Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science
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Visions of Mars : essays on the red planet in fiction and science
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Please enter recipient e-mail address es. The E-mail Address es you entered is are not in a valid format. Please re-enter recipient e-mail address es. You may send this item to up to five recipients. Robert D Braine 's Messages from Mars, By Aid of the Telescope Plant features one of the strangest Communications devices ever devised — a telescope with a lens harvested from the eponymous vegetation — and also some of the most biting attacks on Earthly especially US society.
A good many early Mars stories have a "man from Mars" visiting Earth rather than vice versa. The Man from Mars by Thomas Blot gave the motif its name, though the narrative is dull and single-minded in its critique of organized religion.
Visions of Mars : essays on the red planet in fiction and science - Catalog - UW-Madison Libraries
The most commercially successful of these tales was Richard Ganthony 's play, A Message from Mars , in which the Martian visitor arrives in a dream to reform the character of a Scrooge-like amateur astronomer; the play enjoyed long runs in London and New York, spawned two film versions and a novelization by Lester Lurgan Wells takes the basic Lowellian premise sans canals and upends it in crucial ways: His Martians are decidedly inhuman in physiognomy and anything but benign in intent.
Having exhausted the resources of their dying world, they come as predatory Darwinian competitors to stake their claim to Earth. This novel firmly implanted in the popular imagination the image of Martians as Monsters , and brought a new sensationalism into interplanetary fiction; when Orson Welles 's Mercury Theatre dramatized the novel for US Radio in it precipitated a panic, whose seeds had been sown 40 years before and fed ever since by a lurid stream of pulp fiction see War of the Worlds. Garrett P Serviss 's "sequel", Edison's Conquest of Mars January New York Evening Journal ; , which reassuringly describes the obliteration of the decadent Martian civilization, made no impact not reaching book form until , though it's notable as one of the earliest treatments of Mars as a conceptual replacement for the vanishing frontier.
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The early paranormal literature of Mars introduced some amusingly peculiar notions, from Martian minds inhabiting and directing the personalities of receptive humans in George du Maurier 's The Martian to the literal reincarnation of Christ on Mars in Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World by James Cowan , but they left little impression on later writers and are largely unreadable today.
The only other image which did take hold was something much closer to Lowell's enthusiastic prospectus for exotic Martian life and landscape: Burroughs 's John Carter and his kin battle for beautiful, egg-laying princesses against assorted villains and monsters, armed with swords but borne aloft by flying gondolas. Burroughs was co-opted into Genre SF when The Mastermind of Mars appeared as the lead story in the Amazing Stories Annual , and his influence within the genre has been as powerful as that of Wells.
The Martian adventure story imported the colonialist ethos of H Rider Haggard and other adventure writers of the period; the possibilities offered by a whole new world particularly intoxicated writers at a time when terrestrial frontiers had largely vanished. John Carter himself is an Old West frontiersman, transported to Mars from the Arizona Territory of — though Burroughs 's novels generally confound the imperialist spirit of the adventure mode. This disposition would recomplicate over the ensuing decades into a more general theme of Mars as a "fresh start" for those dissatisfied with life on Earth.
The early sf pulps were resonant with echoes of The War of the Worlds. Outside the pulps one work stands out from all others as a key contribution to the mythology of Mars: C S Lewis 's sf novel Out of the Silent Planet , in which Mars is a world whose life-system is organized according to Christian ethical principles rather than the logic of Darwinian natural selection. The signal attributes of Lowellian Mars echo through many of the stories of this period — even Lewis retained the canals — but increasing knowledge of real conditions on the planet and John W Campbell Jr's editorial insistence on more careful speculative logic suppressed the "traditional" image of Mars in the pulps' primary sf market, Astounding Science-Fiction.
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Its exotic qualities were played down and replaced by the kind of "realism" encapsulated by P Schuyler Miller 's "The Cave" January Astounding , an ironic story in which Martian lifeforms kill an Earthman who violates the truce which they all must observe in order to survive the long Martian night. Martian exotica flourished nevertheless, particularly in the work of Leigh Brackett , whose "Martian Quest" February Astounding was in Astounding but who went on to do the bulk of her work for Planet Stories.
Ray Bradbury subsequently brought the romantic image of Mars to a kind of impressionistic perfection in The Martian Chronicles coll of linked stories ; rev vt The Silver Locusts ; the latter and many subsequent editions have variant contents. In these stories Mars is dead but still haunted by the ghosts of an extinct civilization, visited by Earthmen who become doubly haunted by virtue of the echoes of their own Earthly past which follow them. Bradbury called Mars a "mirror", and he resurrects the use of Mars as a vehicle for critical comment on terrestrial issues.
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- Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science by Howard V. Hendrix.
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The stories are heavy with nostalgia and extraordinarily seductive. In the s the romance of exotic Mars was mostly left behind as the dominant theme became the problems of Colonization of a planet with barely enough water and barely enough oxygen — though the great difficulty of Space Flight to this destination tended to be optimistically understated, as in Wernher von Braun's nonfiction Das Marsprojekt Weltraumfahrt ; ; trans Henry J White as The Mars Project Notable stories in this newly realistic vein were Lodestar: The new realism, however, did not completely supplant the old romanticism: Heinlein 's Red Planet includes Lowellian canals, a variety of native lifeforms, and an ancient civilization alongside its human colony.
New themes also germinated in the colonial soil which would become staples of Mars myth thereafter, including the rebellion of the Mars colony against Earthly domination, human physiological adaptation to Martian conditions, and strife between proponents of Terraforming and those who prefer Mars in its natural state the "red-green" schism that would preoccupy the Mars fiction of the s. Indigenous lifeforms are frequently featured in these novels, but few are hostile though Gordon 's Martians keep his stranded astronaut as a kind of pet ; an exception is in Kenneth F Gantz 's Not in Solitude An uninhabited Mars becomes a grim Prison colony in the relentlessly dystopian Farewell, Earth's Bliss ; rev by D G Compton , while twenty-sixth-century Mars is a run-down, second-class colony squeezed by rivalry between Earth and Earth's extra-solar settlements in John Brunner 's Born Under Mars The mythology of Mars moved into a new phase in the early s as the scenarios of earlier days began to reappear in a somewhat surrealized form.
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Heinlein 's Stranger in a Strange Land ; text restored revives the "man from Mars" motif with the story of a human raised by Martians who returns to Earth to build a religious philosophy out of the elements of their cultural heritage. Wikimedia Italia added it Dec 31, Arto Bendiken marked it as to-read Jun 26, Stephanie McGarrah marked it as to-read Dec 12, Yldz marked it as to-read Mar 27, Josh Miles marked it as to-read Oct 12, Benjamin added it May 15, Rafaela marked it as to-read Feb 27, Adrian marked it as to-read Aug 17, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
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