[1] Not quite including the confectionery, which was the surname of the originator; he came to England from the USA, and invented M&Ms too. That stands for 'Mars and Mars'.
[2] Also egg-laying. Jack, reading Burroughs when young, was disturbed by the idea of their marriage bed ...
who made long hops and landed on his nose, the hypnotic predator that showed you your most desirable images, and attempts at a gosh-wow desert ecology. Then there were stories of Martians coming to Earth, pretending to be human ... and humans attempting to interact with a more or less mystical ancient Martian civilisation.
The best known, perhaps the best crafted of these romanticmystical portrayals of crude, lumbering Earthmen, insensitive to the ethereal beauties of the Martian crystal cities, were Ray Bradbury's. In the 1950s and 1960s his tales were read by many outside the fantasy/SF world, and they appeared in widely read magazines like Argosy as well as in SF pulps in railway station bookstores. They laid the mystical ancient Martian foundation for Robert Heinlein to build the most potent of all these Martian tales, Stranger in a Strange Land. Michael Valentine Smith had been a foundling on Mars, brought up and trained in their culture by the ancient Martians. He came to Earth, founded a commune of friends -'Water Brothers'- and started a religion whose 'grokking the fullness' of everyday events, from sex to science to swimming, spread to communities of readers. There was a tragic, well-publicised association with the murderous Manson killers, who had used this book as their mantra, but this didn't harm sales, and the ancient mystical Martians became the standard image.
Then we learned that Mars has no atmosphere to speak of, that it is cold, dry, laden with frozen carbon dioxide, to the extent that the 'icecaps' were probably dry ice. Our machines visited Mars, looked for `life', and found strange chemistry because we inevitably asked the wrong questions. The `canals' died in the public mind, replaced by craters and gigantic volcanoes.
We have now visited again, and it seems that ancient, wet Mars may have been a reality, there may be at least bacterial life forms under the sand ... Much is not yet clear, but what is clear is that our image of Mars has changed yet again.
Each of us has a variety of associations with Mars. When we weave these many different interpretations and imaginations together, we become a different, wiser kind of creature. As for all of our different Marses ... well, those are toys of our imaginations, as we grok the red planet's fullness.
If Mars seems a bit of a digression, consider those twin icons of evolution, the archaeopteryx and the dodo. In folk-evolutionary thinking, the archaeopteryx is the ancestor of all the birds, and the dodo is the bird that went extinct about 400 years ago. `As dead as a dodo.' Again, our thinking about these iconic creatures is heavily daubed with unchallenged assumptions, myths, and fictional associations.
We mentioned archaeopteryx in Chapter 36 (`Running from Dinosaurs') of The Science of Discworld, second edition. We think of it as the ancestral bird because it is a dinosaur-like animal with birdlike feathers ... and it was the first one to be found. However, by the time of archaeopteryx there were plenty of genuine birds around, among them the diving bird Ichthyornis. Poor old archaeopteryx arrived on the scene far too late to be `the' bird ancestor.
The recent amazing 'dinobird' discoveries in China - transitional creatures part way between dinosaurs and birds - have totally changed scientists' view of bird evolution. At some stage some dinosaurs started to develop feathers, though they couldn't then fly. The feathers had some other function, probably keeping the animal warm. Later, they turned out to be useful in wings. Some dinobirds effectively had four wings - two at the front, two at the back. It took a while before the standard `bird' body-plan settled down.
As for the dodo - we all know what it looked like, right? Fat little thing with a big hooked beak ... Such a famously extinct creature must be well documented in the scientific literature.
No, it's not. What we have is about ten paintings and half a stuffed specimen.[1]' We have more specimens of the archaeopteryx than we
[1] Rajith Dissanayake, 'What did the Dodo look like?' Biologist 51 (2004), 165-8.
do of the dodo. Why? The dodo went extinct, remember? And it did so before science really got interested in it. So few people recorded it, or studied it. It was there, not requiring special attention, and then it wasn't, and it was too late to start studying it. It isn't even certain what colour it was - many books say `grey', but it was more likely brown.
Yet, we all know exactly what it looked like. How come? Because we all saw it illustrated by Sir John Tenniel in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Say no more.
The great strength of Discworld narrative is that it makes fun of just those places where `education' has left us feeling a bit vulnerable: where we change the subject in the pub, or when our five-year-old asks us those probing questions. A running joke throughout the Science of Discworld series is what grammarians call 'privatives'. These are concepts that our minds seem quite happy with, even though a moment's thought shows that they're complete nonsense. Chapter 22 of The Science of Discworld discussed this notion, and we recap briefly.
It is entirely normal to speak of `cold coming in the window' or `ignorance spreading among the masses'. The opposites of these concepts, heat and knowledge, are real, but we've dignified their absence with words that do not correspond to actual things. In Discworld, we find 'knurd', which is super-sober, as far from ordinary sober as drunk is in the alcoholic direction. There are jokes about the speed of dark, which must be faster than the speed of light because dark has to get out of the way. On Discworld, Death exists as a (perhaps the) major character, but on Roundworld that word refers only to the absence of life.
People habitually label the absence of something with a word, instead of (or as well as) its presence: such words are the aforementioned privatives.
Sometimes this habit leads to mistakes. The classic case was the label `phlogiston', the substance that appears to be emitted by burning materials. You can see it coming out as smoke, flame, foam ... It took many years to demonstrate that burning was an intake of oxygen, not the emission of phlogiston. During the intervening period, many people had demonstrated that when metals burned they got heavier, and had therefore argued that phlogiston had negative weight. These were clever people; they weren't being stupid. The phlogiston idea really did work - until oxygen supplanted its explanations, and alchemists suddenly found that the paths into rational chemistry were easier.
Privatives are often very tempting. In What is Life?, a short book published in 1944, the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger asked precisely that question. At that time the Second Law of Thermodynamics - everything runs down, disorder always increases - was thought to be a fundamental principle about the universe. It implied that eventually everything would become a grey, cool soup of maximum entropy, maximum disorder: a `heat death' in which nothing interesting could happen. So in order to explain how, in such a universe, life could occur, Schrodinger claimed that life could only put off its individual tiny heat death by imbibing negative entropy, or 'negentropy'. Many physicists still believe this: that life is unnatural, selfishly causing entropy to increase more in its vicinity than it would otherwise do, by eating negentropy.
This tendency to deny what is happening before our very eyes is part of what it is to be human. Discworld exploits it for humorous and serious purposes. By building Discworld flat, Terry pokes fun at flat-Earthers; rather, he recruits his readers into a `we all know the Earth is round, don't we?' fellowship. The Omnians' belief in a round Disc, in Small Gods, adds a further twist.