Table Of ContentVisions of Mars
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Visions of Mars
Essays on the Red Planet
in Fiction and Science
Edited by
HOWARD V. HENDRIX,
GEORGE SLUSSER
and ERIC S. RABKIN
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Visions of Mars : essays on the red planet in fiction and science /
edited by Howard V. Hendrix, George Slusser, and Eric S. Rabkin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-5914-8
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Mars (Planet)—In literature. 2. Science fiction—History and criticism.
3. Mars (Planet)—Exploration. I. Hendrix, Howard V., 1959–
II. Slusser, George Edgar. III. Rabkin, Eric S.
PN3433.6.V57 2011 809'.93329923—dc22 2010053294
British Library cataloguing data are available
© 2011Howard V. Hendrix, George Slusser, and Eric Rabkin. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the p ublisher.
On the cover: Mars as seen from the Viking 1Orbiter on July 11, 1976 (NASA);
(inset) cover art by Frank Schoonoverfrom the 1917 edition of A Princess of Mars
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
T C
ABLE OF ONTENTS
Preface: Science, Fiction, and the Red Planet
GEORGE SLUSSER, HOWARD V. HENDRIX, ERIC S. RABKIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction: The Martian in the Mirror
HOWARD V. HENDRIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
One: Approaching Mars
Mars of Science, Mars of Dreams
JOSEPH D. MILLER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Where Is Verne’s Mars?
TERRYHARPOLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Rosny’s Mars
GEORGE SLUSSER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Two: The Uses of Mars
Dibs on the Red Star: The Bolsheviks and Mars in the Russian Literature
of the Early Twentieth Century
EKATERINA YUDINA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
The Martians Among Us: Wells and the Strugatskys
GEORGE SLUSSER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Savagery on Mars: Representations of the Primitive in Brackett and
Burroughs
DIANNE NEWELL ANDVICTORIA LAMONT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
The (In)Significance of Mars in the 1930s
JOHN W. HUNTINGTON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Spawn of “Micromégas”: Views of Mars in 1950s France
BRADFORDLYAU. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Is Mars Heaven? The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and
Ray Bradbury’s Landscape of Longing
ERIC S. RABKIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Re-Presenting Mars: Bradbury’s Martian Stories in Media Adaptation
PHILNICHOLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Robert A. Heinlein and the Red Planet
DAVID CLAYTON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Business as Usual: Philip K. Dick’s Mars
JORGE MARTINS ROSA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Kim Stanley Robinson: From Icehenge to Blue Mars
CHRISTOPHER PALMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Martian Musings and the Miraculous Conjunction
KIMSTANLEY ROBINSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Chronicling Martians
SHA LABARE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Three: Science and Fictional Mars
Mars as Cultural Mirror: Martian Fictions in the Early Space Age
ROBERT CROSSLEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Beyond Goldilocks and Matthew Arnold: Interplanetary Triage,
Extremophilia, and the Outer Limits of Life in the Inner Solar System
HOWARD V. HENDRIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Appendix 1—To Write the Dream in the Center of Science: Mars and
the Science Fiction Heritage: A Dialogue Between Ray Bradbury
and Frederik Pohl (George Slusser, Moderator) (May 2008). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Appendix 2—The Extreme Edge of Mars Today: A Panel
Discussion with David Hartwell, Geoffrey Landis, Larry Niven, and
Mary Turzillo, Moderator (May 2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
About the Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
P
REFACE
Science, Fiction, and the Red Planet
George Slusser, Howard V. Hendrix,
Eric S. Rabkin
One might imagine that, in the long road from princesses on Mars to the bare
hope we have today for possible microbial life on the Red Planet, little interest would
remain in placing stories there. A perusal of the web, however, proves this is dead
wrong. There is more life on Mars than ever. One website mentions, for example, The
Mammoth e-book of Mindblowing Mars SF (2009) which features 20 new short stories,
flash fictions and poems, all set on Mars, by such SF writers as Kage Baker, Mary
Turzillo, Patricia Stewart, Liz Williams, and others. This same website announces
the following Mars projects: a graphic novel adaptation of The Martian Chronicles
(2010); “The Waters of Mars,” a Dr. Who TV special on the BBC (2010); War of the
Worlds, a Goliath animated film (2010); Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, a
story anthology by Jonathan Strahan (2010); The Lost Hieroglyph: A Brackett and Bur-
roughs Adventure (2010), and finally a Disney/Pixar film version of John Carter of Mars
(2011).
These new Mars adventures are merely the latest visions in the long dream we
trace in this book. The continuing presence of such fictions points to our need to under-
stand where the fascination with Mars came from, and the nature and importance of
this Martian odyssey in the Western world. The story of that fascination is closely
related to science and its successive visions of Mars—from Huygens and Percival Lowell
to the Mars Rovers. Mars has fascinated writers from many places and times, and this
book deals with early writers, including Voltaire and Verne and their French followers;
Wells’s classic War of the Worlds; Russia’s Mars in Bogdanov, the Mars of the Strugatskys;
Burroughs, Rosny and Weinbaum; and into and through the early Golden Age of science
fiction. Visions of Mars also focuses on the High Age of Mars—the Mars of Bradbury,
Heinlein, Asimov, Dick—then moves to examine the post–Mariner Mars: the Dead
1
2 PREFACE
Planet, briefly brought to life in the 1990s by Kim Stanley Robinson, only to return to
the hostile landscapes of Geoffrey Landis. Although no book short of a grand Martian
encyclopedia can hope to even touch on all that has been said or written about Mars,
here you will nonetheless find the vision of science fiction’s Mars detailed in much of
its richness, from Mars as object of scientific inquiry in “hard” science fiction, to the
Mars-as-rich-metaphor in works ranging from Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles to Ger-
rold’s The Martian Child.
