The Martians
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A TIME Must-Read Book of 2025
A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
Top Ten Best-Reviewed Nonfiction of 2025 (Literary Hub)
“There Is Life on the Planet Mars” ―New York Times, December 9, 1906
This New York Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania.
At the center of Baron’s historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed “canals” etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books.
While at first people treated the Martians whimsically—Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled—the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was “no escape from the conviction” that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile’s Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals’ existence.
Triumph quickly yielded to tragedy. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell’s critics, whose withering attacks gathered steam and eventually wrecked the man and his theory—but not the fervor he had started. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world’s sense of its place in the universe would never be the same.
Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public’s imagination. Many see Mars as civilization’s destiny—the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species—but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new. The Martians is a scintillating and necessary reminder that while we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves.
“David Baron has produced a short, twinkling book about the origins of Mars mania. . . . In Baron’s true tale, reputations rise and fall, and ego distorts like a smudged lens.”
— New York Times
“[The Martians] shows how fantastical beliefs gained purchase in a pre-Facebook age . . . Still, if Baron deftly illustrates the historical roots of collective phantasms, his book is ultimately most interesting for what it says about the timelessness of our shared fascination with the stars, and Mars in particular.”
— New Yorker
“Baron gives a briskly written account of planetary intrigue and obsession. . . . ‘The Martians’ is a well-told tale of cultural and scientific history.”
— Wall Street Journal
“The Martians is not only a captivating look at recent history, but also a poignant cautionary tale, offering hard-to-ignore parallels between the alien enthusiasts of the Gilded Age and the conspiracy theorists of today.”
— TIME
“[The Martians] details the period in our history—the turn of the century from 1800s to 1900s—when so many people were absolutely certain that there was intelligent life on Mars. . . . It’s a wonderful book. It’s so eminently readable.”
— Alan Alda, “Clear and Vivid” podcast
“The Martians, David Baron’s riveting exploration of the Mars craze of the late 1800s and early 1900s, is a case study in the formation of unfounded beliefs. . . . Baron is a terrific storyteller, and he has a sensational story to tell, replete with a host of memorable characters (and more than a few romances). . . . The tale of the Mars craze has immense contemporary relevance.”
— Cass R. Sunstein, University Professor at Harvard Law School, from The New Republic
“The Martians is . . . a story about how an idea takes hold and catches the imagination, about the people and institutions that make it possible. . . . What makes Baron such an entertaining writer is that he understands that the story he is telling is ultimately a romance, ‘a love story,’ as he puts it in his preface, ‘an account of when we, the people of Earth, fell hard for another planet and projected our fantasies, desires, and ambitions onto an alien world.”
— Michael A. Elliott, President of Amherst College, from Amherst Magazine
“[A] convivial and rigorously researched history of the first Martian craze . . . The Martians is fundamentally a portrait of the man who turned Mars into the night sky’s red Rorschach blot.”
— New York Review of Books
“The Martians is a fascinating tale that’s beautifully told; Baron is a lucid and elegant writer. The book is also rich with illustrations . . . that bring the story to life.”
— Christian Science Monitor
“In The Martians, science writer David Baron unpacks the strange but true story of early 20th-century Mars mania. . . . Baron’s telling is brisk, weirdly hilarious, and quietly profound. Beneath the UFOs and dry canal beds is a story about what happens when hope, ego, and the desire to believe collide.”
— Military.com
“David Baron’s ‘The Martians’ . . . tells a fascinating tale of a sweet delusion.”
— Chicago Tribune
“The Martians is a richly detailed book that charts the development of our current scientific and artistic ideas about Mars through the story of one man’s personal obsession with the larger universe. . . . [I]nspiring and thought-provoking.”
— American Scientist
“Mars mania gripped the world a century ago, and this witty new book explains why.”
— Los Angeles Times
“David Baron spins a clever tale.”
— Associated Press
“The latest page-turner from David Baron . . . The Martians reveals forgotten photographs, letters and news clippings that brilliantly bring to life the mass delusion that gripped America and revealed a thirst for a better world.”
— Forbes
“It’s delightful to read a book in which the author seems to be having fun. That would certainly describe David Baron’s The Martians, a brisk and informative account of the quarter-century-long Mars frenzy. . . . All in all, a delectable Martian chronicle.”
