The History of Mars in Science Fiction: From Wells to Weir

A Planet We Invented Before We Explored It

Long before any spacecraft crossed the void between Earth and Mars, writers were already colonizing the planet in ink. The history of Mars in science fiction is, in many ways, a mirror held up to humanity — reflecting our fears, our ambitions, and the limits of what we thought we knew. From invading war machines to lonely botanists, each era's vision of Mars tells us as much about Earth as it does about the Red Planet itself.

H.G. Wells and the Age of Anxiety (1898)

The modern tradition of Mars fiction begins with H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, published in 1898. Wells drew directly on the astronomical work of Percival Lowell, whose popular (if ultimately incorrect) theory held that Mars was a dying world crisscrossed by artificial canals built by a desperate civilization. Wells took that idea to its dark logical conclusion: if Martians were intelligent enough to engineer a planet, they were intelligent enough to covet ours.

The novel arrived at the height of British imperialism, and Wells was explicit about the parallel. The Martians do to England what England had done to Tasmania — they arrive, they exterminate, and they exploit. The alien invasion genre Wells essentially invented was never really about space. It was about what human beings do to one another when power is sufficiently asymmetric.

The 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation, which caused widespread panic in parts of the United States, proved the story's cultural staying power — and revealed how anxious interwar America already was about sudden, incomprehensible catastrophe.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Romantic Mars (1912–1943)

Where Wells imagined Mars as a source of existential threat, Edgar Rice Burroughs turned it into a playground. Beginning with A Princess of Mars in 1912, his Barsoom series depicted a Mars of ancient seas, warring city-states, and six-limbed green giants — a world that never existed but was enormously appealing. Burroughs's Mars was the American West transplanted to the sky: a frontier where a man of courage could reinvent himself.

The science was loose even by 1912 standards, but that was never the point. Barsoom shaped generations of future scientists and engineers, including Carl Sagan, who credited Burroughs with sparking his lifelong passion for planetary exploration. Imagination, even inaccurate imagination, has its own utility.

Ray Bradbury and the Elegy (1950)

By 1950, telescopes had revealed enough about Mars to chip away at Lowell's canals and Burroughs's exotic civilizations. Ray Bradbury responded not by abandoning Mars mythology but by mourning it. The Martian Chronicles is science fiction as poetry — a sequence of linked stories in which human settlers arrive on Mars and, almost inevitably, destroy what they find, importing Earth's racism, consumerism, and nuclear anxiety along with themselves.

Bradbury's Mars is already dying when we get there. His Martians are telepathic, melancholy, and ultimately powerless against human cultural contamination. Published during the early Cold War, the book functions as a sustained critique of American expansionism and the assumption that progress is always benign. It remains one of the most literary works the genre has produced.

Kim Stanley Robinson and the Science of Terraforming (1992–1996)

By the early 1990s, Mars science had advanced dramatically. Missions including Mariner 4 (1965), Viking 1 and 2 (1976), and ongoing telescopic study had established Mars as a cold, thin-atmosphered, radiation-bathed desert. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy — Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996) — absorbed all of it.

Robinson's Mars is the most scientifically rigorous in fiction. His colonists debate the ethics of terraforming with genuine philosophical depth: is it right to alter a planetary ecosystem, even a seemingly lifeless one? The trilogy engages seriously with areology (Martian geology), atmospheric chemistry, and the social dynamics of small isolated communities. It won back-to-back Hugo Awards and remains the benchmark for hard science fiction set on Mars.

Where earlier Mars fiction used the planet as metaphor or backdrop, Robinson used it as subject. His central question — what do we owe a world we did not make? — has only grown more relevant as actual Mars missions accumulate.

Andy Weir and the Engineer's Mars (2011–2015)

Andy Weir's The Martian, self-published in 2011 and released in print by Crown in 2014, represented a significant cultural shift. Weir's protagonist Mark Watney does not fight Martians, mourn lost civilizations, or debate terraforming ethics. He grows potatoes in his own waste products and fixes things with duct tape. The enemy is physics, chemistry, and bad luck — solvable problems for a competent person.

Weir researched NASA's actual mission architecture, orbital mechanics, and radiation exposure data extensively, and the novel reads like a love letter to engineering problem-solving. Released as NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission was returning stunning data from Gale Crater, The Martian captured a moment of genuine public optimism about human Mars exploration.

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey (the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), beginning with Leviathan Wakes in 2011, extended this realistic tradition across the solar system, depicting Mars as a fully inhabited but perpetually unfinished world — cold, austere, and inhabited by people who have adapted to hardship so thoroughly they no longer quite consider themselves human.

What Mars Fiction Tells Us

The arc from Wells to Weir is the arc from fear to competence, from mythology to engineering. Each generation's Mars reflected what that generation most needed to project outward — imperial guilt, Cold War dread, environmental anxiety, or faith in human ingenuity. As actual Mars exploration accelerates, with Perseverance roving Jezero Crater and crewed mission concepts under active development, the next great Mars novel may be written by someone who has read mission reports as carefully as they have read Bradbury. That would be fitting. Science fiction and Mars science have always been in conversation.