Our Favourite Martians: the Public Reaction to HG Wellss Aliens - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Our Favourite Martians: the Public Reaction to HG Wellss Aliens - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Jun 08, 2023 175 likes •296 views

Our Favourite Martians: the Public Reaction to HG Wellss Aliens Stephen Baxter UKSRN, 2-3 March 2017, Manchester Sometimes I stand on spots like this and sort of half-close my eyes, so it gets dim and indistinct . . . The

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Our Favourite Martians: the Public Reaction to HG Wells’s Aliens

Stephen Baxter UKSRN, 2-3 March 2017, Manchester

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‘Sometimes I stand on spots like this and sort

  • f half-close my eyes, so it gets dim and

indistinct . . .’ The Artilleryman, The Massacre of Mankind Chapter 31

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Biology:

Wells: Extrapolation: Evolution

  • From humanoids (Man of the

Year Million, 1893)

  • From a now-reduced ecology

(Massacre of Mankind) Reproduction Budding Shared care of the young (MOM) Food

  • Red weed
  • Humanoids
  • Blood transfusion

Future: food machines, underground living (MOYM)

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Society /Technology:

Wells: Extrapolation: Social structure

  • Telepathy
  • Loyalty to each other
  • A unified Mars
  • No lying
  • No external records
  • No hierarchies
  • Globally unified society
  • No war

(MOM) Technology

  • Cylinders – hard-landing
  • Fighting-Machines, Handling-

Machines, Excavating Machines

  • Mechas / robots
  • General purpose
  • Animal-like
  • General purpose machines, not

military

  • Mature technology: no

significant upgrade after First War (but revision of strategy: e.g. impact weapons, flying machines)

  • Self-replicating… terraforming?

(MOM)

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The Martians on Earth:

Wells: Extrapolation: Strategy

  • Travel near perihelic opposition
  • Targeting London
  • Opportunities at later
  • ppositions
  • London: Earth an inner world;

London visible on nightside; decapitation of global society

  • Retrieval of their dead
  • Securing Earth and mankind:

Second wave scouts planet and studies mankind, in advance of third wave (MOM) Errors

  • Vulnerability to bacteria
  • Water: oceans / ships; black

smoke (rain)

  • Human resistance
  • From a long-tamed ecology
  • Unfamiliarity with a water world
  • Columbus first; Conquistadors

followed (MOM)

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The Martians on Earth:

Wells: Extrapolation: Motive Climate collapse on Mars They must come again:

  • to Venus (WOTW)
  • to Earth (MOM)

First contact Attempts to signal, aid…

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More aliens amongst us. . .

  • Superman (1938)
  • First contact…
  • Doctor Who (1963)
  • The Zoo Hypothesis…
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Our Favourite Martians?

WOTW a complex myth: Martians = colonialism, technological warfare, climate migrants The Martians:

  • Thoroughly alien, thoroughly logical (not

monsters)

  • Courage: in battling global climate

collapse

  • Morality: loyalty to each other
  • But . . .
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Loving the alien?

  • The fatal flaw we share: lack of empathy . . .
  • ”And we men, the creatures who inhabit this

earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us . . . And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior

  • races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their

human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty

  • years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to

complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” (WOTW Chapter 1)

  • But even so…
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Compassion …