Author Visit: David Baron

Join Colorado author, and Colorado Book Award finalist, David Baron as he discusses his newest book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. This novel has been chosen as one of 2025’s top books by The New Yorker, TIME, Boston Globe, Science News, Library Journal, and Colorado Public Radio. Read more about the author and his books at: David Baron – Author/Speaker/Journalist.

More about the book:

A mere century ago, Martians were thought to be real—not fictional—creatures. “Mars is inhabited by a highly civilized and intelligent race of beings,” proclaimed Alexander Graham Bell after astronomers discovered what looked like irrigation canals on the red planet. When Nikola Tesla, in 1899, set up an experimental laboratory in Colorado Springs and detected radio signals that he believed came from Mars, an all-out craze swept society. You could read about the Martians in The New York Times, hear of them in Sunday sermons, and see them depicted on the Broadway stage. Biologists debated whether the aliens were winged or gilled. Inventors devised schemes for communicating with Mars. Philosophers and theologians proposed questions Earth might ask its older, wiser neighbor.

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