"Catherine Drewe," a New Story by Paul Cornell

I just finished reading “Catherine Drewe,” a new short story by novelist, television writer, and comic book author Paul Cornell that appears online and in Fast Forward 2 (October 2008), an anthology edited by Lou Anders and published by Pyr.

A thin work whose atmosphere is a blend of alternate
history and steampunk, "Catherine Drewe" follows British military officer Major Jonathan Hamilton on a clandestine mission to a partially terraformed Mars dominated by the Russians. Hamilton’s goal: to assassinate a woman named Catherine Drewe.

SF critic Rich Horton praised the story, writing of the anthology Fast Forward 2: "Another politically charged piece may be the best story here -- the opener, Paul Cornell's ‘Catherine Drewe.’"

In reviewing the story for Strange Horizons magazine, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro called it “wildly inventive” with “the plot propelled not so much by a single McGuffin as by a combustible gas of intelligent deceptions and counter-deceptions."

Another reader was less impressed, labeling “Catherine Drewe” a
“yawn.”

While I don’t think the story was sleepy, I had difficulty following the plot and was disappointed with the ending. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find books and a library embedded in the storyline.

“Catherine Drewe” is the first story in Paul Cornell’s new series featuring Major Jonathan Hamilton of the British Empire's 4th Dragoon Regiment. A second story, “One of Our Bastards is Missing” will be published in the forthcoming The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3 (2009). To learn more about the series, read Paul Cornell’s LiveJournal.

How to Publish Books without Perishing

How to Publish Without Perishing
The New York Times, November 29, 2008
By James Gleick, Op-Ed Contributor

THE gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, Gutenberg, and now goodbye.)

But I don’t see it that way. ...

Read the entire op-ed piece in The New York Times.

James Gleick is on the board of the Authors Guild.

"My Mars": Ray Bradbury’s Foreword in National Geographic Magazine

The website of the National Geographic Society has an online version of Space: the Once and Future Frontier, the new 120-page, soft cover, newsstand-only issue that examines the history and future of space exploration. Packed with interesting articles, insightful charts, and stunning photographs, the foreword to this collector's edition publication was written by Ray Bradbury and is titled "My Mars." A nonfiction tale Bradbury has told in various versions over the years, here’s the opening of "My Mars":

When I was six years old I moved to Tucson, Arizona, and lived on Lowell Avenue, little realizing I was on an avenue that led to Mars. It was named for the great astronomer Percival Lowell, who took fantastic photographs of the planet that promised a spacefaring future to children like myself.

Along the way to growing up, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs and loved his Martian books, and followed the instructions of his Mars pioneer John Carter, who told me, when I was 12, that it was simple: If I wanted to follow the avenue of Lowell and go to the stars, I needed to go out on the summer night lawn, lift my arms, stare at the planet Mars, and say, “Take me home.”

That was the day that Mars took me home -- and I never really came back. I began writing on a toy typewriter. I couldn’t afford to buy all the Martian books I wanted, so I wrote the sequels myself. ...

National Geographic's Space: the Once and Future Frontier will be available at newsstands until late January 2009.

Science Fiction: People and Starships and Societies Where Wall Street is Relevant

The Times Union, a newspaper serving New York State’s other capital region, has an interesting op-ed piece titled “RPI’s Quest for Life," which details Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s search for life on other worlds.

The op-edder makes several references to science fiction, including this tall tale: “No, the scientists aren't out to find life as we know it from science fiction -- people and starships and societies where Wall Street is irrelevant -- but more basic stuff in the microbial realm.” Solid fiction levered with irony, considering RPI is a nonprofit organization and its search for extraterrestrial life is being funded with a $7.5 million, five-year grant from NASA, an Off-Wall Street entity.

Perhaps the op-edder should ask Santa for a copy of “Tenbrook of Mars” (2008), a science fiction novella by Dean McLaughlin that features people and starships and societies where Wall Street is relevant. McLaughlin’s story incorporates Mars Petro, a publicly held space energy company whose stock price collapses when it declares bankruptcy in the wake of a catastrophic accident. The consequences of the financial meltdown: engineer Don Tenbrook and several thousand other company employees are stranded on Mars. The governmental bailout: Space Administration purchases distressed assets from the ailing Mars Petro, including the spaceships Edgar Burroughs, Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell, and Raymond Bradbury, in an attempt to rescue Tenbrook and his colleagues.

If the scientists at RPI succeed in finding life on other worlds, it will simply confirm what science fiction writers and readers discovered decades ago.

Ace Double Novel: The Secret Martians by Jack Sharkey

The Secret Martians (1960), a novel by Jack Sharkey

At left: Paperback original (New York: Ace Books, 1960), 132 p., #D-471, 35¢. Cover art by Ed Valigursky). An Ace double novel, bound with John Brunner’s Sanctuary in the Sky. Here’s the blurb from inside the front cover:

"Master spy of the Red Planet. Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in any scheme almost on sight -- even where they had eluded the best brains in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System’s greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental agility. But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the end of the whole puzzle of The Secret Martians -- with Jery as the first to go!"

You can read the first chapter of The Secret Martians at Fictionwise.

“The Last Man on Mars,” a Poem by John Nichols

Post-Thanksgiving Day thanks to the blog QuasarDragon for steering me to the October 2008 and last online issue of The Martian Wave, a SF zine dedicated to the exploration and colonization of space. Sadly, I was not aware of this publication and missed all of the previous issues!

In any case, this final online issue contains “The Last Man on Mars,” a poem by John Nichols. The first line, “We were six at first: Landis, Turzillo, Anson, Clarke, Lowell, and myself,” could refer to these Martian science fiction authors: Geoffrey A. Landis, Mary A. Turzillo, Robert Anson Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Percival Lowell.

