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Heir Raktus
Posts: 2915
  • Posted On: Mar 9 2008 8:40am
What is the name of the book set in what must have been the early 1900's where a dying Martian civilization builds canals to slow the ever expanding desert thats swallowing their planet?
Daemon Hyfe
Posts: 2788
  • Posted On: Mar 9 2008 12:25pm
Not sure.

Only books involving Martians I've ever read are The Martian Chronicles and Stranger in a Strange Land.
Omnae
Posts: 4195
  • Posted On: Mar 10 2008 1:22am
Martian Chronicles was the first thing that came to mind but a search in wikipedia also had these:

George Griffiths' A Honeymoon in Space (1900) describes the canals as the remnants of gulfs and straits "widened and deepened and lengthened by... Martian labour".

Edgar Rice Burroughs' influential A Princess of Mars (1912) describes an almost entirely desert Mars, with only one small body of liquid water on the surface (though swamps and forests appear in the sequels). The canals, or waterways as Burroughs calls them, are still irrigation works, but these are surrounded by wide cultivated tracts of farmland which make their visibility somewhat credible.

Otis Adelbert Kline's Outlaws of Mars (1933) has multiple parallel canals, surrounded by walls and terraces, and describes the construction of the canals by Martian machines.

In C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the "canals" (handramit in Martian) are actually vast rifts in the surface of a nearly airless, desert Mars, in which the only breathable atmosphere and water have collected and where life is possible, the rest of Mars being entirely dead.
Heir Raktus
Posts: 2915
  • Posted On: Mar 10 2008 2:40am
I saw the wiki thing, but it doesn't sound like what I think would be it. The one I'm thinking of was written back when it was argued that Mars actually had canals as a proof of intelligent life.