As the neighbouring planet most plausibly imagined as habitable, Mars inevitably gripped the modern imagination as advances in astronomy made more information about its surface and possible life available. Like those ‘unknown’ regions of Africa in the Imperial Romance, Mars became a blank canvas upon which the European imagination could project its fantasies and nightmares concerning alternative societies, cultures and ways of being: either as counterparts to human life on Earth, or as threats to it.

Image: Mars Globe by Emmy Ingeborg Brun (1909) after Percival Lowell. Public Domain. Image ©Ex Carta