White House adds Edmunds.com to enemies list over Cash for Clunkers on Mars

The number of new cars sold on the planet Mars under the United States government’s recent Cash for Clunkers program is at the center of a dispute that has landed Edmunds.com, a company that provides information and reviews about new and used cars to consumers, on the White House’s growing list of enemies. Here’s the story:

Chapter 1: Government offers $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program to stimulate sales of new cars in the U.S.

Chapter 2: Edmunds.com issues a report stating that only 125,000 of the 690,000 cars sold in the U.S. during the time of the Cash for Clunkers program were sales inspired by the program, as opposed to sales that would have happened anyway. Edmunds concludes that each new car purchased under the program cost the American taxpayer $24,000.

“Child of the Gods,” a 1946 short story written by A. E. van Vogt

Thanks to the website baenced at the Fifth Imperium, you can read “Child of the Gods”, a short story written by Sci-Fi author A. E. van Vogt, for free online. Originally published in the August 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the story opens with the education of a mutant boy born into a powerful royal family that dominates Earth and has allies on Venus, but quickly shifts backward a few years to recount an allied invasion of a green, canalled Mars. Here are the opening lines:

By the time the boy was four, the scientist Joquin realized that drastic action was necessary if his mind was to be saved. Somewhere between three and four, Clane had realized that he was different. Enormously, calamitously different. Between four and six, his sanity suffered collapse after collapse, each time to be slowly built back again by the aging scientist. ...

This is a fairly interesting story, as the invasion of Mars involves not only spaceships, but horses, spears and swords!

[via Tinkoo Valia of Variety SF]

Book, newspaper and magazine stock watch

As someone who is interested in the history and future of books, newspapers, magazines and publishing, I have been watching the year-to-date share price performance of a selected group of publicly-held companies whose business activities include the publication, sale, and/or distribution of books, newspapers, and/or magazines (and/or their electronic equivalents). Here’s the list of 14 stocks I am watching, ranked by YTD performance:

BBC announces dates for Doctor Who television special “The Waters of Mars”

The BBC has announced that its forthcoming Doctor Who television special, “The Waters of Mars,” will be aired in the United Kingdom on Sunday night, November 15th, on BBC One, and in the United States on Saturday night, December 19th, on BBC America. If you're not familiar with this special, the plot is set on the Red Planet and involves humans, zombies and the waters of Mars. British Actor David Tennant stars as the Doctor and acclaimed sexy Scottish actress Lindsay Duncan plays the role of Adelaide, his companion and head of a base on Mars.

Meanwhile, if you're not afraid of a few spoilers, check out Digital Spy's Ten "Waters of Mars" Teasers.

“The Waters of Mars” is scheduled to be released on DVD in early 2010.

Animator Ray Harryhausen on Orson Welles and The War of the Worlds

Here is a beautiful excerpt from an interview conducted a few years ago with master animator Ray Harryhausen, in which he discusses his attempt to interest Orson Welles in making an animated film of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (1898), and how he came close to working with Welles in Spain:

Author R. A. Salvatore on the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie moment

Over at Babel Clash, a science fiction and fantasy blog maintained by Borders bookstore, SF/F author R. A. Salvatore reveals that he thinks the best moment in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy film is from Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), starring Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin and Adam West:

“I used to watch this movie every couple of months on those Saturday morning monster matinees. The idea of the hero alone in a strange and hostile place is so terrifying… well, I guess it’s time to show why you’re the protagonist here.

Those moments of building a ‘home,’ a place of reasonable security against such odds seem to me to be an essential element in escapist fiction. Sure, the world is big and bad and scary, but you can make that cave your home.”

Pictured: Promotional poster for Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

1930s magazine cover art: Harl Vincent's short story “Thia of the Drylands”

Here’s some beautiful cover art from the July 1932 issue of Amazing Stories magazine depicting a scene from “Thia of the Drylands,” a short story written by Harl Vincent in which a former space pilot with a mysterious Martian disease travels to the Red Planet for a cure. Apparently, the scene is: “A secret service man from Earth navigates his ronsal along a street in a Martian city.” According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the artist is Leo Morey.

