Kim Stanley Robinson's Favorite Martian

In reading various interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the award-winning trilogy Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), Blue Mars (1996), we came across a short but interesting interview on NewMars.com, the online magazine of the Mars Society. Conducted at the Second Mars Society convention in Boulder, Colorado in August 1999, the interview ended with this neat exchange:

New Mars: Excepting your own characters, who's your favorite Martian?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, if inaminate things -- or call them robots -- are included, than the Viking orbiter that took all those satellite photos in the late 1970s would have to be my favorite. As for real historical personages: Alexander Bogdanov, who wrote so passionately about Mars as the site for a better society. For fictional characters, I think Philip K. Dick's Bleekmen, his indigenous aboriginals who wander the desert margins of his novel Martian Time-Slip.

Note that Robinson earned a Ph. D. in English from the University of California, San Diego in 1982. His doctoral thesis, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, was published in 1984.

Pictured above: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Martians (1999), a collection of short fiction.

New Short Fiction: "Mars: a Traveler's Guide" by Ruth Nestvold

"Mars: a Traveler’s Guide,” a short story by Ruth Nestvold, appeared recently in the January 2008 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The opening paragraphs of the story are available at AccessMyLibrary.com and the blog Puss Reboots has some positive comments.

Nestvold, who maintains her own website, lives in Germany and has a Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart. She has sold stories to Asimov's Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, and other magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, Yseult, was sold recently to a publisher.

Light Reading for a Sunday Afternoon, Vol. III

Here are some recent news pieces worth reading:

• “Space Exploration Going Slowly Than Imagined, But Still Going,” by Christopher Gibbons, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Jan. 26, 2008. Lamenting the state of the human space flight program, an aging Baby Boomer has been looking through his old science fiction books and magazines.

• “Female Figure on Mars Just a Rock,” by Benjamin Radford, Space.com, Jan. 24, 2008. Recently released photos from NASA’s rover Spirit have renewed a Cydonia-type debate about the possibility of life on Mars.

• “The Whole Creature Heaved and Pulsated,” by Dave Itzkoff, Paper Cuts: a Blog about Books, Jan. 24, 2008. In discussing the Hollywood movie Cloverfield, The New York Times columnist Itzkoff recalls H. G. Wells’ description of the invading Martians in his classic book The War of the Worlds (1898).

• “The Dark Side of Space Disaster Theories,” by James Oberg, The Space Review, Jan. 21, 2008. A refutation of the argument in Dark Mission, by Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara (2007), which sees the failure of NASA's Mars Observer probe in 1993 as an attempt to hide the existence of a Martian civilization.

• “Martian Panic is Recreated in North,” The Journal, Jan. 17, 2008. Orson Welles’ famous radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) on October 30, 1938 will be recreated at AV Festival 08, the United Kingdom’s largest celebration of electronic and digital arts.

NPR's Cultural History of Mars

Originally broadcast on January 27, 2004 in the wake of NASA's rover Opportunity landing on the Red Planet,"Cultural History of Mars" is a 35-minute piece from National Public Radio's program Talk of the Nation.

Hosted by Neal Conan, here’s a description of the piece: “Earthlings were fascinated by Mars long before sending rovers and landers to beam back three-dimensional color pictures of its surface. Does it have canals? Did little green men ever inhabit the planet? Will humans ever walk or live on Mars? NPR's Neal Conan and guests discuss the history and mystery of Earth's neighbor, from Galileo to War of the Worlds and beyond.”

Conan’s guests include Dr. William Sheehan, co-author of Mars:
The Lure of the Red Planet (2001), David Catling, professor of astrobiology at University of Washington, and Mark Rahner, pop culture writer for The Seattle Times.

Covering both science and science fiction, the discussion mentions
a Ray Bradbury episode from X-Minus One (radio drama, 1955), Percival Lowell, Mars Attacks! (film, 1996), H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars (1951), Kim Stanley Robinson, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles from Dimension X (radio adaptation, 1950/1951), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character John Carter, C. S. Lewis, Robinson Crusoe on Mars (film, 1964), Angry Red Planet (film, 1960), Total Recall (film, 1990), and Rocketship X-M (film, 1950).

Vericon VIII to be Held at Harvard University

Sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and held annually since 2001, Vericon VIII, a sf, fantasy, gaming, and anime convention, is scheduled for this weekend, January 25th to 27th, 2008, at Harvard University.