Mars and the Paranormal 1880-1940

The November 2008 issue of Science Fiction Studies, DePauw University’s thrice yearly academic journal, has an article titled “Mars and the Paranormal,” by Robert Crossley. While I have not had an opportunity to read the article, here’s an abstract, taken from the journal’s website:

“The parallel emergence of modern Martian studies and psychical research in the later nineteenth century led to a strange fusion of the literary imagination and spiritualist practices. Both Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion were drawn into this association, the latter far more committedly than the former. The turn-of-the-century case of the Swiss medium Hélène Smith, who claimed to have traveled to Mars and learned the Martian language, is a celebrated instance of the link between Mars and the paranormal, but the phenomena of telepathy and astral projection also make their way into such sf narratives as Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912), Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), and Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The extent and significance of the role of the paranormal in early sf can be most fully grasped in less well known narratives by Henry Gaston, Flammarion, George DuMaurier, Louis Pope Gratacap, Mark Wicks, Sara Weiss, J.L. Kennon, and J.W. Gilbert. Collectively, these narratives reveal the persistence of the problematic issue of the interweaving of science (or pseudoscience) and romance in the fashioning of fiction about Mars.”

Presumably, the untitled narratives mentioned in the abstract include:

• Mars Revealed, Or, Seven Days in the Spirit World: Containing an Account of the Spirit's Trip to Mars, and His Return to Earth, what He Saw and Heard on Mars (1880), by Henry A. Gaston

• Urania: a Romance (1889), by Camille Flammarion

• The Martian: a Novel (1897), by George Du Maurier

• The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd (1903), by Louis Pope Gratacap

• Journeys to the Planet Mars, Or, Our Mission to Ento (Mars): Being a Record of Visits Made to Ento (Mars) (1905), by By Sara Weiss

• To Mars via the Moon: an Astronomical Story (1911), by Mark Wicks

• The Planet Mars and Its Inhabitants: a Psychic Revelation (1922), by Eros Urides, a Martian (i.e., J. L. Kennon)

Flash Fiction: "Moresheck" by J.R. Blackwell

365 Tomorrows has a violent piece of flash fiction titled
“Moresheck" by J.R. Blackwell (2005). It’s a story about Moresheck, “one of the brutish, ham handed psychics that roamed the twisting urban alleys of the north face of Mars.”

First lines of "Martian Dispatches,” a Forthcoming Story by David Moles

Tumbarumba, some kind of an online anthology and conceptual work of art, premiers on December 1st. Created by Benjamin Rosenbaum et al., the anthology includes “Martian Dispatches,” a story written by SF/F author and editor David Moles. Here are the opening lines of “Martian Dispatches,” which I pulled from the journal of Benjamin Rosenbaum:

“There was a map of Mars on the wall of my apartment in Helium, souvenir of a previous tenant. Some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd just lie there staring at it, too tired to do anything but take off my breather and kick the compressor into gear. The map had been printed on Earth, in London; maybe fifty years ago, maybe more, like that first edition of Burroughs I saw an AFP stringer carrying in the rocketport on Phobos. The ink on the map had faded and the paper had gone brittle and shiny after years in the dry Martian air, laying a kind of veil over the cities and canals it depicted. On it Mars was still divided into its old territories, names like Bantoom and Okar and Jahar, and down at the bottom under the word MARS the cartographer had printed BARSOOM. ..."

Another excerpt from the forthcoming "Martian Dispatches" is posted on the website of David Moles.

Octavia Butler and the Film Devil Girl from Mars

SF Signal notes that the blog Divers and Sundry has a post about the abysmal 1954 sci-fi film Devil Girl from Mars and how it inspired the writing career of science fiction author Octavia Butler. Butler’s remarks about the film, which are less than positive but quite memorable, were made at MIT in 1998 as the introduction to a discussion about science fiction and modern culture.

As I noted this past September, the MIT Science Fiction Society’s library does not hold a copy of Devil Girl from Mars. However, there is one cool thing about the library: The Pinkdex, the library’s catalog, is so named because it was originally maintained in the early 1960s by Marilyn "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, who later married Larry Niven.

Pictured above: Octavia Butler standing in a Science Fiction section.

A Plea for Pastiche in Science Fiction

Author Robert Gibson, caretaker of the Ooranye Project, argues in “A Plea for Pastiche in Science Fiction” that “For example if somebody now were to write an SF tale featuring a Percival Lowell type Mars with canals and a breathable atmosphere, and if this author were to perform the amazing feat of writing the story with apparently innocent freshness and belief, so that it was just as attractive a work as if it had appeared a century ago, I say the story should be allowed, should be published and taken seriously as a work of art.”

In making his case for pastiche in science fiction, Gibson brings life to the neglected planet of Uranus, shines some light on Mercury and Venus, and beams about Mars. Here are the Martian works he discusses or mentions:

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938), by C. S. Lewis

• The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), by Lin Carter

• The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974), by Lin Carter

• The City Outside the World (1977), by Lin Carter

• Down to a Sunless Sea (1984), by Lin Carter

• Martian Time-Slip (1964), by Philip K. Dick

• Leigh Brackett’s stories about Low-Canal Mars

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (1976), a novelization by Terrance Dicks

At left: Paperback (London: Wyndham Publications, 1976), a Target Book, 125 p., 45 pence. A novelization based on the BBC television serial Pyramids of Mars (1975). The cover art, by Chris Achilleos, portrays the fourth Doctor Who.

Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

"For many thousands of years Sutekh had waited ... trapped in the heart of an Egyptian Pyramid. Now at last the time had come -- the moment of release, when all the force of his pent-up evil and malice would be unleashed upon the world ... The TARDIS lands on the site of UNIT headquarters in the year 1911, and the Doctor and Sarah emerge to fight a terrifying and deadly battle ... against Egyptian Mummies, half-possessed humans -- and the overwhelming evil power of Sutekh!"

