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constructed canals), the discovery in 1877 of Mars’s two small Moons by Asaph Hall (which up-to-date Greg described), and of other phenomena that seemed to suggest that Mars might be much like the Earth, only older. For years, Lowell excited professionals and laymen alike with his proposition that Mars was inhabited by an advanced race of intelligent beings.
    Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten carried the Mars theme several notches higher in the literary scale. Published in 1897 (but not translated into English until 1971 as Two Planets), it took a very logical look at the supposition that since Mars was the happy abode of a higher intelligence than Earth, it would not be Earthmen who would first go to Mars, but rather the opposite. Thus, it was Martian space travelers who flew to the Earth and set up a base on the North Pole. Why they chose such a seemingly inconvenient location is explained in the dialogue: “You must realize . . . that the Martians can only land on Earth in the areas of the north or south poles. Their spaceships try, as soon as they have reached the outer border of the atmosphere, to approach in the direction of the axis of the Earth. But it is dangerous for them to enter the atmosphere. Therefore, everyone agreed with the suggestion my father had made to build a station outside the atmosphere but in the direction of the axis of the Earth, on which the ships would remain and from where they would descend to the Earth in a different manner.” The method of crossing space relied on a gravity-nullifying material, although the actual propulsion was provided by rockets. Lasswitz’s novel was enormously influential on the growing interest in rocketry and spaceflight then taking place in Germany.
    Capitalizing on the growing popularity of Mars, H. G. Wells wrote his acclaimed War of the Worlds*, serialized in magazine form in 1897 and published as a book in 1898. The story dealt with the hair-raising tale of a Martian invasion of our planet. What appeared initially to be a successful conquest of the Earth ended in failure as Wells had the Martians die from terrestrial diseases against which their organisms had no defense. In a retaliatory vein, American astronomer Garrett P. Serviss wrote Edison’s Conquest of Mars, which began serialization even before the last installment of the Wells novel saw print! In this story, Serviss created the first-ever scenes of massed fleets of interplanetary spaceships. Serviss was an experienced astronomer and science writer, and while he was eventually to write far better-polished fiction, this, his first novel, has a much more sound scientific basis than even the Wells original.
    In 1889 a three-volume set of novels, Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant Russe (The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist) by G. Le Faure and H. de Graffigny, was published. It is a veritable catalog of imaginative spacecraft, ranging from Vernian projectiles to rockets to solar sails. The three books dealt with adventures on the Moon, the inner planets, comets, asteroids and the giant outer planets. A fourth volume, Les mondes stellaires, was published but immediately withdrawn and destroyed with the result that only a handful of copies are reported to have survived.
    Perhaps the most astonishing, if not most imaginative, method of travelling to the Moon was described in Andre Laurie’s 1887 novel, Conquest of the Moon* . An entire iron ore-rich mountain is turned into a titanic electromagnetic by means of electricity generated by batteries of solar-powered generators. The plan is to draw the Moon down to the surface of the Earth. The plan backfires when, just as the Moon is about to make contact with the surface of our planet, the mountain—inhabitants and all—is ripped bodily from the Earth and lands on the Moon.
    By the end of the nineteenth century science had made amazing strides and atomic-powered spacecraft were now being described. Garrett Serviss’ A Columbus of Space