Robert P. Fitton discusses his 2008 SF mystery novel The Dust of Mars

In September 2009, science fiction author Robert P. Fitton posted a cool book trailer on YouTube in which he discusses The Dust of Mars (2008), his self-published SF murder mystery novel set in the year 2145 and starring retired Intra Solar System Bureau agent Harry Cobb. Speaking from a sand dune somewhat similar to those on the surface of Mars, Fitton blends science and science fiction, even working in cool quotes from Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Chandler and Buckminster Fuller!



Robert P. Fitton is the author of numerous books and has been dreaming about the stars since he was a boy. He resides on Cape Cod and maintains his own website.

10 awesome The War of the Worlds items for bibliophiles listed on AbeBooks

1) The War of the Worlds (1897)
By H.G. Wells
Bound volume of the 1897 Cosmopolitan serialization, published simultaneously with the Pearson Magazine serialization in Great Britain. This is the first appearance of the work in the United States and predates the 1898 first edition novel; illustrated. $5,000

2) The War of the Worlds: A Newly Illustrated Digest of H.G. Wells' Famous Story (1939)
Dell Publishing's 48-page digest adaptation with comic-book style cover and b&w illustrations; tied to the famous 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles; front cover touts “When they told it on the radio … It terrified the whole country"; rear cover displays headlines from The New York Times and New York Post. $225

“Footnote,” a new novelette by Mel Trent

Writer and “Filthy Piker” Mel Trent recently had her new novelette, “Footnote” (2009), published in serial format on the website of Piker Press, “a weekly journal for arts, sciences, fiction and non-fiction, featuring a wide array of literature, from humor to drama." Rated PG-13 but with frequent use of the F-word, here are the opening lines of “Footnote”:

They came to Mars from Gurstock as the latter planet disintegrated in waves of nuclear blasts. Gurstock had been an old, cold, dying planet, but the people had long ago learned to thwart their own deaths. Their home died, yet they lived on. A massive miscalculation in the sinking of nuclear reactors into the core of the planet hastened its end. The Gurstockians didn't seem to mind. They piled into their ships and headed to Mars.

Mel Trent lives in North Carolina and has written poetry, fiction and anime reviews for Piker Press.

Cover artist Don Ivan Punchatz (1936-2009)

Spectrum Fantastic Art reports that Don Ivan Punchatz, a legendary artist and Spectrum Grand Master who created cover art and illustrations for SF books and magazines such as Playboy, National Geographic, Penthouse, Newsweek, National Lampoon and Time, died October 22, 2009.

Punchatz did the cover art for Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories (pictured), a 1990 collection written by Howard Waldrop, and the interior artwork for “The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes” (2000), a novelette written by Harlan Ellison that was published in a 2000 special edition of Amazing Stories magazine.

[via Locus Online]

New Romanian anthology: Dansînd pe Marte şi Alte Povestiri Fantastice

I haven’t thought much about Romania since I took Professor Radu Florescu’s “Legends of History” class many years ago, but Millennium Press, a small Romanian Publishing House that has reprinted books by authors Ben Bova, Elizabeth Moon, John Scalzi and others, is about to release a fantasy anthology entitled Dansînd pe Marte şi Alte Povestiri Fantastice (Dancing on Mars and Other Fantastic Stories). The anthology’s title story, “Dancing on Mars,” is by Catalin Maxim, and the (presumably) related cover art is the work of Alex Popescu.

Mihai of the blog Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews will be receiving a copy of Dansînd pe Marte şi Alte Povestiri Fantastice in a couple of weeks, so, hopefully, we'll get the Table of Contents and a review.

Pyr unveils cover for reprint of Ian McDonald’s 2001 novel Ares Express

The cover for Pyr’s forthcoming reprint of British SF author Ian McDonald’s novel Ares Express (2001) is posted on Amazon. The follow-up to McDonald’s Desolation Road (1988; Pyr, 2009), Ares Express is scheduled to be released in April 2010. Here’s a description of the novel:

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colourful, witty SF novel; Taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet's circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future - or futures - of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas and trains as big as city blocks.

Pictured: Pyr reprint of Ares Express (April 2010).

