Russian Mars: Three Expeditions to the Red Planet

The first fantastic tales about flights to Mars were written in Russia at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. Yes—imagine it: half a century before Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” and ten years before Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “The Princess of Mars,” three Russian expeditions had already landed on the Red Planet! Each of them used different methods of travel—from flying machines to mind-swapping (hello, Sheckley). They all saw very different Martians: from people with green hair and vicious dwarfs to intelligent crab-squid beings standing on bird-like legs. But at the same time, all three writers agreed on one thing: our neighbors in the universe are convinced vegetarians. In their fantastic stories, Leonid Afanasyev, Ananii Lyakidè, and Porfirii Infantyev predicted contactless payments, electric buses, high-speed trains, a smart home with robot cleaners and a warm floor, access by fingerprint or palm print, remote grocery ordering, plastic knives and forks—and many other inventions familiar to us from the 21st century. Of course, the first experiments by Russian fantasists may now sound somewhat naive, but the adventures of our great-great-grandparents on a distant planet are still far more interesting than the picture the Mars rovers send to Earth today.

Leonid Afanasyev “In a New World” (1901)
Ananii Lyakidè “In the Ocean of Stars” (1892)
Porfirii Infantyev “On Another Planet” (1901)