Martian
Entry updated 7 September 2023. Tagged: Theme.
The title poem of Craig Raine's A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (coll 1979 chap), with its invigorating reimagining of the commonplace as seen and very literally described from an Alien perspective, inspired a 1980s fad for such Martian or "Martianist" displacements; Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) by Martin Amis is one example. The general concept of achieving new awareness by seeing the world through fresh eyes is of course much older, and was central to many of G K Chesterton's fantastic and borderline-fantastic parables such as Manalive (1912). The notion of a specifically Martian viewpoint was anticipated in A D Condo's Comic strip Mr Skygack, From Mars (1907-1917) with its titular alien observer of human quirks. It reappears in "Life on Earth" (November/December 1964 The Rockefeller Institute Review; cut vt "Life on Earth (by a Martian)" in A Random Walk in Science, anth 1971, ed R L Weber) by the Austrian-born US biologist Paul A Weiss, a scientific parable in which Martian observers decide from visual evidence that automobiles are the dominant form of life on Earth, with their later-observed human occupants regarded first as "peristaltic internal organs" and later as parasites (see Parasitism and Symbiosis). The humanoids of Nathan W Pyle's Strange Planet (graph coll 2019) discuss quotidian affairs in a distancing vocabulary that is skewed towards comic literalism. There is a broader trope of a naive-seeming visitor from elsewhere or elsewhen whose devastating simplicity highlights the follies and shortcomings of Earth society: an example with a strong Martian aspect, since the human protagonist Valentine Michael Smith was reared by Martians and is identified in the opening line as a Martian, is Robert A Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; text restored 1991).
Similarly distanced viewpoints are frequently invoked in the context of Ruins and Futurity, as for example when future archaeologists struggle to understand twentieth-century consumer society "relics" in David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries (graph 1979), or the New Zealander imagined by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) idly sketches the ruined architecture of once-great London.
For discussion of the Red Planet itself, and its many fictional natives, visitors, explorers and colonists, see Mars. [DRL]
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