The Martians
The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A TIME BEST BOOK OF 2025: "A completely true look at America’s infatuation with aliens at the turn of the 20th century that feels like it could be science fiction . . . The Martians is not only a captivating look at recent history, but also a poignant cautionary tale, offering hard-to-ignore parallels between the alien enthusiasts of the Gilded Age and the conspiracy theorists of today."
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Science News and the Chicago Public Library
New York Times Book Review • Editors' Choice
Reactor • Best Books of 2025
Christian Science Monitor • 10 Best Books of August
Literary Hub • August's Best Reviewed Nonfiction
Library Journal • Best Books of 2025
A Westword holiday book recommendation
Long before NASA began contemplating a visit to our neighboring world, a turn-of-the-century Mars craze invaded the public’s imagination, here thrillingly retold in David Baron’s The Martians.
“There is Life on the Planet Mars” —New York Times, December 9, 1906
This New York Times headline was no joke.
In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania.
At the center of Baron’s historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed “canals” etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books.
While at first people treated the Martians whimsically—Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled—the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was “no escape from the conviction” that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile’s Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals’ existence.
Triumph quickly yielded to tragedy. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell’s critics, whose withering attacks gathered steam and eventually wrecked the man and his theory—but not the fervor he had started. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world’s sense of its place in the universe would never be the same.
Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public’s imagination. Many see Mars as civilization’s destiny—the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species—but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new. The Martians is a scintillating and necessary reminder that while we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Science journalist David Baron unearths a forgotten historical moment when suddenly everyone was convinced there was life on Mars. Beginning in the 1890s, Harvard-educated aristocrat Percival Lowell boldly declared he had found evidence of canals constructed on the Red Planet. Soon, lurid newspaper headlines claimed actual living beings and biologists speculated on their anatomy. Even inventor Nikola Tesla got in on the act, claiming to have received interstellar radio signals. The mania persisted well into the new century—there were Broadway musical revues—even as Lowell’s theories dissolved under withering scientific scrutiny. Baron traces how this speculative burst left a cultural legacy that still influences how we think about Mars. His meticulous research and narrative flair make complex scientific disputes dramatically compelling, while his gift for scene setting immerses listeners in the era’s optimism and hubris. As propulsive and richly detailed as an Erik Larson history, The Martians is a vivid account of how imagination can blur into conviction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating and vivid history, journalist Baron (American Eclipse) recreates the mania for Mars that gripped America over a century ago. He recaps heated debates between eccentric intellectuals over the existence of intelligent life on the planet—indicated in the minds of some by straight lines, interpreted as canals, observed crisscrossing its surface. The most prominent of these "battling egos" was Percival Lowell, a Boston heir who established his own observatory; he theorized that Mars's canals were an irrigation system preserving a dying planet. Alongside H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds and Nikola Tesla's claim to have intercepted an extraterrestrial communication, Lowell's fantastical lectures depicting "the pathos and heroism of this great civilization fighting to survive" sparked a Mars craze, which included comics, a new dance ("A Signal from Mars"), and claims from some individuals to have visited the Red Planet as "disembodied souls." Baron astutely examines the societal shifts that account for the Martian fixation, among them the rise of a yellow press that craved sensationalistic stories, a new wave of exploration and invention (the Wright brothers' flights; expeditions to the North Pole), and divisive earthbound struggles like the Spanish-American War that rendered Mars—an imagined "Planet of Peace"—as a symbol of hope. While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It's an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind's limitless willingness to believe.