Orson Scott Card is the Guest of Honor and the convention schedule is stocked with many interesting events, including “The Multiple Myths of Philip K. Dick,” in which “Anne Mini, daughter of Dick's second wife and author of A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick, and David Gill ... explore the Gordian knot of the multiple myths of the writer’s life.”

According to its website, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association has a library of about 3,000 items, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic books, as well movies and games. We tried to search the catalog to see if the library has a copy of Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip (1964), but we repeatedly got
“Server error!” messages.

Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura -- Seneca

Sir Edmund Hillary: The Warlord of Mars

With the recent death of Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest, on January 11, 2008, at age 88, we’ve been reading various pieces about his life and extraordinary accomplishments.

One source which stands out is the website of the Academy of Achievement, Washington, D.C. In addition to containing a profile, biography, interview, and photo gallery of Hillary, the website details one of his recommended readings, The Warlord of Mars (1919), by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

I was also a very great reader, and the books I read were initially, very largely on the adventurous sort of activities. The Warlord of Mars or Georgette Heyer and those sort of romantic adventure type things. I was a very keen walker and as I walked along the roads and tracks around the countryside, I'd be dreaming. My mind would be miles away and I would be slashing villains with swords and capturing beautiful maidens and doing all sorts of heroic things.

Pictured above: Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, after scaling the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest. In contrast, Olympus Mons on Mars has an 88,580-foot summit.

Alibris’ Five Top-Selling Martian SF Books

Alibris, an independent booksellers’ website that offers over 60 million used, new, and out-of-print books, has a neat feature that allows one to sort a search by “top-selling.”

For the sake of curiosity, we conducted a search for the subject “mars planet" and generated a list of 419 books. Sorting the list by “top-selling” and weeding out the nonfiction books, here are the five top-selling Martian science fiction books at Alibris:

1. The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells (1898)
2. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (1950)
3. Ilium, by Dan Simmons (2003)
4. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992)
5. A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1917)

Pictured above: Cover of The War of the Worlds (New York: Pocket Books, 1953). For an awesome gallery of more than 300 other covers of Wells' The War of the Worlds, see Dr. Zeus' collection.

The Space Show: NASA's Donna Shirley

Former manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program and recently retired director of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Donna Shirley was interviewed on the January 18, 2008 broadcast of The Space Show, a radio program hosted by Dr. David Livingston.

While we have not had an opportunity to listen to the interview, "this is a must-hear discussion because we kept coming back to science fiction and its role in space exploration and development, especially with terra-forming Mars.”

The influence of science fiction upon Shirley’s career is described in an earlier interview given at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1998:

When I was 12 or so I started reading science fiction. And I read Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars, and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein's books about Mars, and just got completely fascinated with the idea of Mars and going into space and space travel. And so, when I got to college, there really wasn't a space program. I got to college in 1958, and that was the year that Explorer One was orbited, following Sputnik. And so you really couldn't specialize in space, nobody knew how to do it. And so I ended up still working on airplanes.

Shirley voiced similar comments in “Making Science Fact, Now Chronicling Science Fiction,” an article about her role at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, from the June 15, 2004 issue of The New York Times.

Donna Shirley is the author of the nonfiction book Managing Martians (1998), a “captivating memoir of a life and career spent reaching for the stars.” We've added it to our reading list.

The Sirens of Titan: a Paperback Original (1959)

Recently, we stumbled across bookseller Pam Donaldson’s essay about collecting paperback books, which mentions that Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959) is “renowned for being the first paperback original book that was then followed by a hardcover printing.” Similar points have been made by Kelly Tetterton and Oliver Corlett.

Since we were not aware of the importance of The Sirens of Titan's bibliographic history, we decided to read a bit further. With a little help from our local library and the Google Books Library Project, we found some interesting things about Vonnegut's book:

• “It made an historic breakthrough in the relationship between paperbacks and hard-covers. For I recall it as the first paperback original to go from the cheap to the expensive edition, rather than vice versa. It was reprinted in hard covers – presumably by public demand. Lately this course has been followed by other paperbacks, but it took Vonnegut to reverse the field.” -- Donald A. Wollheim, The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today (1971)

• “The thing was, I could get $3,000 immediately for a paperback original, and I always needed money right away, and no hardcover publisher would let me have it. But I was also noticing the big money and the heavy praise some of my contemporaries were getting for their books, and I would think, ‘Well, shit, I’m going to have to study writing harder, because I think what I’m doing is pretty good, too.’" -- Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut (1988)

A search of the catalog at AbeBooks confirms that The Sirens of Titan went from “the cheap to the expensive edition.” Copies of the unsigned 1959 paperback original published by Dell (pictured above), with a first printing of 177,500 copies, are selling for as much as $230. In contrast, copies of the unsigned 1961 hardcover reprint published by Houghton Mifflin, with a limited printing of 2,500 copies, are selling for as much as $5,000.

