Introduction

At the end of the nineteenth century, “news from Mars” excited scientists, writers, journalists, and the general public. The discovery of the lines on the Martian surface and the suggestion that these were “canals” cut by intelligent Martians prompted The War of the Worlds in a newspaper serial in 1897, describing the invasion of peaceful Victorian England by technologically superior, “unsympathetic” Martians. Wells's monsters wreak havoc in Surrey and London with their heat rays and black poison gas, before Earth's bacteria destroy them.

What is little known is that in the same year that The War of the Worlds was first read in England, a German writer, Kurd Laßwitz, quite independently published a book about Martians coming to Earth, entitled Auf zwei Planeten. Laßwitz, a scholar, physicist, and humanist, came up with a vision at least as exciting and thought-provoking as Wells's. His Martians come to Earth as benevolent culture-bearers. They have reached a highly advanced stage of technical and scientific development, but, more important, they have reached a moral maturity that makes them appear almost godlike in the eyes of men. Their home world is presented as a technological and social utopia, and it is this advanced state that they want to share with us, albeit on their terms.