INGO CORNILS

 

 

The Martians are Coming! War, Peace, Love, and Scientific Progress in

H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and Kurd Laßwitz's Auf Zwei Planeten

 

AT THE END OF the nineteenth century, “news from Mars” excited scientists, writers, journalists, and the general public.  Now, more than a hundred years later, the successful Pathfinder mission in 1997 and a string of Hollywood movies have rooted the planet in our consciousness again. But while we view NASA's program of Mars exploration as rather prosaic in the context of our continuing quest for knowledge, our great-grandparents entertained much more daring, romantic, and even apocalyptic notions about the planet. They dreamed about intelligent life there and imagined what might happen if mankind were to encounter it. Thus, it is not surprising that Giovanni Schiaparelli's discovery of the lines on the Martian surface in 1877 and Percival Lowell's suggestion in 1895 that these were “canals” cut by intelligent Martians prompted two writers--one English, the other German--to explore at the end of the century what it would be like if Martians were to land on Earth. In 1897 Herbert George Wells published his famous newspaper serial The War of the Worlds, which describes the invasion of peaceful Victorian England by technologically superior, unsympathetic Martians, who wreak havoc in Surrey and London and almost succeed in wiping out the population with their heat rays and black poison gas before they are destroyed by Earth's bacteria. In the same year, Kurd Laßwitz also published a book about Martians coming to Earth, entitled Auf zwei Planeten (Two Planets). Laßwitz, a scholar, physicist, and humanist in the tradition of Goethe and Kant, offers a vision at least as exciting and thought provoking as Wells's, exploring what happens when men who think of themselves as lords of creation are suddenly confronted with a race that is far more advanced in its technology and science. In contrast to Wells’s repulsive, malevolent monsters, though, Laßwitz's Martians are humanoids who come to Earth as benevolent culture-bearers. Their home world is presented as a technological and social utopia with a truly democratic decision-making process and an evolved sense of personal freedom and public responsibility based on the Kantian imperative. Mankind's exposure to this advanced race inevitably leads to conflict between the two cultures and has far-reaching effects on both individuals and entire societies.

Auf zwei Planeten reached high circulation figures in Germany, especially after WW I, and was translated into most European languages. Full of astonishing technological predictions, it inspired several generations of German scientists, among them Hermann Oberth, the father of German rocketry, and Werner von Braun, who worked on the German V2 rockets in the 1940s and with the American space program in the 1960s. Laßwitz's vision of a space station in geo-stationary orbit in fact provided the blueprint for the International Space Station currently under construction.  Yet in spite of its popularity, the novel was considered “too democratic” by the National Socialists and by 1934 was no longer in print. The book is hardly known in Germany today,4 let alone in the wider world: an (abridged) English translation was not available until 1971!

In this essay, I aim to show how Wells and Laßwitz started from the same premise and yet came up with completely different visions of the future. We will see how Victorian England and Wilhelmine Germany shaped their imaginations, in particular their critiques of the main threat to world peace posed by their respective regimes: colonialism and imperialism. Furthermore, both authors offer unique responses to the challenge of the scientific revolution and pose fundamental questions about mankind's moral and ethical evolution in the face of scientific and technological progress. Inventing an “aesthetics of the future” by writing about science and technology, ethics and morals, the fate of both the individual and the human race, love and duty, culture and nature, they set the ground rules for one of the most popular genres of the twentieth century: science fiction.  Their tales have encouraged a mode of thinking that fuels our present endeavors in space, and they suggest solutions to problems that still beset us on Earth: an ecology in danger, rampant nationalism, and social injustice. While countless followers have mined the books for their sensationalist aspects, I want to focus on their original ideas on war, peace, love, and scientific progress, ideas that have lost none of their relevance.