Wanted: LibriVox Readers and Anthology Writers

Here are two interesting opportunities for Martian science fiction aficionados who might want to take a more active role in the genre:

• LibriVox, a digital library of free public domain audiobooks, is seeking volunteers to read and record pieces of Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898), Garrett P. Serviss’ unauthorized sequel to H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898).

• Editor Doyle Eldon Wilmoth, Jr., is calling on writers to submit fiction pieces for his forthcoming It Came From Planet Mars anthology, which will be published on July 15, 2008 and will be available as a free download from SpecFicWorld.com.

New Serial: Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

Scheduled to be published as a novel by Ace Books in August 2008, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Joe Haldeman’s Marsbound can be read as a three-part serial in Analog: Science Fiction and Fact.

We missed Part I (January/February 2008) and Part II (March 2008), but we read Part III, the conclusion, in the April 2008 issue. Marsbound is an interesting story with a lot of hard science and passing references to a spaceship named John Carter, presumably named after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character.

As Analog described Marsbound in its January/February 2008 issue, “The title lends itself to at least two interpretations, both of which are at least partly applicable. And while the story does involve Martians, they are, as Joe puts it, ‘not your grandfather's Martians.’ You'll see that as soon as you meet them, and likely find them among the most intriguing aliens you've ever encountered. But there's much more to them than meets the eye. …”

Both Chrome Bits and Jason Sanford’s blog provide specific descriptions of the story line and offer comments. Also, a post on Fantasy Book Critic states that Haldeman is in the process of writing Starbound, a sequel to Marsbound.

Boskone 45 to be Held in Boston

Boskone 45, the New England Science Fiction Association’s regional sci-fi convention, will be held this weekend, Feb. 15-17, 2008, at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston.

The program schedule contains some interesting events, including a nonfiction presentation about the Mars Homestead Project by two members of the Mars Foundation. Here’s a partial description of the project, taken from the program schedule:

“The mission of the Mars Homestead Project is to design, fund, build and operate the first permanent settlement on Mars. The initial goal for the Mars Homestead Project is to identify the core technologies needed for an economical, growing Mars Base built primarily with local materials. Efforts will then be focused on prototype projects of increasing sophistication. These could include the selection of existing equipment which could be used on Mars, or the construction of prototypes of new equipment. These steps will lead the Mars Foundation to the establishment of an entire simulated Mars settlement at a location here on Earth, which will serve as a research and outreach center.”

One of the presenters is Bruce Mackenzie, co-founder and Executive Director of the Mars Foundation, whose “concepts for brick masonry structures for Mars settlements have been featured in … the science-fiction trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.”

Screenplay Sale: Abbott and Costello Go To Mars

As detailed below, the original 1951 handwritten manuscript and a typewritten draft of the screenplay to the Hollywood science fiction comedy film Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) are selling for $4,500 on AbeBooks.

Despite the title of the film, the comedy duo, who stowaway on a rocketship bound for Mars, never actually make it to the Red Planet. Rather, they end up on a female-inhabited Venus.

Screenwriter D.D. Beauchamp's handwritten manuscript treatment for the 1953 Universal film comedy, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. Present in its entirety is Beachamp's original treatment, executed in pencil, with holograph corrections. Interspersed throughout are the resulting typewritten pages (also with holograph corrections). The combined pages are bradbound with green studio covers, showing a date of December 5, 1951 (two years prior to the film's release, and well before production began), and the word "Treatment" written in ink at the top right corner, along with a stamped studio reference number. All told, a complete document of the original holograph manuscript and first typewritten draft of the film's treatment. ... A superb original screen story for one of the twentieth century's most revered comedy teams, in its earliest form. ...

For a bibliography of Mars-related films, check out The Mars Movie Guide, a neat website maintained by Gerry Williams of the San Diego Chapter of The Mars Society.

Phoenix Mars Mission Exhibit Opens at Arizona Museum

Up from the Ashes: Phoenix Goes to Mars, a new exhibit about NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission, is scheduled to open at the Arizona Capitol Museum on February 14, 2008.

Here's a description of the exhibit, taken from the museum's website: "Over 20 photographs highlight The University of Arizona's Phoenix Mars Mission, which lands on the Red Planet in May 2008. Also on display are scale models of the Phoenix Lander and the scientific instruments on board. The Phoenix Mars Mission was named after the mythical bird that rises from the ashes of its own fiery death and is born a new."

For additional details about the exhibit, read the museum's press release.

