Jocular item of Terminology denoting generic Aliens, most often from Mars, as widely popularized in 1940s and 1950s newspaper stories about UFOs. An early small green extraterrestrial appears in the whimsical story "Green Boy from 'Harrah'" (8 October 1899 Atlanta Constitution) by Charles Battell Loomis, and green (though far from little) Martians in Burroughs's A Princess of Mars (February-July 1912 All-Story as "Under the Moons of Mars" as by Norman Bean; 1917). Robert Nathan's The Woodcutter's House (1927) uses the phrase "little green man" to describe a "small god" whose size depends on his number of worshippers.
The first known sf use of the actual phrase is in "Mayaya's Little Green Men" (November 1946 Weird Tales) by Harold Lawlor. Fredric Brown used it three times in singular and plural form as the expected appearance of aliens in "Mouse" (June 1949 Thrilling Wonder), and Mack Reynolds wrote the mystery novel The Case of the Little Green Men (1951). The best-known sf treatment of the theme, featuring a non-violent Invasion of annoying little Martian voyeurs, is Fredric Brown's Martians, Go Home (1955). The eponym of Lewis Zarem's The Green Man from Space (1955) also hails from Mars. Knowing references to this Cliché appear in later sf: for example, a unappealingly sausage-shaped "Old Galactic" alien in James H Schmitz's A Tale of Two Clocks (1962; vt Legacy 1979) manifests reassuringly at the close of the book as a literal Little Green Man. The wasted limbs and mighty brain of Dan Dare's green Venusian nemesis the Mekon suggest a synthesis of little green man and H G Wells's "The Man of the Year Million" (6 November 1893 Pall Mall Gazette).
This sf trope may echo the UK legend of the Green Children (> The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). [DRL]
see also: Ivan Southall.
links
Previous versions of this entry