Lost Libraries: Niven, Polastron, Eusebius

In reading our way through Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars (1999), a collection of related short fiction, we’ve seen several interesting passages about books and libraries. Below is a neat passage about raiding old libraries through time retrieval.

"The Industrial Age is over, the world isn’t rich anymore, and we can’t afford to experiment. But what have we forgotten? What miracles could we find by raiding old libraries? If you search through two thousand years of the past you’re bound to find something."

“Finding it is the problem,” Ra Chen agreed. “I built the big X-cage to raid the Library of Alexandria before Julius Caesar torched it. It turns out that we can’t reach back that far. But we got to the Beverly Hills Library in plus-sixty-eight Atomic Era! We scooped it all up just before the quake and the wave. Why don’t you set some of your people searching through those old books?”

“I will. What about the Pentagon or the Kremlin? They must have had interesting stuff –-“

“Secrets. Locked up, hidden and guarded. Willy, it’s a mistake to think of armed men as dead.”

Speaking of lost libraries, Books on Fire: the Destruction of Libraries Throughout History, by Lucien X. Polastron (2007), is worth reading. Polastron discussed his book in the December 6, 2007 segment of NPR's The Book Guys.

Pictured above: Aerial view of Caesarea Maritima, located on the Mediterranean coast and one the richest archaeological sites in Israel. A center of Roman, Jewish, and Christian scholarship, Caesarea grew a library in stature second only to that of Alexandria. The Christian Bishop Eusebius, the "father of Church history," used the resources of Caesarea's library to write his Historia Ecclesiastica in the early fourth century. According to Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700 (4th ed., 1998), the library at Caesarea had 30,000 volumes at its height, in about 630 A.D.

Screenplay for Sale: Journey to Mars (1936)

A screenplay entitled The Journey to Mars (1936), by James Ashmore Creelman, is selling for $8,000 on AbeBooks. The listing notes that "Creelman was a celebrated Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include King Kong. Journey to Mars is dated 1936, which is one year after Creelman's final Hollywood film. He commited suicide in 1941."

The screenplay has piqued our interest, as neither The Mars Movie Guide nor VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever 2008 lists a Hollywood film with the title Journey to Mars.

We’ve done a bit of research and here’s what we have so far:

• A screen note in the December 26, 1935 issue of The New York Times mentions that "The Journey to Mars, an astronomical adventure melodrama will be filmed in color by Paramount.”

• A column in the October 12, 1937 issue of the Los Angeles Times announces that “A Journey to Mars Programmed with Scott and Lamour in Leads” and states that “Outdoing Buck Rogers ... will be the Paramount production ... long contemplated, and at last to reach the cameras. Arthur Hornblow, Jr., assumes charge ... and J. A. Creelman is evolving the screen play ... Lamour ... will appear as an alluring Martian ... Scott will depict an American scientist.”

• An article in the September 9, 1941 issue of The New York Times reports that “Playwright Dies in 18-story Plunge: Body of James Creelman Found in Courtyard of 72d St. Apartment Building.” There is no mention of his professional accomplishments, not even a reference to King Kong.

• The International Motion Picture Almanac (1956) contains this small blurb: “Journey to Mars, original, by John Colton and James Creelman, with the scientific collaboration of W. H. Christie and the Mt. Wilson Observation. Paramount.”

Our knowledge of how Hollywood and the film industry functions is thin, so it is unclear to us whether the screenplay for Journey to Mars lay dormant from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s and then was brought to fruition on the big screen under a different title, or whether the screenplay has ever been brought to fruition. If anyone has additional information, we’d appreciate the help. We're not interested in purchasing the screenplay, just the intellectual challenge. Thanks.

Light Reading for a Sunday Afternoon, Vol. II

Here are some recent news pieces worth reading:

• “2007 WD5 Mars Collision Effectively Ruled Out - Impact odds now 1 in 10,000,” by Steve Chesley, NASA Near Earth Object Program, Jan., 9, 2008. The chances of an asteroid striking Mars have diminished.