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars was reviewed in 1977 by Keith Miller of Doctor Who Digest, who concluded “Yes, I must admit, I thought this book was very good indeed." More recently, the book was reviewed by fans Christian Petrie and Tim Roll-Pickering. Another fan, who has read all 161 Doctor Who novelizations, places this book in the “Good Efforts -- worth picking up if you see them second-hand” category.

An unabridged audiobook of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars was produced by BBC Audio and released in August 2008. Sci-Fi Online: the UK's Leading Telefantasy and Cult Website has a review.

Unfortunately, the Pyramids of Mars are not included in the blog io9's "45 Coolest Moments In Doctor Who's History."

Genesis: an Epic Poem about Mars

Liz Henry of Feminist SF – The Blog! posted a nice passage from Genesis: an Epic Poem (1988), by poet Frederick Turner.

Composed in iambic pentameter and 10,000 lines long, Genesis describes the human terraforming of Mars from the year 2015 to 2070. According to one critic, it is “a full expression of Fred Turner's metaphysics, scientific philosophy, and theology, as well as being an action-packed science fiction narrative of war, family inheritance, betrayal, and gigantic technological achievement.”

Here’s another, more bookish, passage from Genesis. It begins to describe the gardening of Mars by its master gardener Beatrice Van Riebeck:

It is a matter very practical:
The gardening of crater planetscapes.
Few books record its arts and its techniques;
Yet Cicero’s landscape gardeners would know,
When they laid out his grounds by Lake Lucrino,
And the patricians of the Alban Hills,
Who set their villas by the crater-lakes
Of Nemi and Albano clad in vines
And let their grottos give a prospect on
A glimmering water, framed in shady pines--
They’d be worth asking, if she might invoke
Their gentle, haughty shades for such discourse;
Yet they passed on their wisdom, as the Greeks
Did to the Romans and the Romans to
The masters of the Renaissance; they taught
The gardeners of England how to shape
A sylvan walk to imitate the trials
Of Hercules or sharp Odysseus,
Instruct a guest-Aeneas how to choose
The way of piety and fortitude.
And they, in turn, taught the Americans:
The gardens of Dumbarton Oaks, and those
The Du Ponts planted outside Wilmington
Carried the same hermetic wisdom on
Across the oceans, and the garden-worlds
That glitter in a necklace round the sun
Bear the same history, the land of shades
Transformed to paradise, to fairyland,
To purify the dreaming of the tribe.
It seems that Beatrice must write the book,
Though, and reveal its secret name as Mars ...

Frederick Turner also wrote A Double Shadow (1978), a science fiction novel about Mars.

Birthday Party for Sci-Fi Fan Forry Ackerman

The blog File 770 details the birthday party for ailing science fiction fan Forrest J Ackerman that Ray Bradbury hosted on Saturday at a bookshop in California. Forry turns 92 years old today.

According to Worlds of Tomorrow: the Amazing Universe of Science-Fiction Art (2004), Ray Bradbury once said, “Forry Ackerman is the most important fan in the universe!”

Pictured above: Forrest J Ackerman, Life magazine photo, 1951

An Interview with Jerod Ravell, the Husband of a Martian Matriarch

Andrea Smart of the e-zine Smart Interface interviews Jerod Ravell, the husband of Martian matriarch Kelly Ravell, at Scifialiens’s Weblog. It’s
all part of the clever supplemental material author Phyllis K. Twombly has created to accompany her Martian Symbiont series of science fiction novels.

The Martian Symbiont series started with Been Blued (2007), moved to Martian Blues (January 2008), and continues with a forthcoming third novel. According to Twombly’s blog, here’s the storyline so far:

“In Been Blued, an advanced group of people return [to Earth from Mars and deep space] because a space virus has wiped out their women. They each carry a symbiont that allows them telepathy but won’t let them start a family until it senses a willing female. In Martian Blues, the Martians have been successful in starting families, and the symbiont has spread to 92% of mankind. Some of the non-symbiotic humans have formed an underground that seeks to defy all Martian conduct, in spite of Earth largely being at peace. They don’t believe the Martians’ warnings about an invasion of hostile aliens, and they’re really ticked off about the alien the Martians have been passing off as human while he grows up ... in spite of the fact that he’s on Earth’s side. In the third novel (Sorry, can’t tell you the title yet, in case it gets changed,) the underground kicks things off with an almost deadly attack on the Martian matriarch’s niece. Someone must infiltrate the underground to gather evidence, even as the matriarch plans the Martian fleet’s return to space ...”

Interested in learning more about the biological and medical aspects of the Martian Symbiont? Read The Martian Symbiont White Paper, a document in Twombly’s universe of blue.

According to an autobiographical sketch, Phyllis Twombly developed an interest in science fiction due partly to her father's fascination in NASA’s early space exploration programs and the Apollo 11 Moon landing. She also watched a lot of Star Trek and Doctor Who!

BBC Radio to Broadcast a Reading of C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet (1938)

Starting on November 24, 2008, BBC Radio 7 will broadcast an unabridged reading of Out of the Silent Planet (1938), a classic novel by C. S. Lewis. The first in Lewis’ science fiction trilogy, the novel is about a British professor of philology who makes an unexpected journey to the planet Malacandra, a fictional version of Mars. But, as SFFaudio pointed out recently, "this isn’t rockets, robots and ray guns material."

Specially commissioned for BBC Radio 7, Out of the Silent Planet will be read by Alex Jennings over the course of several days. Check the website for specific dates and times. The best opportunity to listen to the reading might be through BBC's "Listen Again" feature, which makes programs available for about a week after they are broadcast.