Howard V. Hendrix’s introduction, “The Martian in the Mirror,” offers a personal
meditation on the Martian odyssey of science fiction. He sees the vision of Mars this
book proposes as a vast compendium of theories, ideas, and fictions about another
world. Whenever we look at Mars, we are looking at the mirror of our own cultural
dreams and concerns.
The essays that follow are divided in three sections: (1) “Approaching Mars,” the
short opening section, offers a brief history of the scientific discoveries that have peri-
odically brought Mars to our attention, and an appreciation of how Jules Verne, arguably
the first science fiction writer, viewed Mars only as an occasional venue for adventure
and discovery; (2) “The Uses of Mars,” the main body of the text, offers individual
examples of how writers beginning with H.G. Wells have used Mars to project their
unique visions of humanity’s future; (3) “Science and Fictional Mars,” the short con-
cluding section, presents two essays that broadly analyze the Martian phenomenon in
science fiction: Robert Crossley’s discussion of the radical change wrought by the Mariner
9photos, and Howard V. Hendrix’s sweeping analysis of the nexus of planets, persons,
and pathogens, and the triage relation across the history of the science fiction genre
between and among Venus (too hostile to life to be worth “treating”), Earth (abundantly
alive and therefore in no need of “treatment”), and Mars (worth “treating” because of
its potential for supporting life).
Approaching Mars
In “Mars of Science, Mars of Dreams,” Joseph D. Miller, a professional life scientist
and a science fiction critic, explores Mars as “a Rorschach test for the imaginative since
at least the time of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli, in 1877,
observed what he believed to be straight lines (canali, or channels) in equatorial regions
of Mars.” Miller charts the development of both our knowledge of Mars and our cer-
tainty about that knowledge, indicating how exemplary fiction writers from Wells to
the present exploit and sometimes distort the Mars known at any given moment to sci-
ence. Once he brings his reader to an understanding of our current knowledge of Mars,
Miller concludes with suggestions about the sorts of imaginative projections today’s
science makes possible.
In “Where Is Verne’s Mars?” Terry Harpold begins with an examination of the rel-
ative paucity of the occurrence of Mars in Verne’s fiction, linking it to Verne’s almost
obsessive emphasis on circuits of movement and the possibility that Verne had little
Science, Fiction, and the Red Planet (Slusser, Hendrix, Rabkin) 3
need of Mars for demonstrating this favored literary mechanism, since the poles, tropics,
and cities of Earth already provided him with space enough for such demonstration.
Harpold then takes us beyond those bounds, however, by suggesting the ways Verne’s
work can serve as a model for reading modern fictions of Mars.
George Slusser’s “Rosny’s Mars” discusses J.H. Rosny’s Les Navigateurs de l’Infini
(Navigators of the Infinite) (1927). Rosny, a Belgian writer, penned evolutionary tales
throughout his career, all set on Earth. His final SF novel, even though it projects an
Earth-analog ecosystem on Mars, marks a significant departure from his earlier work.
Not only do his astronauts, in their relations with the Martian humanoid species, affirm
the anthropomorphism that Rosny rejected in his evolutionary novel La Mort de la Terre
(The Death of the Earth)but they encounter, during the trip to Mars, the lure and terror
of Pascal’s infinite, toward which Mars is the first timid step. The novel takes French
Mars stories in a wholly new direction, away from juvenile space opera and toward the
space adventures of the American Golden Age, and the Mars of Anglophone figures
like Clarke and Heinlein.
The Uses of Mars
Ekaterina Yudina’s “Dibs on the Red Star: The Bolsheviks and Mars in the Russian
Literature of the Early Twentieth Century” examines Russian and Soviet fascination
with the Red Planet. Her touchstone text is Alexandr Bogdanov’s prerevolutionary novel
Red Star(1908). She sees most Russian Martian texts, even today, in dialogical relation
to Bogdanov, and examines one prominent Soviet example, Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita. In
Bogdanov’s novel, Mars is a place of successful revolution. Tolstoy, however, significantly
reverses the relationship: Now it is Earth that has achieved a successful socialist revo-
lution while Mars is a dying planet with an oppressive society. The novel’s answer to
the question of whether or not Mars can be redeemed is ambiguous. Yudina contrasts
Bogdanov’s fascination with the color red (including the red blood of his later Institute
for Blood Transfusions, an institution for aging Soviet leaders) with the essentially col-
orless nature of Tolstoy’s Mars.
George Slusser’s “The Martians Among Us: Wells and the Strugatskys” discusses
the parallel roles of Mars and Wells in Russian and Soviet literature, leading to the
confluence of British writer and Red Planet in the post–Stalin novels of the Strugatsky
brothers. Not only is Mars a common theme of the Strugatskys, but Wells’s War of the
Worlds becomes a persistent subtext in their fiction, offering a vision of unregenerate
human nature that undermines the official Marxist view of history as essentially pro-
gressive. Wells’s Martians are already at work in the Strugatskys’ “juvenile” Space Appren-
tice and haunt the pages of the Bradbury-like story chronicle Noon: 22d Century. The
theme of invasion and reaction deepens in works from Hard to Be a Godand The Second
Invasion from Marsto Ugly Swansand Roadside Picnic. The Wells subtext becomes per-
vasive in A Billion Years to the End of the World, when Martians confront the Invisible
Man.
