Kindle: Reading the Future

Jeff Bezos has ignited the holiday shopping season with the launch of the Kindle, Amazon’s new mobile e-reader. Praised by supporters as the next chapter in the evolution of electronic books and decried by critics as the latest footnote in the history of the decline of civilization, "the future of reading" has sparked an explosion of attention.

For our purposes, only one question is relevant: Will the $399 Kindle take a reader to Mars?

Surprisingly, the answer is yes, as the 91,000-volume Kindle library holds quite a few Martian science fiction books:

• Old classics, including Gulliver of Mars, by Edwin L. Arnold (1905), the first five books in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series (1917-1922) and “A Martian Odyssey,” by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1934).

• Works from the mid-century cannon, such as Red Planet, by Robert Heinlein (1949), The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke (1951), and Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick (1964).

• Recent titles, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), William K. Hartmann’s Mars Underground (1997), Robert Zubrin’s First Landing (2001), and Gary Tigerman’s The Orion Protocol (2003).

• And, some things that were unbeknownst to us, such as End of an Era, by Robert J. Sawyer (2001), “Carter on Mars,” by Janis Ian (2004), and Starstrike: Task Force Mars, by Douglas Niles (2007).

While Kindle seems hip, it’s not as cool as Bezos’ Blue Origin project, which actually may transport a reader to Mars some day.