# Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett  P. Serviss (1898)



## AE35Unit (Sep 15, 2010)

*Edison's Conquest of Mars* ​ This 'sequel to The War of the Worlds' was written in the same year as Wells' marvellous tale but by another author-Garrett P. Serviss. 

Serviss was an astronomer and scientist who wrote many non-fiction works  on astronomy, both for beginners and the more advanced astronomer-think  of him as an early Sir Patrick Moore! (who himself has written SF!)
Anyway the premise of this story is that an American contingent decide  to make a trip to Mars before the Martians can return for a second  attack, and needing the ships to make the trip they turn to inventor  Thomas Edison to design  the ships- also serving as a pilot. On the way  they make an odd discovery on an asteroid that would surely have a great  effect on Earth's economy! Also they discover a race of giants living  on a well known asteroid-very bizarre!
Despite the subtitle 'the sequel to H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds'  the  two novels couldn't be more different! While Wells's martians were  'mere  round bodies with no arms nor legs-quite repulsive', Serviss  describes  them as giant humanoids with larger heads, 4 limbs like  humans the heads having odd bumps depending on their role-warriors or  scientists, a deliniation that reminded me of the lives of Bees!
 Also his Mars is a watery  place not much different to Earth, rather  than the dry barren world of  the former book-in Serviss's book it is  somewhat reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom.

Despite such differences and a certain naivete (the crew have no radio,  and the individual ships must communicate with each other via flags and  lights!) it made  for  a good read with decent science,  and at times it  is amazing that it was written before 1900!
If yiou fancy reading it you can get it here, free:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19141
The copy I downloaded though, with images, had a glitch in as much as some of the images overlaid the text making it hard to read where such an image appeared-the html-ePub conversion done in error.





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