Here are descriptions of the first five of the twelve episodes of Out of the Silent Planet, taken from BBC Radio 7’s website:

• Episode 1. “A Cambridge academic out walking calls at a mysterious house for shelter, but its sinister owners have other plans for him.”

• Episode 2. “Ransom wakes up to find he is captive on some kind of ship, and is incredulous when Weston reveals their intended destination.”

• Episode 3. “Ransom overhears a conversation about his intended fate on Malacandra, where he will first encounter the aliens known as sorns.”

• Episode 4. “Ransom spends the night alone in the forest of Malacandra, before encountering another of the alien species, known as a hross.”

• Episode 5. “Ransom makes a journey to the hross's settlement, and discovers his hosts' name for the Earth is Thulcandra: the Silent Planet.”

Interestingly, according to C. S. Lewis: a Biography (2002), by A. N. Wilson, Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet after a conversation with fellow author J.R.R. Tolkien in which both men expressed "their distaste for much of what was being published at that time."

SF Artist Bob Eggleton Covers Mars

Thanks to a recent post at the blog SF Signal, I’ve been browsing some cool artwork by Bob Eggleton, an award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and horror artist.

Eggleton’s website has a beautiful gallery of sci-fi art that displays "The Lost Mission," a painting of Mars based on his love for such films as The Angry Red Planet (1960) and nostalgic “pointy rockets.”

Bob’s ART du Jour blog also has some impressive paintings, including
“Marscape,” “Red Wind,” “Of Late I Think of Mars,” “The Rolling Stones,” “Mars Landing #2,” “Martian Dust Storm,” and “The Angrier Red Planet,” as well as a neat rocket sketch about a “Mars Landing.”

More than a few pieces of Eggleton’s Mars art have rocketed out of his studio and landed on the front of science fiction books. Check out the craftsmanship on these covers:

• Labyrinth of Night (1992), by Allen Steele

• Man O’War (1996), by William Shatner

• Rainbow Mars (1999), by Larry Niven

• Martians and Madness: the Complete SF Novels of Fredric Brown (2002), by Fredric Brown, published by the New England Science Fiction Association

• The Martian War: a Thrilling Eyewitness Account of the Recent Invasion as Reported by Mr. H.G. Wells (2005), by Gabriel Mesta

Forrest J Ackerman: a Martian Oddity

Later today, Ray Bradbury will lead a birthday celebration in a California bookshop in honor of his longtime friend and ailing sci-fi über-fan Forrest J Ackerman, who turns 92 years old on November 24th. For my own tribute, I've pulled a passage from the introduction to Martianthology (2003), in which Forry explains how his “A Martian Oddity,” a two-and-a-half page piece of short fiction originally published in Marvel Science Stories in 1950, made it into the anthology:

Several years ago when Barsoom made its closest approach to Jasoom (Mars to Earth in Burroughs’s language) I was invited by the management of the Griffith Observatory cum planetarium on the hilltop overlooking the now-sold Ackermansion and Hollywood to entertain and educate an eager audience as to how our neighbor world was seen through the imaginative eyes of Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars), Stuart J. Byrne (Tarzan on Mars), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), HG Wells (The War of the Worlds) and other practitioners of the sci-fi genre.

This was before a rocket from Earth had actually visited the 4th planet and photos had shown it to be a sandy red surface pockmarked by meteor impacts, no life-sustaining atmosphere.

Gone the romantic canals, the mono-manned flyers, the six-legged riding throats, the Mars men who could remove their heads and protect them under their arms, charismatic princess Thora and Llana of Gathol, lashing swords thrusting through putrid hearts in their defense and honor.

For exotic/erotic visions of Mars we had to turn back the clock and turn the pages recording the imaginings of science fiction imaginers.

During the course of the lecture I read my short humorous story
“A Martian Oddity,” the title an homage to Stanley G. Weinbaum’s watershed classic “A Martian Odyssey,” and was gratified to find my little farce greeted by a gale of laughter. I include it in this collection and hope it will similarly amuse you!

Happy Birthday, Forry! Best wishes for a healthy recovery.

Flash Fiction: “Bride” by J.R. Blackwell

365 Tomorrows has a somber piece of flash fiction titled
“Bride" by J.R. Blackwell (2006). It provides a glimpse into the bridal industry on Mars. Here’s the coolest line: “Paint is curling off the plastic in the Hotel, breaking down, like all of Mars.”

Results of New Scientist Magazine Sci-Fi Book Poll

New Scientist magazine’s “The Future of the Genre,” a special online feature devoted to science fiction, shines a ray of light on Mars. First, Martian Sci-Fi authors Stephen Baxter and Kim Stanley Robinson are two of the six authors who discuss the future of the science fiction genre. Second, Robinson's rainbow of Mars novels from the 1990s almost made the official Top 3 list of fan's all-time favorite science fiction books. And third, of the almost 700 fans who voted for their favorite book, these Mars-related works were mentioned:

• Voyage (1996), by Stephen Baxter

• Mars (2000), by Ben Bova

• The Martian Chronicles (1950), by Ray Bradbury

• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), by Philip K. Dick

• Semper Mars (1998), by Ian Douglas

• Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), by Robert A. Heinlein

• Mars Crossing (2000), by Geoffrey A. Landis

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938), by C. S. Lewis

• Mars trilogy (1992-1996), by Kim Stanley Robinson

• Men, Martians and Machines (1955), by Eric Frank Russell

• Ilium (2003), by Dan Simmons

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

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

• “A Martian Odyssey,” (1934), short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum

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

Note: The magazine cover pictured above has nothing to do with the book poll.

New E-Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction: It Came from Planet Mars

It Came from Planet Mars (October 2008), a new
e-anthology edited by Doyle Eldon Wilmouth, Jr., and published by SpecFicWorld, features four tales of dark speculative fiction:

• "Weird Fruits," by Camille Alexa. Here’s the first line: “When the largest volcano on Mars erupted, people of every nation on Earth watched the live satellite feed as plumes of fire and dust and the very stuff of the planet itself roiled into the Martian sky and filled its heavens. ...”

