JF Ptak Science Books Post 1965
In this episode of the Strange Things in the Sky Department there are a number of posts dealing with Strange Earths–sometimes there are strange Earths int he sky, above the Earth. And so on. In this small offering we see a green-sea earth viewed by Martians from, well, Mars. It is the cover art for sheet music “A Signal from Mars”, composed by Raymond Taylor and arranged by E.T. Paull in 1901. Somehow the Earth is being illuminated by a small canned power source of high energy light that must have the energy of a pulsar, and there’s a five-pointed star that is added for unknown effects. There’s mot much more that can be said, except that the music (sampled below), which is a ragtime march, has nothing to do with Mars so far as I can tell. Mars was certainly in the news when this sheet music was published in 1901–Percy Lowell had taken it upon himself to interpret Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 of “canali” on Mars as “canals” rather than “channels” and convinced himself that what he was seeing with his superior instrumentation were indeed structures built by engineers of another race on another planet. So, perhaps “A Signal from Mars” was much like the Atomic Motels in 1945 and Radium Cakes in 1897–folks just used a popular name in the news to excite interest in their own work via association with repetitive references.
[Source: the Library of Congress] This is a detail from:
Another curious image of Martians with telescopes comes from Puck magazine in 1904:
[Source: the Library of Congress.]
Martians pointing telescopes at the Earth is a much more preferable situation than Martians pointing gigantic cannons:
This is the cover art by the fabulous Frank R. Paul for Stanley D. Bell’s “Martian Guns” found in the January 1932 issue of Wonder Stories.
There’s really no way to determine how big the gun is except to say
that it is probably “big”–there’s just nothing to place the thing in
perspective, as the figures in the foreground, being Martian, don’t have
a specific height. They could be 6′ tall, or 60′–perhaps they’re
only 1/10 of an inch tale, and the projectile they’re firing to the
earth is so devastatingly powerful that size doesn’t matter.