Mars the Divine (Empire of Time Series) by John Argo

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Runners: Escape Prison World or Die (Empire of Time SF Series Novel#6) by John Argo

Page 36.

London Aside (Margin Note 1)

Mars the Divine (Book 4: Empire of Time series) by John Argo[Comment aside from one who has traveled in time and can now append information then lacking at Tatnall's evening study:

None of us realized it on this frigid November 1892 night, but within two years there would be quite a stir about Mars. The sciences in general, and nature, were being much discussed. Darwin's biological postulations that supplemented the geological discoveries of Lyell and others were upsetting long-established dogmas. In 1883, nature had shown her power by blasting aloft the tropical island of Krakatoa, so noisily that church bells rang in London hours later when the blast reached around the world. The Frenchman Jules Verne was a generation ahead of Wells in publishing scientific adventures. The world had watched in awe as the Americans fought the 'first modern war,' so much so that Verne, impressed by American advances in artillery, had in 1865 published From the Earth to the Moon, citing American technology. In 1894, Mars was due to swing very close to the Earth, and the world's latest telescopes would be trained on the Red Planet—notably Schiaparelli. This leading astronomer, working from Berlin and the observatory at Brera in Italy, had begun making the most detailed studies of the Martian surface ever, from the 1870s onward. His theories on canali ('channels', not 'canals') led romantics to depict entire civilizations like those of Ray Bradbury in the mid-20th Century. The eccentric astronomer Nicolas Flammarion, in Paris, had already published a bestseller kindling worldwide interest in extraterrestrial beings. Percival Lowell's observations at Flagstaff would take Schiaparelli's work a great leap further in postulating an advanced Martian civilization. In 1894, a French observer would claim he had seen lights on Mars. Vast changes in human history took place at precisely in this era. Most notably, the human population skyrocketed due to new advances in sanitation, lower infant mortality rates, food preservation, technological advances, and the like. Simple things like hygienic plumbing and public health awareness would cut cholera and other diseases dramatically. Air travel and the automobile revolutionized not only the coming and going of people, but the carrying and bringing of things. Chesterton had remarked upon the tendency of Utopians to devote endless discussion to the means by which bread should be delivered to their ideal societies (by balloon, carriage, or whatever) and all too little time to how the bread would actually be gotten. The age of rapid transportation and free capital solved such questions in a grimy but efficient manner. The late 1800s were an age that had been at relative peace for some decades, and its denizens tended to be more optimistic about technology and the future, than had they known about the looming nightmare of the century with its endless butchery and terror.

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