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Famously, H. G. Wells traced the begetting of The War of the Worlds to a casual remark made by his brother Frank on a walk through rural Surrey. "Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly . . . and begin laying about them here!"1 As the author recalled the conversation, the brothers had been discussing the extermination of the Tasmanians by European settlers. This anecdote has always been useful in opening up the anticolonialist allegory of Wells's invasion-from-Mars novel, but the kind of Martian narrative he devised did not itself simply drop into literary history out of the ether. The War of the Worlds, the first romance of extraterrestrial invasion, is both a culminating event in a speculative tradition and a strikingly original departure point for what the American poet Frederick Turner has called, by analogy with the Arthurian "Matter of Britain," the Matter of Mars.2 This essay examines how three centuries' worth of scientific and literary speculation led up to the creation of the book that set a new standard for fiction about other worlds.
As Karl Guthke argues in the definitive history of extraterrestrial literature, the telescope liberated the fictional imagination, and fictional voyages through space in the post-Copernican universe could be justified as philosophical searches for truth.3 The development of a literary Matter of Mars, of which The War of the Worlds is the first masterpiece, is inseparable from the history of the earth-based telescope, which enjoyed its greatest prestige in the nineteenth century. But a telescopic image, as we now realize, is no more "objective" than a camera image. Telescopes, trained on a distant planet like Mars and straining to penetrate the turbulent and distorting atmosphere of our own world, were undependable scientific instruments, capable of creating illusory images-or, sometimes, visionary ones. Therein lay their usefulness to literature.4
At the close of the nineteenth century, in his great history of Martian studies, Camille Flammarion cited Galileo's hesitant declaration of victory in 1610 in his struggle to get a good view of the planet. Galileo had been fabricating telescopes, enhancing their magnification, and experimenting with what they could do, ever since he heard the year before about the new Dutch invention and immediately grasped its...