While fictions were clearly interventions in scientific debate, as argued in the previous chapter, they were also, in certain specific texts and on particular occasions, conscious creative efforts to contribute to scientific knowledge more directly. As this chapter will show, popular fictions did make attempts to become popular science and to employ certain epistemological categories of knowledge-making in the same way as professional scientific practitioners. At the same time, scientific knowledge-makers employed creative fictional tactics to enhance their understanding of scientific objects under scrutiny.

Sometime during the opposition of Mars in 1894 Percival Lowell began to write a long verse poem entitled ‘Mars’. The poem draws on his experiences of nightly observations of the planet and although it is not obviously a work of science it should be read as one part of his many reflections on the dissemination of astronomical knowledge. In the early stages of the poem, where Lowell's untidy versification suggests a process of speedy writing under the influence of an immediate inspiration, Lowell stresses his desire to know the answers to his many questions about Mars:

Using ‘we’ and ‘our’ Lowell regards his quest for understanding as one shared by everyone.