Joseph Fraser

Fraser emigrated to Australia from Lancashire and was dying of consumption in Melbourne when he wrote this political science fiction novel. It was first published in 1889 and has been reissued in collaboration between Melbourne University and Grattan Street Press in the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction series. There's an interesting introduction by an academic who did a PhD on the history of popular phrenology in Australia and New Zealand, which is relevant because Fraser was a phrenologist. He believed the now soundly debunked premise that people's characters can be determined from the shapes of their heads.

This started off well, with the class struggle in the northern mill towns as wealthy mill-owners reduced weavers' wages, leaving them close to starvation. The main character, Adam Jacobs, is the son of a law-abiding weaver who is caught up in a riot, unfairly found guilty and sentenced to transportation. Adam's mother follows her husband to New South Wales, taking the children. At the start of the book, Adam Jacobs is a 45-year-old merchant in Melbourne, married with children. But he has another life as a little boy on Mars, which he is recording in a diary. The Martial (Fraser's term) Adam Jacobs is called Charles Frankston, and in the diary he grows from a toddler to a successful young man.

Mars is colder than Earth, with less atmosphere and less water, so the Martials are physically adapted to life there. They're a much older and more developed society than that of Earth, so there is no crime, no sickness, and no belligerence. Pathogenic organisms have been eliminated, as have dangerous animals. Mars is run on principles of altruistic socialism. Much of the book describes Martial life in enormous detail. It is Fraser's ideal society, based on science, rationality, equality and religion. It does not appeal to me at all and I found it dull reading, except for scientific bits that appealed e.g. Fraser seems to predict the Haber Process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen compounds, and he is concerned about the exhaustion of fossil fuels. On Mars there are unlimited supplies of electricity from the centre of the planet. He's very much down on Malthus and leaves it to the Martials to limit population size by what appears to be intuition, altruism and cooperation.

I'd recommend the book as an historical oddity, but not as a work of literature. It's far too didactic.… (mehr)