"...Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our planet with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us...."

Yes, I'm listening to Jeff Wayne's version on 'War of the Worlds'.

Wells's opening narration has to be one of the most wonderfully chilling things I think I've ever read. On the face of it, it breaks every narrative rule in the book (third person, passive voice, no dialogue, pure exposition) and yet, I find it impossible to read without shivering.

Interestingly, for its day, 'The War of the Worlds' was also scientifically-plausible. The Victorian Mars was believed to be a living world, if likely rather a dry and desolate one. Indeed there was even some evidence of supposed activity on the surface - the infamous 'cannali'. (Actually 'channels' - the word was mistranslated into English as 'canals', which are a rather different entity from that which Schiapperelli meant to imply!)

Of course, Science Has Marched On (as it's rather prone to). Our Mars is a nearly-airless, lifeless world. If anything does live on it  - and there can't be very much, else we would long since have known of it - then it couldn't be more than a few microbes, perhaps huddling in some warm, wet reservoir beneath the surface. Our Mars almost certainly did have liquid water, warmth and air, but that phase was billions of years ago. Our Mars is just too small.

Its core cooled and froze out aeons ago, stilling the planet's internal dynamo. With no global magnetic field, there was nothing to shield it from the solar wind, and the storms of the Sun slowly stripped away its air. In addition, without plate tectonics, the atmospheric cycle slowly ground to a holt. Mar's air was gradually lost to sediments deposited at the beds of the Noachian oceans. Then those oceans themselves gradually evaporated, their vapour rising into the stratosphere, where solar ultraviolet broke apart the heavy water molecules. The light hydrogen atoms would simply have escaped into space, Mars's low gravity being too weak to hold them. The oxygen would have been lost into compounds by reaction with other materials in the Marian crust and air - oxygen is a notably reactive gas! (And as well it is - if it were any less reactive, our entire human metabolic system would be quite impossible.)

Over the millennia, these processes ran their course. Mars was left dry, desolate and lifeless. If there ever was anything living there, it does not seem to have been able to survive the transition from Blue Mars to Red Mars. Today, Mars averages something like -60 Celsius and it has a surface air pressure of a mere 7.6 millibars, or less than 1% that of the Earth. The only remaining water are some suspected permafrosts and the two small, bright caps of ice at either pole. There is also a breath or so of water vapour in the thin atmosphere, but not enough to form more than a single pond. Our Mars is a cold, cratered orb, staring blindly into the heavens.

Still, one has to wonder.

"...The chances of anything coming from Mars, he said, were a million to one..."