• “Norman Mailer Archive Opens in Texas,” by Jim Vertuno, The Associated Press, Jan. 3, 2008. The archive includes “The Martian Invasion,” a short story Mailer wrote when he was a kid.

• “Constant Reader: Superman is Dead,” by Paul Constant, The Stranger, Jan. 2, 2008. A Seattle columnist lauds The Million Year Picnic, a Cambridge, MA, comic-book shop named after a short story in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950).

Mary Turzillo to Attend Arisia 2008 in Cambridge

Science fiction author Mary Turzillo is scheduled to participate in Arisia 2008, a science fiction and fantasy convention to be held next weekend, January 18th to 21st, at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, MA. She’ll start her weekend with a book signing on Friday evening, January 18th, at Cambridge's Pandemonium Books.

A former professor of English at Kent State University, Turzillo won a Nebula Award in 2000 for her novelette “Mars is No Place for Children,” which was originally published in the May 1999 issue of Science Fiction Age magazine. The novelette, written as the diary of a young Martian girl, reminded one reviewer of “the Heinlein juveniles” and left another reviewer “cold.” A detailed description of the novelette and an excerpt are available at Fictionwise.

Turzillo’s first novel, An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, was serialized in Analog magazine from July to November 2004 and the first six chapters are available at Analog's website.

More recently, Turzillo’s short story “Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads” was published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (2007). According to the blog Visions of Paradise, the story “is about the difficulties of settling Mars. It is a strong adventure about how a radical Land Ethic Nomad tries to drive off-planet all settlers by seemingly sabotaging their nuclear plants. In some ways it reminded me of Cyril M. Kornbluth & Judith Merrill’s 1951 serial Mars Child,” which was printed in book form as Outpost Mars (1952). Both SF Signal and SCI FI Weekly reviewed “Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads" and the other Solaris stories.

As of 2008, Turzillo is working on a new novel, Heart’s Journey, Mars Quest, “a novel about the adventures of Marcus and Zora Smithe (parents of her plucky Martian girl hero Kapera).”

Mary A. Turzillo is married to Martian scientist and science fiction author Geoffrey A. Landis, who is also scheduled to participate in Arisia 2008.

(Addendum: Pandemonium Books has "Pandemonium Erupts in Central Square!" T-shirts, with "Martian War Machines trashing City Hall, and generally tearing up Central Square." The T-shirts sell for about $20.)

Leslie F. Stone's "The Human Pets of Mars" (1936)

Originally appearing in the Vol. 10, No. 12, October 1936 issue of Amazing Stories, "The Human Pets of Mars," a novelette by Leslie F. Stone, is an influential, but controversial, piece of early Martian science fiction.

The novelette has a seemingly simple story line: Martians land on a golf course at Haines Point, Washington, D.C., and capture a small group of humans, transporting them back to Mars, where they are kept as pets. After a short but abusive captivity, the humans steal a Martian spaceship and make their way back to Earth. At the story’s conclusion, one of the former captives declares: “I’m going to make a life work of freeing every animal pet in the land!”

Yet, as Isaac Asimov points out in his Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930’s (1974), “This story ... does not hold up on rereading as well as many of the other stories in this book did, and I am keenly embarrassed by the simple-minded portrayal of the Blacks in the tale. Yet I well remember thinking the story was absolutely great when I read it for the first time. ... It was sometime in late 1936, encouraged, I believe, by my pleasure in The Human Pets of Mars, that I could finally resist no more. I had grown tired of the endless pages of my fantasy, which was getting nowhere, and I decided to try, for the very first time, science fiction!”

A detailed analysis of the racial elements of Stone’s novelette is “Race and Color Coding in Leslie F. Stone's The Human Pets of Mars: Reflections for the Repertoire of the Multicultural Classroom,” a scholarly article by Batya Weinbaum (1997).

As one of the first woman writers to have her work published in science fiction magazines, Leslie F. Stone was an important sci-fi pioneer. A short biographical sketch of her appears in Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965, by Eric Leif Davin (2006).

