Word: martian
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...only a poor Martian's daughter...
Mars floats seminaked, wrapped in its thin blue atmosphere as if in a transparent negligee. Yellow clouds, perhaps of dust, drift across it slowly. The white polar icecaps wax and wane with the swing of the Martian seasons, and its surface changes color, as if with seasonal vegetation...
...Martian atmosphere also seems to lack oxygen. This fact alone, says the careful physiologist, rules out all higher forms of life-as earthlings understand life. Warm-blooded "little men from Mars," therefore, will probably never try to invade New Jersey. But Martian plant life (e.g., mosses and lichens that can manufacture their own oxygen) is entirely possible. From this distance, there is not" much more to be learned about the far-off planet that looks pale red to the naked eye. If rocket riders ever get to Mars, says Dr. Strughold, the first explorer to return will be able...
...While I lived in the United States I was a science-fiction addict myself," confessed Hungarian Author Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler in Harper's Bazaar, "and I am still liable to occasional relapses." But the American mania for "reading about space travel, time travel, martian maidens and extragalactic supermen is habit-forming, like opium, murder thrillers and yoghurt diets ... [A kind of] apocalyptic intuition [that] the human race may be a biological misfit doomed to extinction . . . may be one of the reasons for the sudden interest in life on other stars...
Except for a couple of quick, vivid shots the Martians are not seen on the screen. But the story is occasionally told from the Martian point of view, as seen through a shimmering, eyelike bubble of film. Director Jack Arnold has made good use .of the barren brooding desert expanses with their lonely, unreal look of another world, and the picture is well acted, particularly by Richard Carlson as a mystically inclined astronomer. As was more or less inevitable, the picture is in 3-D, but the extra dimension does not add much to the drama. It is the least...