work was unusual in thatit was a poetic and sympathetic look at the human colonization of Mars as a metaphor for the violent annexation of the Western frontier of the United States, complete with spiritually enlightened indigenous natives who are eventually wiped out by the bacterial plagues that hitchhike to Mars within the bodies of white men. Bradbury's take on Mars was not wholly dissimilar to Wells's in his observations of human malignancy.
    Thus, the possibility of Mars as a place occupied by intelligent and possibly warlike beings remained deeply ingrained in the popular consciousness. And despite the opposition by many scientists of the day who declaimed these Martian fantasies due to the extreme temperatures and lack of measurable water or a breathable atmosphere there, this popular mindset lived on.
    Then came 1965, and Mariner 4.

M ariner 4 represented NASA's first journey to Mars, the second of two spacecraft to attempt the trip. This was a time when the space agency wisely launched its unmanned probes in pairs, which often saved the mission. Mariner 3 failed, but Mariner 4 sailed past Mars, returning twenty-one spectacular, if ghostly, images. In the process, Mariner smashed the Martian empire of previous generations to, quite literally, dust. The images returned by that robotic craft were grainy and indistinct, and involved some