"Claptrap Classics," by Edgar R. Burroughs

In 1964, Dover Publications reprinted two Edgar Rice Burroughs books as a single paperback volume, A Princess of Mars and A Fighting Man of Mars: Two Martian Novels (1917, 1931). The release of this
“Martian duo” was marked by a humorous magazine article which appeared in the August 21, 1964 issue of Time magazine. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of that article:

A curious thing happened to Edgar Rice Burroughs on the way to oblivion. When the 74-year-old novelist died in 1950, most of his 24 Tarzan books and ten Martian sagas were long out of print and far out of vogue. Then in 1961, a lady librarian in California removed a Tarzan book from the shelf on the grounds that the Ape Man and Jane were living in sin. Actually, as Burroughs went out of his way to establish in The Return of Tarzan, the two were properly married in the bush by Jane's father, an ordained minister. But the nationwide newspaper publicity over Tarzan prompted paperback publishers to burrow into the Burroughs estate. ...

Why 10 million paperback readers a year should beat a path to this convoluted claptrap is anyone's guess. Perhaps, suggests Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, Burroughs appeals to a reader's "primitive instincts." A more likely explanation is that the books induce the same kind of "dreamless and refreshing sleep" that overtakes John Carter when he breathes the atmosphere of Mars.

In trying unsuccessfully to find the cover art of A Princess of Mars and A Fighting Man of Mars: Two Martian Novels, we did find a gallery of other Barsoom paperback covers maintained by Russ Kirkman. Great stuff. Thanks, Russ!

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

Opened in 2004, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (SFM) in Seattle is “the world’s first museum devoted to the thought-provoking ideas and experiences of science fiction.”

Of particular interest to us is the museum’s featured exhibition, The Changing Face of Mars:

“More than any other location, Mars has served as the stage for SF journeys of adventure, discovery and conflict. Humans have always been fascinated by the “Red Planet,” and the belief that Mars was covered with “canals” sparked countless SF tales of a dying world ready either to conquer or be conquered. These tales planted images in the public perception of Mars that affected the assumptions of a generation of space scientists. Ultimately, however, bigger and better telescopes, and then actual visits by robotic spacecraft erased those images and replaced them with more accurate views. The old Martians were killed off and their world obliterated, but what was left behind was a world ready for a new wave of SF based not on old myths, but on a real planet revealed by more advanced science.”

Here are some suggested readings from the exhibit, taken from SFM’s website:

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

• A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1917)

• The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (1950)

• The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke (1951)

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

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

• A Martian Odyssey and Other Classics of Science Fiction, by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1966)

• Desolation Road, by Ian McDonald (1988)

• Beachhead, by Jack Williamson (1992)

• Mars, by Ben Bova (1992)

• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992)

• Moving Mars, by Greg Bear (1993)

• The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke (1994. nonfiction)

• The Secret Life, by Paul J. McAuley (2001)

Book Sale: Out of the Silent Planet, a 1938 novel written by C. S. Lewis

Below is the description of a copy of C. S. Lewis'
Out of the Silent Planet (1938), which is selling on AbeBooks for $7,950.

According to Destination: Mars in Art, Myth, and Science (1997), a wonderful reference for Martian science fiction written by Martin Caidin and Jay Barbree, Lewis' novel is “a sophisticated Christian rebuttal against the use of science for material gain. Lewis set the action on Mars, attacking H. G. Wells in particular, whom he portrayed as a vulgar journalist.”

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

Publisher: John Lane / the Bodley Head, UK
Publication Date: 1938
Book Condition: NF
Dust Jacket Condition: NF
Edition: First Edition
Book Type: Hardback

Description: The rarest of the rare. CSL's first book in the Harold Jones dust jacket. The edges have been professionally cleaned (of fox spotting and the word's Garlicks Library). Page 1 and 99 have the "sacred and profane" words GARLICKS LIBRARY stamped at the base of the page..plus 4 dog ears: number 60341 stamped on both the front paste down/back flap of the DJ and 25 November 1938 (this date only) stamped on the end paste down. For all those flaws, a very desirable copy of arguably one of the scarcest of the pre-war dust jackets.

Price: $7,950

For a biographical sketch of illustrator Harold Jones, see the description of the Harold Jones Papers at the McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi.

Eric John Stark, Martian Adventurer

Paizo Publishing’s reprint of The Secret of Sinharat, by Leigh Brackett (1964), starring Martian adventurer Eric John Stark, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock, has been released. The title seems a bit misleading, as the book also contains a reprint of People of the Talisman (1964), another Brackett novel featuring Stark.