• "The Wolves That Haunt the Rock" by Mark Patrick Lynch

• "Explorations in a New World" by Eric Turowski

• "Tricks of Shadow and Light" by Barry Napier, who is a geek for all things having to do with Mars. Here’s a snippet: “On the screen, the flat and featureless Martian landscape rolled away into the distance like bloodstained canvas. Sitting about fifteen feet away from the rover camera’s position, a shining object protruded from the ground at a peculiar angle. It caught the weak glare of sun, and sparkled in a muted rust-like color. ..."

Biographies of the four authors are available at SpecFicWorld.

Philcon 2008: the Science Fictional Mars

Philcon 2008, the Philadelphia Conference on Science Fiction & Fantasy, to be held this weekend, November 21st to 23rd, 2008, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, will feature a panel discussion on The Science Fictional Mars: "It seems to hit reset every 20 years. From H.G. Wells to Ray Bradbury to the present, it seems to be a different planet. Will the real Mars please stand up?” Moderator Alexis Gilliland will lead panelists James L. Cambias, Tobias Cabral, and Stephen C. Fisher.

Director of Forthcoming John Carter of Mars Film Read the Book as a Youth

For Wall-E Director, Art Mixes Well with Commerce
Reuters, November 18, 2008
By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- If there ever was a person meant to make a movie about a U.S. Civil War soldier from the Confederate States of America stranded on the planet Mars, it just may be Andrew Stanton, director of animated hit "Wall-E."

Why?

A soldier of the confederacy was a "rebel" in the 1860s when the United States fought its war between the states, and Stanton also comes from a pack of rebels -- the filmmakers at Disney-Pixar -- whose movies like "Wall-E" have time and again defied conventional Hollywood wisdom and become smash hits. ...

"To me it seems bass ackwards when you're asking yourself, 'Okay, what has the rest of the world accepted and what will they accept next?' That just seems weird. That's like looking at (movies) like a businessman," Stanton said about the way he and the filmmakers at Disney-Pixar approach story ideas. ...

As for that confederate soldier story, "John Carter of Mars" is Stanton's next animated feature project. It is based on a story written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known for his "Tarzan" books.

Stanton said he read "John Carter" as a boy and has been in love with it ever since. It is based on a simple idea, he said: "an ordinary person in an extraordinary world."

But audiences wanting to go there will have to wait several years before the movie hits theaters. But when it does, the betting is that like "Wall-E", it, too, will be a hit.

Read the entire article from Reuters.

Web Novel: The Argus Project by A.R. Yngve

Thanks to Swedish science fiction/horror writer and artist A.R. Yngve, I’m reading my way through the online serialized version of his space-opera novel,
The Argus Project (2006).

According to Yngve, a substantial portion of the novel takes place on a partly terraformed Mars, about 170 years into the future, where genetically altered colonists are waging a desperate war for independence against the Terran overlords.

As the work's foreword explains, The Argus Project started as the synopsis for a comic strip and then exploded into an online serialized novel about an interplanetary war for natural resources, thanks to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the early 1990s.

Interestingly, The Argus Project inspired Yngve to write and record a gangster rap song titled "Die, Martian." In the novel, the song is a superhit of the late 22nd century, sung by Slimy Shake, who raps for the Terran forces.

SFFaudio Challenge Includes Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Outlaws of Mars (1933)

The Third Annual SFFaudio Challenge, which encourages selfless science fiction and fantasy fans to create audiobooks of published works that are in the public domain, includes The Outlaws of Mars (1933), by Otis Adelbert Kline. This is a timely development, as Kline, who is often portrayed as an inferior writer to his contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs, is enjoying a much-deserved renaissance.

To learn more about the relationship between Otis Adelbert Kline and Edgar Rice Burroughs, listen to this Dateline Jasoom podcast and read “The Dueling Writers of Mars!,” a recent post at Pazio Publishing’s blog.

Pictured above: Cover of the unabridged Paizo reprint of Kline’s The Outlaws of Mars, scheduled to be published in early 2009.

Drawing the Graphic Novel Watchmen into Martian Science Fiction History

With die-hard fans of Watchmen (1986-1987), the groundbreaking graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, rabid over the forthcoming Warner Bros. film adaptation set for release in 2009, it’s worth noting that part of the novel is set on Mars.

In this lengthy passage from Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World (2002), science journalist Oliver Morton draws Watchmen into the history of Martian science fiction:

Perhaps the first truly successful use of the planet to this end was in Watchmen, an ambitious and accomplished graphic novel written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, and published ...
in the mid-1980s. One of the principal characters in Watchmen is Jon [Doctor Manhattan], a once human superhero whose vast powers over time, space, and the structure of matter have made relating to humanity hard for him; reasonably early on in the action he removes himself from the Earth. Gibbons, looking for inspiration, came across The Traveler’s Guide [by William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller, 1981] in a library and was captivated by its chapter on Mars. He loved the realistic treatment it offered of an alien, inhuman world; he was also struck by some strange synchronicities. Most extraordinary was seeing a picture of the smiley face in Galle crater; extraordinary because a smiley face (with a splash of blood across it) was a key part of the graphic novel’s reoccurring imagery. He enthused to Moore about the possibilities these Martian landscapes offered. As a result the novel’s ninth installment sees Jon and his one-time lover, Laurie, floating over the planet’s best-known landmarks as they talk about the most intimate details of Laurie’s past and the nuclear apocalypse threatening the Earth. Godlike Jon appreciates the vast scale and age of the landscape below them in ways that no human could -- and attaches little significance to Laurie’s memories or to the end of life on Earth.

