royed."_

_"Two of the Martians were stretched dead upon the ground."_

_"He might have been a match for twenty of us."_

_"... he proceeded to teach us ... words of his language."_

_"... approaching from the eastward a large airship...."_

_"... a human being here on Mars!"_

_"The gigantic statue of their leader is THE GREAT SPHINX!"_

_"It was a panic of giants."_

These illustrations are a selection of the best from the original
newspaper installments and were redrawn for this volume by Bernard
Manley, Jr., of Chicago, Illinois.

INTRODUCTION

If you picked up a magazine and read in it a story mentioning a
passenger-carrying rocket driven by atomic power furnished by a
substance prepared from uranium, you probably would not be greatly
surprised. After all, such an invention is today but a step or two ahead
of cold fact. But you might be surprised to learn that if this story was
_A Columbus of Space_, the one I happen to have in mind, your
grand-parents may well have read it before you were born--for _A
Columbus of Space_ was published in _All-Story_ magazine in 1909, thirty
years before the potentialities of U235 were realized, and nearly forty
before the atomic bomb became a problem for people to think about.

Did the author of this story simply make a lucky shot in the dark?
Perhaps; but let me tell those who are inclined to think so that he was
a Carnegie lecturer, a member of half-a-dozen learned societies, one of
the first to write a book on Einstein's theory of relativity, and an
internationally known figure in his specialty, astronomy. His name is
Garrett Putman Serviss.

He was born on March 24, 1851, at Sharon Springs, New York, of native
New England stock. His interest in astronomy began as a boy, and was
greatly stimulated when he began to examine the beauties of the heavens
through a small telescope, the gift of his older brother. This
encouraged his enrolling in the course of science at Cornell University
in 1868 (its opening year) from which he was graduated in 1872. There
followed two years at the Columbia College Law School, which he left as
an LL. B.; and in June, 1874 he was admitted to the bar. He did not
practice law, however, but turned instead to newspaper reporting.

Whence came this interest in law and journalism? We can only guess,
tracing its onset to the man's college days. As a Cornell sophomore, he
was the class poet; as a senior, its historian; and on commencem