Gulliver of Mars — Background and Themes

A Prosaic Beginning for an Unlikely Voyage

The opening chapter establishes a narrator who is deliberately ordinary. Jones is a 'poor younger son' with five dollars, unpaid bills, and a locket containing a portrait of a 'dear buxom, freckled, stub-nosed girl.' His immediate concerns are supper and a pipe. The supernatural is dismissed: 'New York in this year of grace is not the place for the supernatural.' Yet the night wind sounds like 'the last gurgling cries of throttled men,' and the moon is obscured by 'large vapoury clouds.' The contrast between his matter-of-fact voice and the eerie setting prepares the reader for a story that will mix the mundane with the extraordinary. Arnold uses the first-person frame to ground the incredible, with Jones insisting he 'must write' to relieve his mind, even as he fears being called a 'fabricator.'

The River of the Dead and a Corpse Companion

In a key excerpt, Jones finds himself on a river of the dead, floating alongside a raft bearing a dead Martian girl. The description is detailed and sensory: her face is 'like carved ivory,' her fingers 'closed in her lap upon the beautiful buds.' The raft is 'disguised by flowers and silk trailers.' Jones realizes with horror that they are 'flying swiftly down that river of the dead they had told me of that has no outlet and no returning.' Other dead Martians join them—'budding boys and girls,' 'older voyagers'—all bobbing toward a graveyard in 'eternal winter.' The scene is gothic and dreamlike, with the dead maid rolling her head to stare at him with 'stony, unseeing eyes.' This episode, while fantastical, is not typical of early Martian fiction, which often focused on canals and advanced civilizations. Here, the planet is a place of eerie, ritualized death.

Catalog Subjects vs. Textual Evidence

The Project Gutenberg catalog lists 'Science fiction,' 'Martians -- Fiction,' and 'Mars (Planet) -- Fiction' as subjects. The excerpts, however, reveal a story more concerned with personal obsession and supernatural horror than with scientific speculation. The Martian setting is sketched through exotic details—'great pale buds,' 'yellow-girt slaves'—but the narrative drive comes from Jones's emotional turmoil: his love for a 'chimera in female shape' and his guilt over the destruction that followed. There is no mention of Martian technology, politics, or exploration. The river of the dead and the corpse-maid evoke mythic or gothic traditions rather than the scientific romance of contemporaries like H.G. Wells. Readers expecting a hard SF tale of Mars will find instead a confessional fantasy steeped in fin-de-siècle melancholy.

Approach Gulliver of Mars as a first-person fantasia rather than a systematic Martian adventure. The narrator’s voice—by turns self-deprecating, lyrical, and haunted—is the book’s chief engine. Pay attention to the recurring tension between the prosaic (steak, slippers, unpaid bills) and the sublime (a dead maiden on a flower raft). The excerpts offer no resolution, only a journey into cold and darkness. The story’s pleasures lie in its atmosphere and its narrator’s unsteady grip on reality.

There’s something achingly lonely about that pale corpse-maid drifting past, isn’t there? The technology hardly matters when the heart is that hollow. It reminded me of the quiet, biting sadness threaded through Beasts and Super-Beasts — A Closer Reading—how the absurd often masks a deeper, unspoken grief, much like a Martian river hiding its dead.