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(1908).
    It is worth mentioning that Lowell was one of the few “intelligent Martian” promoters who backed up his assertions with some generally solid scientific reasoning. He wrote convincingly of the relationship between Mars's age, its distance from the sun, and early planetary formation to support his ideas. Reading his books today, and understanding the sketchy evidence available to him and others of the time, one can enjoy the road map of his logic and feel the genuine passion of his notions. He was far from a tabloid journalist, despite the fantastic thoughts he put forth. For example, examine (and endure) the wordy excerpt that follows:
    …[T]he aspect of the lines is enough to put to rest all the theories of purely natural causation that have so far been advanced to account for them. This negation is to be found in the supernaturally regular appearance of the system, upon three distinct counts: first, the straightness of the lines; second, their individually uniform width; and, third, their systematic radiation from special points…. Physical processes never, so far as we know, end in producing perfectly regular results, that is, results in which irregularity is not also discernible. Disagreement amid conformity is the inevitable outcome of the many factors simultaneously at work…. That the lines form a system; that, instead of running anywhither, they join certain points to certain others, making thus, not a simple network,but one whose meshes connect centres directly with one another,—is striking at first sight, and loses none of its peculiarity on second thought. For the intrinsic improbability of such a state of things arising from purely natural causes becomes evident on a moment's consideration…. Their very aspect is such as to defy natural explanation, and to hint that in them we are regarding something other than the outcome of purely natural causes. 8
    In other words, these lines must be artificial canals because they are straight, uniformly wide, and go from one point to another, and this is unlikely to happen by natural accident.
    Lowell went further, though, which may have done more to undermine his credibility than the faux canals. Another excerpt from the same book states: “Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed, and with them electrophones and kinetoscopes are things of a bygone past, preserved with veneration in museums as relics of the clumsy contrivances of the simple childhood of their kind.” 9

    Lowell, somewhat characteristically, took things a bit too far in his flawed but admirable enthusiasm. However, his copious writings, dated though they are, make for entertaining reading even today.
    It has since been argued that Schiaparelli, Lowell, and the others who so patiently charted the lines across the Martian surface may have done little more than traced the capillaries in their own retinas, either as shadows cast through the structure of the eye or as reflected in the eyepieces of their telescopes. Nobody can be sure. What can be said with some authority is that no two observers saw quite the same patterns, and few users of modern telescopes have felt compelled to make note of such patterns in the last one hundred years.
    Nevertheless, the stage had been set for a Mars peopled in some way, by some thing. Fiction responded to this fertile landscape via men like H. G. Wells, whose The War of the Worlds , first published as a serial in Britain's Pearson's Magazine in 1897 and later as a novel in 1898, wrote the first truly compelling tale of interplanetary invasion. His account, well-spiced by a background in journalism (and written in this fashion), was perhaps the first truly horrifying work of science fiction, in many ways (along with writers such as Jules Verne) establishing that genre. It was a newslike accounting of the invasion of Earth by Martians, and it remains as chilling today as the year it was first published. Navigating the void between