Mars: a Trillion Year Spree

Trillion Year Spree: the History of Science Fiction, by Brian W. Aldiss (1986)

An updated version of his classic Billion Year Spree (1973), Aldiss’ Trillion Year Spree is a respected history of science fiction. While not illustrated, the book mentions or analyzes quite a few Mars-related works, including:

• Lieut. Gulliver Jones: His Vacation, by Edwin L. Arnold (1905)

• “The Martian Way,” by Isaac Asimov (1952)

• The Sword of Rhiannon, by Leigh Brackett (1953)

• The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (1950)

• A Princess of Mars, and other books in the Barsoom series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1917, and later)

• All We Marsmen (1963), Martian Time-Slip (1964) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), by Philip K. Dick.

• Across the Zodiac: the Story of a Wrecked Record, by Percy Greg (1880)

• A Honeymoon in Space, by George Griffith (1900)

• Red Planet (1949), Double Star (1956), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Number of the Beast (1980), by Robert A. Heinlein.

• The Swordsman of Mars, by Otis Adelbert Kline (1933)

• Two Planets, by Kurd Lasswitz (1897)

• "Shambleau," by C. L. Moore (1933)

• A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn (1954)

• Man Plus, by Frederik Pohl (1976)

• The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest (1976)

• Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson (1985)

• Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon (1930)

• "The Persistence of Vision," by John Varley (1978)

• The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut (1959)

• The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells (1898)

• Planet Plane / Stowaway to Mars, by John Wyndham (1936 / 1972)

A detailed review of Trillion Year Spree appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 1988. More recently, the book was reviewed on the blog Immediacy: Immediate Thoughts about the Ephemeral Environment.

For a different perspective on Aldiss, see the 2004 interview, “Brian Aldiss has been on a Trillion-Year Spree within Science Fiction for Half a Century,” on SciFi.com. Also, note that Aldiss co-authored a work of Martian science fiction: White Mars, Or the Mind Set Free: a 21st-Century Utopia (1999).