Mars and the Gilded Age Imagination

America’s Gilded Age, remembered for its ostentatious displays of wealth and fashion, was an era awash in excitement about the planet Mars. Beginning in the 1890s, an aristocratic Bostonian — the astronomer Percival Lowell — electrified the nation with writings and lectures that depicted Earth’s neighboring world as home to an advanced, peaceful and tragically dying civilization. Lowell offered “proof” in the form of photographs that revealed (or so he said) a planetwide irrigation network on the desiccated globe, and the Martians thus invaded American culture. You could read about them in The New York Times and see them portrayed on the Broadway stage. Pastors sermonized about the wise aliens, while inventors devised schemes to communicate with them so we might learn answers to life’s most existential questions.

Although Lowell’s theory eventually fell into disrepute and the frenzy abated, it left a permanent mark. The Mars craze inspired a new and enduring literary genre — science fiction — and laid the groundwork for the Space Age, setting our civilization on a course to explore and perhaps someday inhabit the mysterious world next door.

David Baron’s book “The Martians” will be available for purchase before the lecture and the author will be available for a book signing.