Mars in Science Fiction

Long before any spacecraft reached Mars, the planet was already colonized — by the human imagination. For more than a century, Mars has been the canvas onto which we project our hopes and anxieties about the future: a dying civilization signaling across the void, a frontier to be conquered, a fragile world to be protected, a mirror in which we examine what it means to be human somewhere other than Earth.

That imaginative history has shaped the real one. Percival Lowell's mistaken canals seeded a century of fiction; H.G. Wells turned Mars into a source of existential dread; and in 1992 Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars treated colonization with such scientific and political seriousness that it still shapes how engineers and advocates think today. When Andy Weir's The Martian became a cultural phenomenon, its obsessive accuracy sent a generation of readers toward real Mars science.

The works collected here — novels, films, television, and games — are not just entertainment. They are the ongoing argument about what Mars means and what we should do with it. Explore how storytellers from ancient mythmakers to modern filmmakers have imagined the Red Planet, and how those visions continue to steer the machines and missions we send there for real.