[via John DeNardo of SF Signal]

Sci-Fi baby names: Mary

Name: Mary

Origin: 20th-century Earth

Source: Invaders from Mars (1953)

Biography: Eerily efficient 1950s housewife Mary MacLean finds herself transformed into an eerily efficient alien drone when her body is snatched by Martians holed up in a sand pit behind her house in the 1953 feature Invaders from Mars.

Trivia: If you suspect your newborn may be a Martian pod person, look for the telltale X-shaped scar on the back of its neck.

Variants: Marie

[Taken directly from Sci-Fi Baby Names: 500 Out-of-This-World Baby Names from Anakin to Zardoz, by Robert Schnakenberg (2007)]

Machines of Loving Grace, a 2008 biblical novel written by Isaac Israel

Here’s another interesting novel you can preview or purchase through the self-publishing website Lulu.com: Machines of Loving Grace (2008), by a fellow named Isaac Israel. A hefty, 400-page work that derives its title from Richard Brautigan's 1963 poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, Machines of Loving Grace is the third volume in Israel’s Late-Earth Chronicles series. Here's a description of the novel:

Brit Raln is a young Martian with a problem. He's hearing voices. And what the voices are telling him will make him a fugitive from the Motherbrain. As he runs from killer robots and soulless automatons in the 30th century, he searches desperately for an ancient book called the Bible.

According to one reader, Machines of Loving Grace “is the story of Abraham set on Mars! Abraham is an Earth-born Martian lad, Ur of Chaldees is a beautiful machine city built on the edge of Valles Marineris (the Grand Canyon of Mars), and the Sumerians are robots! This is a biblical fairytale for the 30th century.”

Interestingly, Machines of Loving Grace is dedicated, in part, to “the memory of all the great pulp science fiction writers of the Golden Age -- A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov, in particular -- whose early works, when they were turned into novels some twenty years after their debut in magazines, were sources of joy and wonder to a certain young lad of thirteen.”

Isaac Israel is a Messianic Jew who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains with his wife.

The Saturday Evening Post posts 1940 article about disturbing life of Orson Welles

For a companion piece to its October 24, 2009, retrospective article, “Are We Ready for Another Martian Invasion?”, The Saturday Evening Post has posted a neat article from its archives: “How to Raise a Child: The Disturbing Life -- to Date -- of Orson Welles” (PDF, 1.6 MB), by Alva Johnston and Fred Smith, published in the February 3, 1940, issue.

Is the Queen of the Iron Sands dead, boys?

Chapter 5 of Queen of the Iron Sands, a “free serial adventure in weekly web installments” written by fantasy author Scott Lynch and inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic novel A Princess of Mars (1912), has been missing for more than 30 days. While we wait and hope that Lynch and his serial adventure are alive and well, it might be fun to have a sing-along.

How about “The Queen is Dead,” a 1980s tune by The Smiths:

Oh! Take me back to dear old Blighty,
Put me on the train for London Town,
Take me anywhere,
Drop me anywhere,
Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham
But I don't care,
I should like to see my ...

Cover artist Dean Ellis (1920-2009)

Spectrum Fantastic Art reports that Dean Ellis, a prominent illustrator and painter who created the cover art for numerous science fiction books and magazines, died last week in Saratoga Springs, New York, aged 88. In 1970, Ellis painted a work entitled “The Martian Chronicles", which was used as the cover art for a couple of early 1970s Bantam paperback editions of Ray Bradbury’s classic collection. According to the website FindArtInfo.com, Ellis’ original acrylic 25.5 x 16.5 in. painting sold at auction in 2004 for about $2,500.

[via Locus Online]

“The Terror from Mars," a recent animated short film set on Halloween

A few months ago, California Institute of the Arts graduate Daron Nefcy released her recent short animated film “The Terror from Mars” on YouTube. Inspired by horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, “The Terror from Mars” is a humorous tale about an alien with hunger pangs who lands on Earth on Halloween night.


Follow Daron Nefcy's adventures on her blog.

