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The place held by the planet Mars in our literary imagination has prompted the National Endowment for the Humanities to award Professor Robert Crossley of the English Department a $24,000 grant to research and write a book to be called Imagining Mars: A Cultural History.
Ever since humans began looking into the night sky and noticed the presence of the celestial bodies, they have been creating myths, theologies, and stories about Mars. But it is only in the last few hundred years that a body of scientific knowledge about Mars has accumulated. As scientists understood (and misunderstood) what they were observing, their reports fired the imaginations of writers who used the idea of Mars as a vessel to serve their varied literary purposes.
"I've been intrigued by the question of why so many science fiction writers wrote about Mars," says Crossley, "and how informed the fiction was-when is the literary imagination in sync with scientific understanding, when is it not, and why? If the authors didn't care about portraying Mars scientifically, what were they up to?" asks Crossley.
Crossley says that our own political, economic, and social concerns are reflected in much of the literature about Mars. As an example, he points to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which he observes, was "designed not to predict the future, but to reflect the anxieties, aspirations, and values of Americans in 1950."
Imagining Mars will survey the literature about Mars with special emphasis on the period from 1877 to the present, and will include chapters on the how Mars has been imagined by writers as a site for utopia, an extension of the American frontier, and as a laboratory for ecological experiment.
He will also survey the accumulation of scientific evidence about Mars, and its influence on the literature. One individual central to the book is Bostonian Percival Lowell, an amateur astronomer who triggered a wave of interest in Mars with his writings on a Martian civilization "heroically resisting extinction" by engineering the "canals" observed on the planet's surface. The question of the canals' existence was finally laid to rest by the photographic evidence provided by NASA's explorations of Mars in the 1960s.
Crossley traces his interest in science and the imagination back to his days as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, when he wrote an essay on the roles of the humanities and the sciences in education. He came to UMass Boston in 1972. An interest in British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon turned into a fifteen years project resulting in three books: An Olaf Stapledon Reader, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, and Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, (1913-1919). His work on Stapledon was also supported by an Endowment grant in 1989-90.
The Endowment awarded only twelve grants this year to individuals in Massachusetts, and of those twelve, Crossley's was one of two to be awarded in the field of literature and one of two awarded to individuals at a public institution.