by gojomo 11 hours ago
I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.
But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]
It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.
It was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?
Because honorary degrees are not credentials.
But that's obviously not a reason to treat them as a bad thing. It's also not entirely true ... he was awarded those honors because of the quality of his science journalism.
FWIW, I think @mapontosevenths is wrong to say that @gojomo's mention of the honorary degrees and being an OOC was "like they're a bad thing" ... their "But it's hard ..." indicates a conflict between those "credentials" and the typo that gojomo makes way too much a deal of.
Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".
If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.
But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?
Someone should look into the author and/or editor.
Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.
I got so caught up in that phrase I went rereading the plot summary of WOTW to check my memory. After than I had no interest in the article, assuming it had been written by AI.
It's hard to take seriously someone who dismisses the (factually correct) content of a popular science article just because of a typo that has no bearing on that content.