Here's a description of the new Paizo reprint: “Enter Eric John Stark, adventurer, rebel, wildman. Raised on the sun-soaked, savage world of Mercury, Stark lives among the people of the civilized solar system, but his veneer of calm masks a warrior’s spirit. In the murderous Martian Drylands the greatest criminals in the galaxy hatch a conspiracy of red revolution. Stark’s involvement leads to the forgotten ruins of the Martian Low Canals, an unlikely romance, and a secret so potent it could shake the Red Planet to its core. In a special bonus novel, People of the Talisman, Stark ventures to the treacherous polar icecap of Mars to return a stolen talisman to an oppressed people. The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman make an excellent introduction to the work of Leigh Brackett, a pillar of science fantasy and one of the greatest writers to work in the genre."

The bundling of these two novels is not a new development, as they comprise “Book One” and “Book Two” of Brackett’s single-volume Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars (New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 1982).

Also, the two works were bound together as an Ace Double novel (New York: Ace Books, 1964; Series M, #101), in which Edmond Hamilton, Brackett’s husband, wrote an introduction, noting that “her stories about Mars had their inspiration in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels.”

Tracing the ink back a bit further, The Secret of Sinharat is an expansion of Brackett’s story “Queen of the Martian Catacombs,” which was published in Planet Stories magazine in 1949. And, People of the Talisman is an expansion of Brackett’s story “Black Amazon of Mars,” which appeared in Planet Stories in 1951. Sci-Fi critic Rich Horton discusses these expansions in his review of the Ace Double novel.

For a larger perspective of Brackett's Red Planet, see Wikipedia's article “Mars in the Fiction of Leigh Brackett.”

The Landing of Viking 1 in 1976

In reading about the landing of NASA’s Viking 1 on Mars, July 20, 1976, we found a beautiful article entitled “Mars? New Realities for Sci-Fi,” which appeared in The New York Times a few days later.

Lamenting the public’s lack of interest in the subject, columnist John Leonard asked several science fiction writers about the significance of the landing and why they did not join Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena to await the historic feat, which was originally scheduled for July 4th. Here are some excerpts from Leonard's article.

• Isaac Asimov: "'We’ll find out what it’s really like ... That’s not inhibiting for a writer. That means a whole new set of stories. Every advance of science opens up new possibilities for fiction.' Why hadn’t Mr. Asimov gone to Pasadena? 'Carl Sagan invited me a dozen times ... but I don’t fly.'"

• Kurt Vonnegut: "almost went to Pasadena for the scheduled Fourth of July touchdown, stayed instead in the Hamptons, and feels he probably made the right decision because who would want to wait around for two weeks in Pasadena? Asked about the landing, he is typically laconic: 'I’m relieved they sent instruments. ... It’s better than the moon. Everybody knew what the moon was like. Ray Bradbury says we’ll be on Mars in 20 years. Won’t that be something?'”

• Frederik Pohl: "was in New Jersey. He had intended to go, but the Fourth of July postponement postponed him, too. He will be there in September for the landing of Viking 2. 'A good first step,' says Mr. Pohl.”

• Frank Herbert: "stayed home in the State of Washington. Mr. Herbert, whose superb Dune series was completed this month ... is at work on a new novel 'and you know how that is.' But he watched the landing on TV, and liked the dominating chat of Mr. Bradbury and Dr. Sagan. 'I think … that science-fiction writers and the scientists engaged in space exploration, in their fantasies and their work, are the only people concerned with making us immortal. The planet’s finite. So is the solar system. Most people don’t just live from paycheck to paycheck; they live from the late movie to the alarm clock. Our attention-span is short. But to survive we’ve got to colonize. It’s very exciting.'"

• Larry Niven: "was at the lab for the countdown. 'A tough ticket, too,' he says. Mr. Niven is known as a writer who cares a lot about hard science. What did he feel in Pasadena? 'All the appropriate emotions ... But one more: it got to me. Maybe it would crash. Maybe the cameras wouldn’t work. All the data were 15 minutes late. Our hopes, our wishing, was 15 minutes late.' ... Mr. Niven is not worried by facts. 'My first three books on Mars were about three different Mars. … They kept changing Mars on me. We don’t stop writing when reality changes.'"

Note that Robert A. Heinlein and artist Jon Lomberg, neither of who is mentioned in Leonard's article, were both present at JPL on July 20, 1976. Lomberg created a radio documentary of the Viking landings, a five minute excerpt of which is available at CBC Radio's website. The entire documentary, which includes live recordings from mission control at JPL and interviews with science fiction writers, is part of the "Visions of Mars" library.