For information about the "Visions of Mars" library, which is enroute to the Red Planet aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander, see "Space Library Heads Towards Mars," our blog post of August 31, 2007.

Lin Carter and the Trap Door Spiders

In reading our way through Lin Carter’s The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), we came across the line “I knew that the terrible predators prowled the highlands of the plateau regions - I had even heard they made their dens in pits and crevices, which they somehow roofed over with sand, not unlike Earth’s humbler little predators, the trapdoor spiders” and remembered that Carter was a member of the Trap Door Spiders, a New York City literary society whose members included fellow science fiction authors Issac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lester del Rey.

Considering that Carter’s novel centers on the search for a lost ancient Martian city and that one of the main characters is an extraterrestrial archaeologist, we wonder if Carter might have been influenced by another member of the Trap Door Spiders, Professor Lionel Casson of New York University. A classicist and authority on ancient seafaring, Casson authored several nonfiction books about the Classical World, including Excavations at Nessana (1950) and Ancient Egypt (1965). His most recent book, Libraries in the Ancient World (2001), was reviewed by The New York Times and discussed in a 2001 interview with Lingua Franca.

Light Reading for a Sunday Afternoon, Vol. IV

Here are some recent news pieces worth reading:

• “Ex Marks the Spot,” by Shaun Brady, Philadelphia City Paper, Feb. 6, 2008. Mentions a screening of the Soviet silent sci-fi film classic Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), with a new score by a Philadelphia-based musician.

• “THQ Confirms Red Faction III,” by Rob Purchese, EuroGamer.net, Feb. 6, 2008. A “first-person shooter” video game set on Mars is in development.

• “Barry Morse, 89; played Lt. Gerard on The Fugitive,” by Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 2008. Obituary of Morse, who appeared in the television series Space: 1999 and later in the miniseries The Martian Chronicles (1980).

• “The Automatic Author: A. Lee Martinez interviewed,” by Charles Tan, SFCrowsNest.com, Jan. 2, 2008. Martinez cites Edgar Rice Burroughs as one of his biggest influences.

Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances by Leigh Brackett (2008)

Thanks to Locus Magazine, we learned that a new collection of classic short stories, Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances, by Leigh Brackett (2008), was published recently by Haffner Press. Here’s a description taken from Haffner’s website:

“Picking up where Martian Quest: The Early Brackett left off, this volume collects 12 more tales of strange adventures on other worlds from the undisputed Queen of Space Opera. Drawn from Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories pulp magazines, this tome revels in the 1946 titular collaboration with Ray Bradbury -- who also contributes an original poem about Leigh Brackett as well as an essay about meeting & working with Brackett. Harry Turtledove, the modern master of ‘alternate history,’ provides the introduction and the book is adorned with Frank Kelly Freas' vintage illustrations from the 1953 reprint of Lorelei of the Red Mist.”

While we have not had an opportunity to read the stories in Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances, we believe at least three of them are related to Mars. Here's the full table of contents:

• “The Blue Behemoth,” Planet Stories (May 1943)

• “Thralls of the Endless Night,” Planet Stories (Autumn 1943)

• “The Jewel of Bas,” Planet Stories (Spring 1944)

• “The Veil of Astellar,” Thrilling Wonder Stories (Spring 1944)

• “Terror Out of Space,” Planet Stories (Summer 1944)

• “The Vanishing Venusians,” Planet Stories (Spring 1945)

• “Lorelei of the Red Mist,” Planet Stories (Summer 1946)

• “The Moon That Vanished,” Thrilling Wonder Stories (October 1948)

• “The Beast-Jewel of Mars,” Planet Stories (Winter 1948)

• “Quest of the Starhope,” Thrilling Wonder Stories (April 1949)

• “The Lake of the Gone Forever,” Thrilling Wonder Stories (October 1949)

• “The Dancing Girl of Ganymede,” Thrilling Wonder Stories (February 1950)

For a beautiful gallery of pulp magazine cover art that displays the issues in which Brackett’s stories originally appeared, see G. W. Thomas' website Leigh Brackett: Queen of Space.

The New Ray Bradbury Review

Vol. 1, No. 1 of The New Ray Bradbury Review, a forthcoming serial published by The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis) is scheduled to be released in Spring 2008.

The first issue will focus on “Ray Bradbury and Adaptation" and its cover and table of contents are posted on the Center’s website. We’re looking forward to reading the piece “Juvenilia: Bradbury’s Comic Adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

Meanwhile, here’s a couple of other Bradbury items worth reading. First, Graham Sleight's "Yesterday's Tomorrows" column from the October 2007 issue of Locus Magazine, which looks at classic works by Bradbury, including The Martian Chronicles (1950).