“Soldier, Sailor,” a 1990 short story written by Lewis Shiner about ruins on Mars

Fiction Liberation Front, the online collection of works written by SF author Lewis Shiner, holds an interesting short story entitled “Soldier, Sailor.” Originally written in 1976 and first published in Shiner’s collection Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (1990), “Soldier, Sailor” features a man named Kane and the ruins of a city on Mars. Here are the opening lines:

Stepping out of the airlock behind Reese, Kane was amazed by the weight & wetness of the air. He could make out the odors of cut grass, honeysuckle & ivy. Martian night was falling outside the dome & he sensed clouds forming above him. Rain on Mars. Evenly spaced houses surrounded him, covered with ivy & separated by rows of elephant ears & ferns. The intricacy of the ecological planning startled him; a bee floated over his head & somewhere a mockingbird whistled. …

“Soldier, Sailor” was later expanded into the cyberpunk novel Frontera (1984).

In addition to maintaining Fiction Liberation Front, Lewis Shiner maintains his own website.

Indie booksellers ask Justice Dept. to investigate predatory pricing

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times report that yesterday the American Booksellers Association, a 109-year-old organization which represents independently owned bookstores, sent a letter to the U.S. Dept. of Justice asking it to investigate what it describes as “predatory pricing” by Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target in their fierce battle to slash prices on selected, best-selling books. Apparently, the tactics of the corporate behemoths are "damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that shares of Amazon climbed as much as 23% to $114.75, after the world’s largest online retailer reported a 69% jump in profit and a 28% gain in revenue. Shares of Amazon are up more than 80% year-to-date. Yahoo!

Sci-Fri: Gravity-loading skinsuit for walking on the Red Planet

The website fibre2fashion has a neat article on an Australian professor who is working on a next-generation spacesuit for astronauts of NASA and other space agencies to use while spacewalking on the surface of Mars. According to the article, the gravity-loading skinsuit seeks to address “a significant health problem faced by astronauts -- extreme bone loss -- by mimicking the effect of gravity on the skeletal system.”

Armed to the Teeth with Lipstick, a 1998 detective cult classic by Blag Dahlia

For a prolonged Halloween treat, the online Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has been reprinting all 31 chapters and the original artwork from the 123-page, cult classic novel Armed to the Teeth with Lipstick (1998), written by underground punk legend Blag Dahlia and illustrated by the late “mad” Marc Rude. Starring Lucifer Doolan, “a well-hung Sam Spade-styled detective from Mars hooked on amphetamines, violence, and a ‘six-foot subatomic gash’ named Natasha Romilar, who shoots nerve gas from her nipples,” here are the opening lines of Armed to the Teeth with Lipstick:

Review of Grandmaster Michael Moorcock’s 1965 novel City of the Beast

Last year, Nathan Brazil of the SF Site reviewed the Paizo Publishing reprint of City of the Beast (1965, 2007), a well-known Martian science fiction novel written by British author and SFWA Grandmaster Michael Moorcock. As Brazil notes, City of the Beast was penned in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition and originally published in 1965 as Warriors of Mars, under Moorcock’s pseudonym, Edward P. Bradbury. Chronicling character Michael Kane’s adventures, it is the first novel in Moorcock’s trilogy about the Red Planet.

While Brazil’s review is generally positive, he does have one criticism: “this book cannot rise above the quality of a shadow. Kane is not Carter, Shizala is not Deja Thoris, and Vashu is not Barsoom. City of the Beast and its sequels are without a doubt entertaining, but the real thing is still preferable, and available.”

Pictured: 2007 reprint by Paizo Publishing.

SF sleaze sale: Complete set of 11 Beacon Galaxy novels from ca. 1960

A bookseller from Ontario is selling a complete set of Beacon Galaxy Science Fiction Novels from the late 1950s and early 1960s for $725 on AbeBooks, the used and rare book site. A subset of the larger 46-novel set published by Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, these eleven novels were published under the Beacon Books imprint from 1959 to 1961. All of the novels have lurid cover art and, in some cases, racy passages were inserted in the text. Among the titles: Sin in Space: An Expose of the Scarlet Planet (1961; formerly Outpost Mars, 1952), written by Cyril Judd, a joint pseudonym used by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril.

