ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a relatively neglected aspect of the legacies of science, the seemingly autonomous development of planetary science in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In The War of the Worlds, evolution produces a monstrosity at once obscene and superior: a realisation of nightmarish aspects of the Frankenstein myth and the threat of a competing race. The War of the Worlds owed much of its immediate impact and subsequent popularity to Wells's shrewd understanding of the scientific, ecological and sociopolitical implications of nineteenth-century speculation about life on Mars. In contrast to the spate of utopias set on Mars by other late nineteenth-century science- fiction writers, H. G. Wells recognised the literary potential of the canal controversy, touched off in 1895 by the American astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell promoted a philosophy of science, a 'chain of reasoning', that led him to his conclusion that it was 'probable that upon the surface of Mars we see the effects of local intelligence'.
