For the optimist, aliens are ET, or Mork, or Mr Spock. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to detect whether a person’s outlook is positive or negative is to ask them how they feel about aliens. So he is both Martian and martial: that is, of the planet Mars, and bellicose to boot. Unusually, for one of Bugs Bunny’s nemeses, he is actually quite alarming, possessing as he does a degree of competence which eludes, say, Elmer Fudd. It doesn’t hang down to his knees as a centurion’s might have done, but fans out like a demented tutu. He also sports a skirt, divided by slits. Marvin’s outfit is a plumed helmet, like a Roman soldier might have worn, though in a bright, alien green. The martial nature of the planet’s inhabitants was perfectly clear to Chuck Jones, who presented Marvin the Martian (though he didn’t yet have that name) in Haredevil Hare, in 1948. The red colour was unavoidably reminiscent of war to the ancients, and thus Mars shares its name with the Roman god of war. Mars is visible to the naked eye, so it’s no surprise that it drew the attention of early astronomers and story-tellers. Her story has texture and detail, right down to her weary horse.īut the moon was only the beginning of our extraterrestrial inspiration. In other words, the moon-goddess isn’t just a flowery shorthand for the moon. After a long night dragging the moon across the firmament, the horse looks exhausted: his eyes bulge, his nostrils flare, his jaw sags open in a desperate bid for air. One of the most celebrated sculptures of the Parthenon Frieze – which once decorated the Acropolis of Athens – is that of Selene’s horse from the east pediment. It begins with gods: Helios, the god of the sun, and his sister, Selene, goddess of the moon, who both traverse the sky with their chariots. Whatever objects the Greeks could see in the sky, they constructed stories about them. The king of the moon and the king of the sun are engaged in all-out war. The unusual steeds are only the first strange creatures they encounter: a short while later, warriors arrive on fleas the size of 12 elephants. Once they arrive on the moon, our heroes are startled to see men riding three-headed vultures as though they were horses. Lucian is often cited as the predecessor of Jules Verne, but he neatly presages Dorothy’s transport to Oz, too. In his True History, he takes his heroes on a trip to the moon, which they reach after being carried into the air by a whirlwind that lasts for seven days.
The 2nd-Century satirist, Lucian, can lay a pretty convincing claim to writing the first science fiction.
While many of us look to the heavens and wonder how many stars there could be, and how far away they are, others look up and think: I wonder who lives there? And do they have antennae? Some of the earliest storytellers were inspired – just as modern storytellers are – by looking up at the night skies.
0 kommentar(er)
