Fighters from Mars

Fighters from Mars consists of two unauthorized edited versions of The War of the Worlds serial that appeared in the Cosmopolitan Magazine between April and December 1897.

Fighters from Mars
AuthorOriginal H. G. Wells, edited versions unknown
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
Publication date
1897–1898
Preceded byThe War of the Worlds 
Followed byEdison's Conquest of Mars 

The first version appeared in the New York Evening Journal between December 5, 1897 and January 11, 1898, and was entitled Fighters From Mars, or The War of the Worlds. The second version appeared in the Boston Post between January 8, 1898 and February 1898, and was entitled Fighters from Mars, or The War of the Worlds in and near Boston.

These versions change the settings to the local areas where the newspapers were on sale, and also edited out most of the passages containing science, science details pertaining to ordinary people and problematic actions by the narrator. Even though they are considered unauthorized it does seem that Wells may have inadvertently given the go ahead to the versions, as can be seen from a letter that was published in the magazine The Critic in March 1898. Where Wells states: "Yet it is possible that this affair is not so much downright wickedness as a terrible mistake."

In each paper the sequel Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss was published after Fighters from Mars had finished.

Legacy

Rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard read both Fighters from Mars and Edison's Conquest of Mars and credited them with helping form his early interest in developing rockets for interplanetary exploration.[1]

gollark: > It is widely believed that the (computable) numbers √2, π, and e are normal, but a proof remains elusive.
gollark: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
gollark: It's not proven that they're equally distributed.
gollark: For an example of something which is infinite but does *not* contain all possible number strings, think about, I don't know, 0.010110111... (infinite sequence of zeroes and then an increasing number of ones). That doesn't contain all possible number strings because it only contains 0 and 1.
gollark: It actually hasn't been proven to contain any possible number string.

References
  1. Goddard, Robert (1970), ""Material for an Autobiography of R. H. Goddard"", The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, Volume I: 1898-1924, New York: McGraw-Hill Education, p. 7

Sources
  • Fighters From Mars, or The War of the Worlds (1897-1898). New York: New York Evening Journal. 1897.
  • Fighters From Mars, or The War of the Worlds in and near Boston (1898). Boston: The Boston Evening Post newspaper. 1898.
  • The Critic, March 1898, Vol. 29, page 284.
  • Fighters From Mars. Steven Mollmann, blog entry April 21, 2009.
  • Review of sequel (with reference to Fighters From Mars)
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.