When I got home from SpaceX, this old book greeted me at the front door, returned from a friend. The cover struck me — it looks just like renders I have seen of a SpaceX fleet of Starships approaching Mars.
Edison keeps serving as a foil to the hero’s journey, from electricity to the war of the worlds.
Written in 1898, this “space opera” contains some notable “firsts” in science fiction: alien abductions, spacesuits, aliens building the Pyramids, space battles, asteroid mining, cigar-shaped spacecraft, a trial trip to the Moon before Mars, disintegrator ray, and hand-held phasor gun.
When my son read it, he found it to be very strange, and he was struck by how many references they had to various dams on a terraformed Mars.
And the similarities to Starship? “The departure of the flying ships was a wonderful scene. The polished sides of the huge floating cars sparkled in the sunlight… their brilliant pennons streaming like an assemblage of gigantic humming birds.” (p.43.)
Mars? “Around the South Pole were spread immense fields of snow and ice, gleaming with great brilliancy.” (p.129.)
Pioneering rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard read Edison’s Conquest of Mars and credited it with helping form his early interest in developing rockets for interplanetary exploration.
Leave a Reply