Second, a nostalgic passage from “Tarzan, John Carter, Mr. Burroughs, and the Long Mad Summer of 1930,” Bradbury’s introduction to Edgar Rice Burroughs: the Man Who Created Tarzan, a beast of a book by Irwin Porges (1975):

You see my problem was Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars.

Problem, you ask. That doesn’t sound like much of a problem.

Oh, but it was. You see, I couldn’t stop reading those books. I couldn’t stop memorizing them line by line and page by page. Worst of all, when I saw my friends, I couldn’t stop my mouth. The words just babbled out. Tarzan this and Jane that, John Carter here and Dejah Thoris there. And when it wasn’t those incredible people it was Tanar of Pellucidar or I was making noises like a tyrannosaurs rex and behaving like a Martian thoat, which, everyone knows, has eight legs.

Do you begin to understand why Waukegan, Illinois, in the summer of 1930 was so long, so excruciating, so unbearable for everyone?

Everyone, that is, save me. ...

Pictured above: The original Ray Bradbury Review, a collection of Bradbury material edited by William F. Nolan and published privately as a softcover chapbook in 1952. The book was reprinted as a hardcover by Graham Press in 1988.

Dave Itzkoff and YA Martian SF

Last Sunday, Dave Itzkoff, a reviewer for The New York Times, published a controversial column titled “Elsewhere’s Children,” which has sparked a heated debate over the quality of Young Adult (YA) science fiction and the merit of reading it.

Controversy aside, we ran some searches in WorldCat and compiled a list of YA Martian science fiction books. The list is based upon Worldcat’s subject headings and is limited to books whose lengths exceed 125 pages. Note that three of the books are available in full-text or audio format at ManyBooks.net.

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

• Through Space to Mars, or, The Longest Journey on Record, by Roy Rockwood (1910)

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

• The Mystery Men of Mars, by C. H. Claudy (1933)

• Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1940)

• The Angry Planet: an Authentic First-Hand Account of a Journey to Mars in the Space-Ship Albatross, Compiled from Notes and Records by Various Members of the Expedition, by John Keir Cross (1945)

• Red Planet: a Colonial Boy on Mars, by Robert A Heinlein (1949)

• Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars, by Ellen MacGregor (1951)

• Stand By for Mars!, by Carey Rockwell (1952)

• Freddy and the Men from Mars, by Walter R. Brooks (1954)

• Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars, by Walter R. Brooks (1955)

• The Green Man from Space, by Lewis Zarem (1955)

• Rocket Man, by Lee Correy, a pseudonym of G. Harry Stine (1955)

• Podkayne of Mars: Her Life and Times, by Robert A. Heinlein (1963)

• Journey Between Worlds, by Sylvia Engdahl (1970)

• Orvis, by H. M. Hoover (1987)

• Kipton & the Caves of Mars, by Charles L. Fontenay (1998)

• Samir and Yonatan, by Daniella Carmi (2000)

• Bad Dog and Those Crazee Martians!, by Martin Chatterton (2002)

Paizo's Planet Stories Series

As the blog Wired indicated yesterday in a nice post, Paizo Publishing is in the process of reprinting several books of “Burroughs-esque” Martian science fiction adventure as part of its Planet Stories series. For a description of the series, read the interview with Paizo publisher Erik Mona. Here’s the publication schedule, with summaries taken from Paizo’s website:

• City of the Beast (alternate title Warriors of Mars), by Michael Moorcock, with an introduction by Kim Mohan. Published in September 2007. “Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion returns as Kane of Old Mars, a brilliant American physicist whose strange experiments in matter transmission catapult him across space and time to the Red Planet. ... Kane’s is a Mars of the distant past ..."

• The Secret of Sinharat, by Leigh Brackett, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock. Published in December 2007 and featured in our blog post of January 3, 2008. “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 ..."

• Lord of the Spiders (alternate title Blades of Mars), by Michael Moorcock, with an introduction by Roy Thomas. Scheduled to be published in March 2008. “Once more into the matter transmitter for an unforgettable journey to ancient Mars! ... Pulled back to earth on the eve of his marriage to the beautiful Princess Shizala, brilliant physicist Michael Kane must once again journey to the Red ..."