— Yale Alumni Magazine
“[Baron’s] storytelling skills and astute research instincts drive the tale relentlessly. Even more adroitly, he introduces a remarkable parade of principals. Some of them are brilliant, some eccentric, and a good many are both.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books
“The Martians is a delightfully detailed and shockingly tender history that captures the converging powers of imagination—suggesting that humanity’s desire to know, understand, and connect with the world around it, while potentially flawed in execution, can lead to profound and lasting societal change.”
— Las Vegas Review of Books
“[Baron’s] tale of the rise and fall of belief in Martians resonates because versions of these problems are still with us today. . . . Whether readers pick up this book to explore the history of Mars in culture, to revisit an instructive moment when mistaken beliefs held sway, or to find out how Lowell could spin uncertain data into a captivating vision, and what it ultimately took to unseat those ideas, Baron delivers.”
— Nature Astronomy
“Author David Baron explores the fascinating history of Mars mania that swept the globe starting in the 1890s. . . . This charming and colorful work of history offers food for thought, and it’s also just a fun read, and Baron makes a strong case that the impact of Mars mania continues to this day.”
— Chicago Public Library
“The Martians unpacks the strange and wondrous period when many people truly believed that life on Mars was not only possible but proven. Once upon a time, Martians were in fact, a fact.”
— Jennifer Martin, 5280 Magazine
“As propulsive and richly detailed as an Erik Larson history, The Martians is a vivid account of how imagination can blur into conviction.”
— Apple Books
“[Baron’s] highly enjoyable book makes a strong case for the proposition that brainy Martians exist only in the imagination of Earthlings.”
— Washington Post
“An enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This absorbing, illustrated account will transport science fiction and astronomy buffs back to when people dreamed of life on Mars.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
“It’s a lively story that will be entirely new to most modern readers. . . . Baron is a clear, rigorous storyteller.”
— Air Mail
“A tale astonishing and improbable. Ego! Madness! Tesla! . . . Impressively researched and perfectly executed, The Martians is a fizzing terrific read.”
— Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars
“David Baron, America’s premier scribe writing at the intersection of astronomy and social history, captures the Red Planet Craze in all its quirky and fabulous weirdness. . . . The Martians makes for enlightening and insightful reading, but it’s also just plain fun.”
— Hampton Sides, author of The Wide Wide Sea
“With The Martians, David Baron has ventured into the past, back to the dawn of modern science fiction, and returned with a vivid tale that is equal parts entertaining and instructive. ”
— Darrell Hartman, author of Battle of Ink and Ice
“David Baron beautifully captures all the drama, humor, and sheer craziness at the turn of the 20th century when America went bonkers over the possibility of life on Mars. Well researched and thoroughly entertaining.”
— Marcia Bartusiak, author of The Day We Found the Universe
“David Baron’s exuberant book tells the story of a seemingly alien race—Americans of a century or so ago—that, on closer inspection, bears an uncanny resemblance to us today. The rich had gotten fantastically richer, life was unsettled by an array of new technologies, and in their frustration people began looking elsewhere for answers.”
— Russell Shorto, author of Taking Manhattan
“Based on meticulous and original research, gifted science writer David Baron has provided, in brilliant prose, a fascinating account of the scientific and cultural phenomenon known as ‘Mars mania.’ . . . A book anyone who loves Mars is sure to love.”
— William Sheehan, Mars historian and coauthor of Discovering Mars
“In his skillful tour of the era, Baron introduces us to a colorful cast of astronomers, inventors, and kooks, as they projected both the dreams and prejudices of a rapidly transforming society out into the solar system.”
— Peter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World
“David Baron’s book reveals the amazing backstory of what led to today’s Mars exploration program and the place that Mars holds in our collective consciousness.”
— Bruce Jakosky, project lead, NASA’s MAVEN mission to Mars (2003–2021)
“David Baron has written a scintillating and revealing story of Percival Lowell’s claims of artificial canals on Mars and the impact of these claims on science and popular culture. . . . The book is an original contribution to scholarship that will also appeal to a broad audience.”
— Steven J. Dick, Former NASA Chief Historian