The failure to find any trace of life on Mars in the 1970s was as harsh a blow to science fiction as it was to science. It had almost always been the Martians, rather than their planet, on which the fiction had focused. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s there was remarkably little new science fiction about Mars. Inspired by The Traveler’s Guide, Moore found a way to reclaim what had been lost by giving significance to the planet itself, rather than its inhabitants. Mars offered him a contrast to the pettiness of Earth as sharp as the divide between one panel and the next. It provided a place of timelessness to frame the sharp cuts between different events in Laurie’s memory. It provided a way to talk about the absence of life as something other than death. Life, Jon tells Laurie, “is a highly overrated phenomenon. Mars gets along perfectly well without so much as a microorganism. See: There’s the South Pole beneath us now. No life. No life at all, but giant steps, ninety feet high, scoured by dust and wind into a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting round the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide. Tell me -- would it be greatly improved by an oil pipeline?”

Moore made memorable use of Mars, and Gibbons got the opportunity to create his own renditions of the landscapes he had discovered in Hartmann’s and Miller’s book. But he also found himself having to try things Hartmann and Miller had wisely avoided. Moore devoted a page of the script from which Gibbons worked to building up Olympus Mons, “A sizeable mountain, very far away ... The sizeable mountain is now quite a large mountain, still very far away ... The mountain is now a bloody enormous mountain, and it’s still a long way away ... Olympus Mons, now completely filling the background. It is still some distance away. We are starting to understand how incredibly huge it really is.” Gibbons took his best shot at turning these instructions into images for the readers, but it defeated him, as it had to. Comic books are drawn at Laurie’s scale, not Jon’s.

Watchmen illustrator Dave Gibbons is the author of Watching the Watchmen: the Definitive Companion to the Ultimate Graphic Novel (2008), a new book that traces the graphic novel’s evolution from idea to finished product.

More Praise for "Tenbrook of Mars," a Novella by Dean McLaughlin

Author, editor, and critic Jason Sanford is the latest high-profile individual who believes “Tenbrook of Mars,” a novella by Dean McLaughlin that was published in the July/August 2008 issue of Analog magazine, should be considered for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Recall that back in October, critic Rich Horton called “Tenbrook of Mars” this year’s “best novella by far, and the best story in Analog in some time,” and gave it his Anlab vote. “This is a very moving story of a Martian colony marooned for 20 years, and the engineer who becomes the leader, and pulls them through against all odds until help can arrive,” Horton wrote in summarizing McLaughlin’s work.

Also, the New England Science Fiction Association has “Tenbrook of Mars” on its list of 2008 Hugo Award Recommendations.

A review of Dean McLaughlin’s “Tenbrook of Mars” is posted at The Fix: Short Fiction Review and the July/August 2008 issue of Analog can be purchased through Fictionwise.

Fan Visits Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame

SF fan Doug Scott details his recent visit to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. In addition to posting some nice photos, he notes that the museum has a Mars display featuring original editions of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898), Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (1992-1996).

Radio Series and Book Welcome to Mars Reflect on the Fantasy of Science in America, 1947-1959

In 2006, author and multimedia performer Ken Hollings and sound producer Simon James broadcast live on Britain's Resonance FM radio a twelve-part series of unscripted reflections on the fantasy of science in America during the late 1940s and 1950s. Titled Welcome to Mars, the series examined the concept of “the future” and told the “story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless.”

Here are the twelve parts of Welcome to Mars, which you can listen to as a podcast, thanks to the Internet Archive. Note that each part is a mp3 file of approximately 30 minutes replete with sound effects.

• Programme 1: 1947: Rebuilding Lemuria

• Programme 2: 1948-49: Flying Saucers over America

• Programme 3: 1950: Cheapness and Splendour

• Programme 4: 1951: Absolute Elsewhere

• Programme 5: 1952: Red Planet

• Programme 6: 1953: Other Tongues, Other Flesh

• Programme 7: 1954: Meet The Monsters

• Programme 8: 1955: Popular Mechanics

• Programme 9: 1956: Greetings My Friends!

• Programme 10: 1957: Contact with Space

• Programme 11: 1958: Battle for the Mind

• Programme 12: 1959: Teenagers from Outer Space

If this has piqued your interest, check out Welcome to Mars (2008), the new companion book by Ken Hollings that was just published in the UK by Strange Attractor Press. The book launch is scheduled for November 18, 2008, at The Horse Hospital in London.

Liz Williams’ Novel Winterstrike One of UK's Best SF/F Books of 2008

Amazon UK’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2008 includes Winterstrike (September 2008), by British author Liz Williams. Set on Mars, the novel is the first in a Gothic SF trilogy. Here’s
a spoiled description of Winterstrike:

"In the centre of Winterstrike, Mars's first city, in the middle of the meteorite crater that gave the city its name, stands the fortress: a mass of vitrified stone striped as white as a bone and as red as a still-beating heart. And on one particular night, at the top of the fortress and on the eve of war, at the summit of a tower so high that from it one could see out across the basalt walls to the dim, shimmering slopes of Olympus, stood a woman ...

Winterstrike spy Hestia Mar has been sent to Caud to recover details of an ancient weapon. During her stay in the Martian city, she encounters the ghost of a warrior, who turns out to be the encoded representation of the city's bombed library. Hestia Mar manages to access the library's data, but realizes too late what she has done: by downloading the information, she has virtually guaranteed the use of the weapon against Caud by her own government. Desperate to rescue the situation, she makes her way back home across the dangers of the Crater Plain.

Meanwhile, in Winterstrike itself, the festival of Ombre has been taking place on the eve of war. Hestia's cousin Shorn -- imprisoned by her family for accidentally consorting with a male -- manages to escape. Her sister Essegui, pursuing her to the dangerous mountains of Mars, discovers a plot by creatures who hold the secrets of the Martian past, and its future. While Essegui battles forces back in Winterstrike, Hestia travels to Earth in an attempt to save her city."