• Masters of the Pit (alternate title Barbarians of Mars), by Michael Moorcock, with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany. Scheduled to be published in June 2008. “Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion returns in the form of Michael Kane, a brilliant Earthman stranded on the treacherous deserts of Ancient Mars! In this sweeping, epic sword-and-planet adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice ..."

• The Swordsman of Mars, by Otis Adelbert Kline, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock. Scheduled to be published in September 2008. “Harry Thorne, outcast scion of a wealthy East Coast family, seeks the greatest adventure of his life. He exchanges bodies with his look-alike, Martian Sheb Takkor, and is transported millions of years into the past to a Mars ..."

Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Princess of Mars, and Phillips Academy

In admiring a recent chart in The New York Times listing the largest prep school endowments in the country, we remembered that Edgar Rice Burroughs attended Phillips Academy, Andover. With an $800 million endowment and notable alumni such as Humphrey Bogart and George W. Bush, we assumed that the academy’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Library would hold copies of Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1917) and the other novels in his Barsoom series.

Much to our surprise, the library does not own a copy of A Princess of Mars. As some constellation, the library does have these Barsoom novels:

• Three Martian Novels: Thuvia, Maid of Mars. The Chessmen of Mars. The Master Mind of Mars (Dover, 1962)

• Llana of Gathol (Ballantine, 1963)

• Swords of Mars, and Synthetic Men of Mars (Doubleday, 1966, 1963, illustrations by Frank Frazetta)

• The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars (Doubleday, 1971, illustrations by Frank Frazetta)

Sharing Cover Art: Philip K. Dick & Frank Herbert

Last week, the blog io9 had an intriguing post titled
“What’s Wrong With This Philip K. Dick Book Cover?” The post points out that the cover art of a 1970s Manor Books edition of Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) is the same cover art that was first used for a British edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Can anyone identify the artist and the dates of publication of the two books in question?

Miss Pickerell and the Amply Read Planet

Recently, we stumbled across an insightful essay titled “Past Masters: Mars – The Amply Read Planet,” by Bud Webster, at the website Helix: a Speculative Fiction Quarterly. Written in July 2006, the essay mentions many of the seminal works in the cannon of Martian science fiction. More interesting is Webster’s “list of what I consider to be the 100 best story titles that mention Mars.” The list contains novels, short stories, and a poem, “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” by Craig Raine (1979).

Pictured above: Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars, by Ellen MacGregor (1951), which is included in Webster’s “100 Best” list and is recommended reading by Dr. Bert Vogelstein of the Academy of Achievement.

Book Sale: Asimov's The Martian Way (1955)

Below is the description of a copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955), which is selling on AbeBooks for $1,500.

According to a review by Villiers Gerson in the November 13, 1955 issue of The New York Times,
“Isaac Asimov is one of science fiction’s better writers, but, as this volume of four novelettes testifies, he is at his best in the novel. The title story, “The Martian Way,” is by far the best of the group ...” and Asimov’s description of its origin is included in our blog post of October 16, 2007.

The Martian Way and Other Stories, by Isaac Asimov (1955)

Publisher: Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Publication Date: 1955
Binding: Hardcover
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Edition: 1st Edition

Description: Octavo, boards. First edition. Collects “The Martian Way," "Youth," "The Deep" and "Sucker Bait," all written between 1952 and 1954. ... Neat owner's name in ink on front paste-down (hidden under jacket flap, a bit of tanning to endpapers, small cross within a circle lightly inked in gold at bottom of spine panel (the why and significance of this symbol placed here is unknown to us), else a fine copy in fine dust jacket with touch of wear along bottom edge of front panel. A very nice copy of a scarce book.

Price: $1,500

BBC Reading of Leigh Brackett’s "The Last Days of Shandakor"

Thanks to a January 25th post at SFFaudio, we learned that a reading of "The Last Days of Shandakor", a novelette by Leigh Brackett (1952),
is being re-broadcast in two parts on BBC7’s the 7th Dimension. Read by Nathan Osgood, Part One aired last Sunday, January 28 (still accessible for a limited time through BBC’s Listen Again feature), and Part Two is scheduled to air this Sunday, February 3.

Originally published in the April 1952 issue of Startling Stories magazine and first broadcast on BBC7 in March 2007, here is a description of The Last Days of Shandakor from SFFaudio: “An epic space adventure written in which Mars is portrayed as a dying planet where desperate Earthmen compete with the last Martians and other alien races for lost knowledge and hidden power.” A more detailed description of Brackett's novelette is available at the BBC’s website.