Sunday, July 17, 2011

Conquest of Mars

It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the facts at my disposal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity and to those who were witnesses of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form.

The Martians had nearly all perished, not through our puny efforts, but in consequence of disease, and the few survivors fled in one of their projectile cars, inflicting their cruelest blow in the act of departure.

They possessed a mysterious explosive, of unimaginable puissance, with whose aid they set their car in motion for Mars from a point in Bergen County, N. J., just back of the Palisades.

The force of the explosion may be imagined when it is recollected that they had to give the car a velocity of more than seven miles per second in order to overcome the attraction of the earth and the resistance of the atmosphere.

The shock destroyed all of New York that had not already fallen a prey, and all the buildings yet standing in the surrounding towns and cities fell in one far-circling ruin.

The Palisades tumbled in vast sheets, starting a tidal wave in the Hudson that drowned the opposite shore.

Conquest of Mars

"Actually, it was a book that the prisoner produced, and then he proceeded to teach us, as well as he could, several words of his language."		Edison's Conquest of Mars, by Garrett Putnam Serviss (1851–1929), is one of the many science fiction novels published in the nineteenth century. Although science fiction was not at the time thought of as a distinct literary genre, it was a very popular literary form, with almost every fiction magazine regularly publishing science fiction stories and novels. "Edison's Conquest of Mars" was published in 1898 as an unauthorized sequel to H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, but did not achieve the fame of its predecessor. The book was endorsed by Thomas Edison, the hero of the book -- though not by Wells. (Summary from Wikipedia)

LibriVox recording of Edison's Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss. Read by LibriVox Volunteers. For more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit LibriVox.org.

This audio is part of the collection: The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection. It also belongs to collections: Audio Books & Poetry; Community Audio.

Artist / Composer: Garrett P. Serviss. Date: 2008-06-14. Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text. Keywords: librivox; audiobook; science fiction; space opera; Thomas Edison; Edisonade; Mars; martians. Creative Commons license: Public Domain,

Composition Licence: This MP3 (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. This applies to the United States, where Works published prior to 1978 were copyright protected for a maximum of 75 years. See Circular 1 "COPYRIGHT BASICS" PDF from the U.S. Copyright Office. Works published before 1923 (in this case 1898) are now in the public domain.


This MP3 (or other media file) is also in the public domain in countries that figure copyright from the date of death of the artist (post mortem auctoris) in this case Garrett Putnam Serviss (1851–1929) and that most commonly runs for a period of 50 to 70 years from December 31st of that year.



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