Winterstrike was reviewed by the blogs Fantasy Book Critic, Walker of Worlds, TheBookbag.co.uk, Cheryl’s Mewsings, and the newspaper The Guardian. The novel is not yet available in the United States.

“The Beast-Jewel of Mars,” a Short Story by V. E. Thiessen (1955)

Thanks to an intriguing post titled “Is Leigh Brackett V. E. Thiessen?” at the blog Dark Worlds, I recently downloaded and read “The Beast-Jewel of Mars,” a short story by V. E. Thiessen. Originally published in the Spring 1955 issue of Planet Stories magazine, the tale is about
“two Earthmen who run foul of an ancient prophecy on Mars.” Here's the opening paragraph:

"He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal. ..."

Pyr to Reprint Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road

Pyr-o-mania, the blog of science fiction imprint Pyr, gives us another reason to feel good about the future: Pyr will reprint Desolation Road (1988), an award-winning novel by British author Ian McDonald. Scheduled to be released in July 2009, here’s a description of Desolation Road, taken from Library Journal back in 1988:

“Founded by accident in the Martian desert by a scientist obsessed with the nature of time, the town of Desolation Road grows from a whistle stop on the Bethlehem Ares Railroad to a stronghold of freedom ranged against the ROTECH bureaucracy. The loves, hates, and intrigues of the town's residents come to life and build to a vivid climax in this compellingly executed novel.”

Pictured above: The cover for Pyr's forthcoming reprint of Desolation Road. Check out a gallery of other covers at LibraryThing.

New Flash Fiction: “The Manumitters”

The blog Timing Error has a good piece of flash fiction titled “The Manumitters” (2008). It revolves around a
heated exchange between a Martian military officer and
a disgruntled Earthman at an annual trade market in New Mexico.

Book Sale: Shambleau and Others, a Collection by C. L. Moore (1953)

A collection of seven previously published stories, Shambleau and Others (1953), by C. L. Moore, contains three novelettes set on Mars starring interplanetary adventurer Northwest Smith: the classic “Shambleau” (1933), “Scarlet Dream” (1934), and “The Tree of Life” (1936). Here’s a nice first edition of Shambleau and Others that’s
for sale over at AbeBoooks:

Shambleau and Others, a collection by C. L. Moore (1953)

Publisher: New York: Gnome Press, Inc. Publishers
Publication Date: 1953
Binding: Hardcover
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition

Description: Octavo, boards. First edition. Adhesive label with signed inscription by Moore to Gerry de la Ree affixed to front free endpaper. Collects three Jirel of Joiry and four Northwest Smith stories. ... A fine copy in fine dust jacket with touch of rubbing to upper front corner and head of spine panel and two closed tears at rear spine fold ... Still a sharp, bright example of the dust jacket.

Price: $250

The indefatigable Blue Tyson notes that you can read "Shambleau" online and the blog Variety SF points out a neat Heinlein connection to this classic Northwest Smith story. Also, as Dark Worlds and QuasarDragon mention, there’s a cool 1955 French comic version of “Shambleau,” illustrated by Jean-Claude Forest.

For a more challenging read, see "Shambleau ... and others: the role of the female in the fiction of C. L. Moore," a litcrit essay by Sarah Gamble that was published in Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (1991).

Interview with Veronica McGregor, the Voice of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander

Writer and blogger Claire Evans has a neat interview with Veronica McGregor, News Services Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who gave the Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft its Internet voice at Twitter and Gizmodo. McGregor, a mother of two, former CNN NASA correspondent, and graduate of UCLA, composed more than 600 messages on Twitter and grew the number of online followers from about 3,000 on landing day (May 25, 2008) to more than 39,000 earlier this week, when the spacecraft froze to death on the Red Planet.

For another perspective on the Phoenix Mars Mission and the spacecraft's often overlooked Visions of Mars library of science fiction, read "Red Into Blue," a recent editorial comment in The Times of India.

The official epitaph of Phoenix Mars Lander, as determined by a contest hosted by the blog of Wired magazine: "Veni, Vidi, Fodi."

Culture Martienne: a French Blog

Culture Martienne, a French blog about the planet Mars in popular culture, was recently brought to my attention. Focusing on literature, cinema, comics, artwork, and more, this is a great resource that covers both French and English language items. You can easily translate the blog and navigate in English by using Yahoo’s Babel Fish.

Among the many interesting things you’ll find at Culture Martienne:

• A detailed chronology about Mars in science and science fiction

• A list of novels written by French and English authors

• A call for stories for a forthcoming French SF anthology titled Dimension Mars, scheduled to be published in early 2010

Thanks Herveline!

The Far Call, a Novel by Gordon R. Dickson (1978)

The Far Call (1978), a novel by Gordon R. Dickson

At left: Paperback (New York: Ace Books, 1983), 414 p., $2.75. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

"Jens Wylie would never leave Earth, but his heart was with the brave men and women of the first Mars Expedition, enchanted by the siren song of the stars. As U.S. Undersecretary of Space, he thought he could share some small part of that bold adventure. But as the mission progressed, Jens saw the sure signs of imminent disaster, a mission failure that could bring Earth’s Space Program to a halt. He knew that he must risk his future, and maybe even his life, to keep humanity on the road to the stars -- the only question was whether he had the courage to do it."

Nominated for a Ditmar Award in 1979, The Far Call has a long but tangled history. A note inside the 1983 Ace paperback states that
“Portions of this work have previously appeared in Analog magazine in different form."

