Last and First Men · Chapter
VIII: The Martians explained
This chapter delves into the history and psychology of the Martians, explaining their motivations and the internal contradictions that led to their downfall.
What happens
This chapter delves into the history and psychology of the Martians, explaining their motivations and the internal contradictions that led to their downfall. It describes their evolution into a single, unified species with a collective mind, their obsessive veneration of radiation and rigid materials like diamonds, and the resulting delusions that drove their invasion of Earth. The chapter contrasts the Martian collective psyche with human individuality, highlighting their lack of love, diversity, and true self-criticism, and suggests that their public mind, while powerful, was ultimately inferior and rigid.
Themes in this chapter
Humanity and the Other
The chapter presents the Martians as a radically different form of intelligent life, contrasting their collective psyche and motivations with human individuality and diversity.
The Limits of Knowledge
The Martians' downfall is attributed to their self-deception and delusions, showing how even a highly intelligent species can be blinded by its own irrational beliefs and cultural obsessions.
Society and Collective Identity
The chapter explores the nature of a society built on absolute unity and uniformity, showing how the Martian collective mind, or 'Leviathan', stifles individual thought and progress.
Characters to notice
- The Martians
The chapter provides a detailed history and psychological profile of the Martians, explaining their collective mind, their obsession with radiation and diamonds, and the delusions that led to their invasion of Earth.
- The Martian Individual
The chapter describes the individual Martian's experience, including their instinctive nature, their lack of sexuality, and their internal conflict between private thoughts and the demands of the collective 'super-mind'.
- The Martian Cloudlet
The chapter details the physical and instinctive nature of the Martian cloudlet, including its vegetative functions, its complex instinctive impulses, and its potential immortality.
- The First Men
The Martians are compared to the First Men, particularly in their shared capacity for delusion and their obsession with a particular concept (movement for the First Men, radiation for the Martians).
- The Second Men
The Second Men are mentioned as having a more developed sense of self-consciousness and self-criticism compared to the Martians, highlighting a key difference in their psychologies.
Key passages
“In self-defence they persuaded themselves that since they were so much more admirable than the rest, the extermination was actually a sacred duty.”
To justify their brutal past, the Martians convinced themselves that their superiority made the genocide of other races a moral imperative.
This highlights the Martian capacity for self-justification and the origin of their delusional culture.
“Every diamond was therefore a supreme embodiment of the tense energy and eternal equilibrium of the cosmos, and must be treated with reverence.”
The Martians came to revere diamonds as sacred objects, believing they represented the perfect balance of cosmic energy.
This illustrates the irrational obsession with rigidity that motivated their invasion of Earth.
“The Martian super-individual was Leviathan endowed with consciousness.”
The collective mind of the Martians was like the biblical Leviathan, a powerful and terrifying entity brought to life.
This metaphor emphasizes the nature of the Martian public mind as a rigid, military-like force.