Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science PDF
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Visions of Mars This page intentionally left blank 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.
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