So when the (illegitimate and at least somewhat mangled) adaptation of the original serial version of The War of the Worlds (published under the name "Fighters From Mars-additional obscenely long subtitle") proved hugely popular, it was decided that a sequel should be commissioned, since none were forthcoming from Wells himself.
Edison's Conquest of Mars (yes, really) was written by one Garret P. Serviss, an astronomer and science fiction author... who pretty clearly had never read The War of the Worlds (at least, not enough of it to write a sequel). What resulted was eighteen chapters of what can be best described as insanity.
Well, perhaps that's doing it a disservice. But it's no TWotW.
Now, I don't know how similar "Fighters From Mars" was. Perhaps the differences between Edison's Conquest of Mars and TWotW are the fault of the adaptation, rather than some other factor. Certainly, the Martians of ECoM feel something like a tidied up, sanitized version of the other Martians.
But first things first. Let's talk about Thomas Edison's role in Edison's Conquest of Mars.
Apparently, all Edison did in real life was rubberstamp his name being in the book. Otherwise, he wasn't the least bit involved in production. (Wikipedia does describe it, quite amusingly, as "perhaps the most literal of the Edisonades.") In the book itself, well, it's pretty crazy.
First off, Edison was able to examine the antigravity devices in the Martians' flying machines (he immediately understood their functionality because they work via electricity, and if there's one thing Thomas Alva Edison understands, it's electricity![/sarcasm]), and determined how to make a super-powerful version of it that could be used to travel from planet to planet. Yes. It took him, like, fifteen minutes.
(Images of scans from the serial borrowed from here.)Then, he made a disintegrator ray. This ray only destroys specific substances it's attuned to. As is typical of Edison, he tested it on an animal first for no good reason. (If you think I'm being a little harsh on Edison, well, I'll be frank-I'm not a big fan of the man. That's probably because I've read too much about him and his publicity campaigns.)
So then he and all the world's governments put their resources together and made a warfleet of a hundred spaceships crewed by two thousand guys or so (exact figures escape me-it's not like it's important) and set out to make sure the Martians can never attack Earth again.The Martians are, as noted, very different from those of TWotW, but one doesn't actually notice this at first. This is mainly because the book takes its time to get to them. Once you get there, the differences couldn't be more obvious.
First, while some general bits of technology (heat rays, explosively propelled "cars"-that is, spacecraft, etc.) exist in common, there's one pretty radical difference-the Martians are essentially big, ugly humans.
Ugh. In fact, all dominant species from all inhabited worlds in this weird universe are essentially humans with some difference. The entirety of the difference in natural genetics? Size.For instance, the Martians are fifteen feet tall on average (Martian women average more like twelve to thirteen). A member of an exinct race of Moon men left a five-foot-long footprint. And there was a woman from the asteroid Ceres who was forty feet tall.
Note that every single female of any species that qualifies for a mention (not counting governmental figures, who weren't described anyway) was extremely beautiful.
Why were Martian men ugly while Martian women were beautiful? Because Martian men had their brains artificially stimulated to be smarter in specific fields, while Martian women were given very broad, general educations. (Debunked pseudoscience, of course-the cranial deformation idea was based on phrenology.)Anyway, supposedly, the Martian scientist caste didn't even need to do research-they simply knew all the natural laws. Therefore, 1) they weren't technically scientists (a scientist is fundamentally a researcher, y'know), and 2) they had developed the most sophisticated technology it was possible to develop... on Mars.
This of course begs the question of why they had to build cruddy cannon-launched spaceships, while Edison could build craft that were far superior to modern (by which I mean, modern in the present) spacecraft, ones that could make the journey to Mars in a matter of a month and a half or so, which is pretty incredible. There is an explanation, but it's a lame one: Earth has certain elements Mars doesn't, and these proved necessary for construction of the disintegrators (which were much deadlier than heat rays, since they turned stuff to vapor in an instant) and antigravity devices. Earth is better than Mars, nyeah nyeah nyeah!
Ahem. Ultimately, that's sort of the message we get-Earth is better than anyone else. (The story is pretty unabashedly imperialistic, so this isn't terribly surprising.) Of course, there's an issue with this-the Martians used to rule Earth.
Yeah. In ancient times, Mars invaded Earth, kidnapped a bunch of people, built the Great Sphinx and the pyramids, and then... um, left when Earth germs started killing them... or something?
Sheesh, the Martians were dummies if that's true.
The book has a lot of surprisingly strong points-it describes space better than you'd think, for one. (On the other hand, it turns out that a comet has a gigantic electrical charge and traps the electrically driven spaceships in its tail. So, yeah, what?) It also can claim the title of "first space opera."
So, if you like TWotW, well, you might consider reading this, and finding out about the numerous other things I didn't mention, like the asteroid made of gold. (Oops, mentioned it!) But don't be surprised if you feel a need to throw it to the floor when he starts talking about Aryans being the people from the Garden of Eden... Um, yeah.
-Signing off.
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