It was a sad day for little green men on July 14, 1965, when cameras aboard Mariner 4 took a series of photographs that dispelled at a stroke decades of speculation about life on the Red Planet.

The images, taken from 6,000 miles above the planet’s surface, forced writers and film-makers to abandon lurid tales of ancient Martian civilisations and concentrate instead on human attempts to settle on Mars.

It was an abrupt end to a canon of literature inspired by Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observation in 1877 that the Martian landscape appeared to be riven with channels, which authors interpreted as canals constructed by intelligent creatures.

H. G. Wells created a hostile race of Martians who attempt to conquer the earth in War of the Worlds, published in 1898. Four decades later a radio adaptation featuring mock news broadcasts was so convincing that New Yorkers fled their homes in terror. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author best known for creating Tarzan, portrayed Mars as a planet occupied by green men with four arms and red humanoid creatures in A Princess of Mars in 1911.

Before he created the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis created Out of the Silent Planet, a story of several intelligent and peace-loving species living on a dying world.

Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov also wrote novels in the 1950s about hidden indigenous peoples of Mars.

Films included Robinson Crusoe on Mars in 1964, a reimagining of Daniel Defoe’s novel, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, also in 1964, a comedy often cited as the worst film ever made.

Mariner’s photographs and the Viking missions in the late 1970s caused authors to concentrate on human colonisation of the planet. Several American writers explored the possibility that settlers on Mars, like American colonists during the War of Independence, would seek independence from their imperial masters.

Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, published in 1969, imagined a demagogue who uses Mars as a base for an army of brainwashed earthlings and sends them on an ill-fated mission to invade Earth.

Steven Spielberg also revived the invading Martian with his reworking of War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise as a family man on the run from hostile alien forces.

In the music world, David Bowie inspired his fans to question whether the planet could support organic life in Life on Mars, although the song itself did little to answer the question.

Perhaps more insight was offered by Elton John in Rocket Man in which he cautioned against settling on the Red Planet. “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/ In fact it’s cold as hell/ And there’s no one there to raise them/ If you did.”

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