Archival notes to the Gordon Rupert Dickson Papers at the University of Minnesota expand on the point: "A much different and shorter form of this novel, under the title "Capsule," appeared in Analog in 1973. Dickson decided to expand that novel into The Far Call, but along the way made so many changes that the new novel was both much longer and significantly different from the original. The Far Call was first published by Dial Press and subsequently reprinted by Dell Books. Other projects were undertaken during the writing of The Far Call, some of them growing out of the research done for the novel. See in this collection materials for “Before the Launch,” a novelette, and the two articles, "A Matter of Perspective" and "SF Authors Interview." The writing process for The Far Call appears to have been very complicated, involving a great deal of research, writing, and revision."

The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine (2000) notes that “Of Dickson’s serials, Sandra Miesel described “The Far Call” (Analog, August-October 1973) as the ‘finest realistic novel about the space program yet written.’ The story plots the many problems and political machinations that plague the first manned expedition to Mars. It is arguably Dickson’s best work, yet it is surprisingly overlooked. Dickson worked on it for years -- some evidence of his research at Cape Kennedy surfaced in Analog in the article “A Matter of Perspective” (December 1971). He remained unsatisfied with the Analog version and rewrote it at least three more times before the book version appeared in 1978.”

In reviewing Dickson’s The Far Call, the webmaster at Kerens.com writes, “This is a real old book I read a long long time ago in a land far away and just pulled it down out of the library again. Not sure why, except real good hard science fiction is a bit rare, and this is one of the old classics. You have to really wander around a Barnes and Nobles for several hours these days to find a jewel like this one. ... The title comes from that class of men that are called by the lure of adventure into the realms of the wild no matter what the risk. Very realistic book and based upon a lot of true science that makes it a good read.”

Autographs of Notable SF Authors

For those of us who are interested in used and rare books, periodicals, and paper ephemera, the website TomFolio.com has sample autograph signatures of quite a few science fiction authors, some of whom have written about Mars or Martians, including:

Forrest J Ackerman, Kevin J. Anderson, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison, Philip José Farmer, Ray Harryhausen, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Richard A. Lupoff, Frederik Poul, Jerry Sohl, A. E. van Vogt, H. G. Wells, Jack Williamson, and Roger Zelazny.

Pictured above: The autograph of Jerry Sohl, author of The Mars Monopoly (1956).

New Short Story Online: “The Ambassador” by Mark Lawrence

The blog QuasarDragon has introduced me to “The Ambassador,” a new short story by Mark Lawrence, which you can read online at Afterburn SF. A fast-paced “Us and Them” story infused with science, medicine, and romance, the plot revolves around Aryans on Earth and their long-lost multiracial descendants on Mars. With each considering the other to be non-human and a threat, the two branches struggle to cooperate in the face of a common foe.

For a nonfiction story about an ambassador to Mars, read “NASA Ambassador is a Solar Man,” a recent Minnesota newspaper article about Earle Kyle, a volunteer for NASA Solar System Ambassadors. When Kyle read the old 1952 Collier's magazine articles by Wernher von Braun about sending a man to Mars, he was hooked for life:
"Mars missions will do the same for future generations and the space research may help with such critical problems as global warming and food and water shortages.”

Looking Back at Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949)

Science fiction fan James Wallace Harris takes an emotional look back at Red Planet (1949), by Robert A. Heinlein, in a recent post at his blog Auxiliary Memory. Among his many interesting observations, Harris notes that Red Planet was released recently as an unabridged audiobook from Full Cast Audio and next year, 2009, is the 60th anniversary of the novel’s publication.

As mentioned in my blog post of October 1, 2008, neither Red Planet nor any of Heinlein’s other writings are part of the Visions of Mars library, which is resting comfortably on the Red Planet aboard NASA’s now-deceased Phoenix Mars Lander.

American Flagg! Comic Book Series Reprinted

Leroy Douresseaux of the Comic Book Bin announces in a lengthy review that after being out of print for quite some time, American Flagg!, a 1980s dystopian science fiction comic book series by Howard Chaykin, is finally back in print!

With an introduction by Michael Chabon that “isn’t so much an introduction as it is a piece for a scholarly journal or high brow literary magazine,” American Flagg!: Definitive Collection Volume 1 (2008) reprints the first fourteen issues in the comic book series and the graphic novel American Flagg: Hard Times (1985).

Here’s a summary of American Flagg!, taken from Douresseaux’s review: “The series was set in the year 2031 ... [long after] a series of worldwide crises forced the U.S. government and the heads of major corporations to relocate to Mars. The exiled American government on Mars, its corporate backers, and a group of technicians on a defected Soviet lunar colony formed the Plex: an interplanetary union that governed the United States from its capital on Mars. The Plex created massive, fortified populations centers that basically transformed cities and urban areas into giant shopping malls called Plexmalls. In the Plexmalls the law is enforced not by police departments, but by the Plexus Rangers. The series follows the adventures of Reuben Flagg, a former television star who is drafted into the Rangers."

Otis Adelbert Kline and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Dueling Writers of Mars

Christopher Carey, editor of Pazio Publishing’s Planet Stories series, has a great post on Pazio’s blog about Otis Adelbert Kline and Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Dueling Writers of Mars!”

Drawing upon his memories as a youth and perspective as an editor, Carey makes a compelling case for purchasing Paizo’s recent unabridged reprint of Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars (1933, 2008).

Critic Fábio Fernandes also has much to say about the dueling writers of Mars in his review of Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars, posted on the blog Fantasy Book Critic.

While I’m not in a position to compare and contrast Kline to Burroughs, I agree that The Swordsman of Mars is worth reading. I bought the book a few weeks ago and was not disappointed. With a lengthy and insightful introduction by Michael Moorcock, Kline's novel is solid pulp and should appeal to all fans of old school sci-fi.

Looking forward to Paizo’s forthcoming unabridged reprint of Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Outlaws of Mars (1933), scheduled to be published in February 2009.