[via AbeBooks’ Reading Copy Book Blog]

Mission: Red Planet, a 2005 board game set in a Steampunk universe

If you’re an old school SF gamer or a hardcore fan of Steampunk, consider Mission: Red Planet, a board game released in 2005 by the French company Asmodée. Set in a Steampunk universe around the time of the Exposition Universelle in 1889, here’s a description of the game, taken from the back of its box:

In Mission: Red Planet, you head a mining corporation financing an ultra-secret project: the exploration of the Martian underground. Spaceships are ready for take-off. You have recruited the best specialists in all areas of expertise: recruiters, scientists, and even saboteurs. Everybody knows that this will be a difficult venture; you will need to lay down the best strategy and rely on the finest intelligence. Watch out for meteorite fields, mining incidents, radioactive rocks, and your competitors…

Put your brass goggles on and check out some of the beautiful Steampunk artwork by Christophe Madura, such as the rulebook cover (pictured above) and the character cards!

1960s Mars art: City of Klumpok

In this beautiful Space Age scene, a rocket flies over the Red Planet city of Klumpok. The image is from a story entitled “Klumpok,” which was published in Stranger Than People (1968), a juvenile book about fascinating creatures of fact and fiction.

[via YellowcakeMushroom's photo stream on flickr]

Another NaNoWriMo novel to be set on Mars

Last week, I posted a piece about Joi Weaver, a twenty-something writer who is preparing to pen a novel set on Mars for National Novel Writing Month 2009, which runs from November 1st to November 30th. This week, I’m promoting another twenty-something NaNoWriMo writer, Tresa Cho, who is also setting her novel, Of All Things Forgotten, on the Red Planet.

This will be the fifth year Tresa Cho has participated in National Novel Writing Month. Her favorite writer is Robert A. Heinlein and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) is one of her favorite novels. She resides in Pennsylvania and maintains a blog called Science Fiction and the Women who Love it.

Best of success, Tresa!

“Auf kühner Fahrt zum Mars,” a 1928 novelette by Austrian rocket scientist Max Valier

Here’s a dusty gem for fans of hard science SF: “Auf kühner Fahrt zum Mars,” a novelette penned by pioneering Austrian rocket scientist Max Valier. Originally published in 1928 in Die Rakete, the journal of the German Rocket Society, Valier’s story was translated into English and published as “A Daring Trip to Mars” in the July 1931 issue of Wonder Stories magazine. A tale about a doctor, an engineer and his wife who first land on the moon and then voyage to the Red Planet, here is Valier’s foreword to “A Daring Trip to Mars,” followed by the opening lines of his story:

Rebels of Mars blog morphs into Retro Sci Fi site

The longtime blog Rebels of Mars, inspired by the writings of pulp author Edgar Rice Burroughs and maintained by SF fan Tom Novak et al., has morphed into a broader-themed website called Retro Sci Fi. Pretty cool. Check it out!

Review of McNamara & Braddock’s 2008 graphic novel The Martian Confederacy

Award-winning comic artist Brian Fies has written a detailed review of The Martian Confederacy: Rednecks on the Red Planet (2008), a graphic novel created by the team of scribe Jason McNamara and illustrator Paige Braddock. Set on Mars in the year 3535, the story is one of a planet that has lost its tourism trade and most of its natural resources. To save Mars, three outlaw rednecks scheme to get back the one thing that can cleanse the putrid air and return the planet to its former glory.

McNamara & Braddock maintain The Martian Confederacy Blog and are currently working on a sequel to their graphic novel The Martian Confederacy: Rednecks on the Red Planet.

Balloon Boy’s father believes European Space Agency hid evidence of civilization on Mars

As far as I can tell, this is not a hoax. In August 2008, Richard Heene of Fort Collins, Colorado, the father of Falcon “Balloon Boy” Heene, posted a six-minute video called “MARS civilization proof #2” on CNN’s iReport website. Arguing that Hale Crater on Mars contains evidence of alien civilization, Heene wrote this text to accompany his video:

ESA photos edited out buildings on Mars. NEW PYRAMID!! I just discovered Edited photos!!! The European Space Agency has leaked evidence clearly showing civilization on planet Mars. This video will show you the evidence, as well as how you can download it and judge for yourself.

Also this Video shows a new Head Monument that has been recently identified on the Maritian surface.

This is not a hoax.

Presumably, Heene has a copy of Richard C. Hoagland’s nonfiction book The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (1987; 5th ed., 2002) in his home library!

Where the wild things are: Barsoom glossary

With the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic book Where the Wild Things Are (1963) doing well at the box office, it seems like a good time to remind fans of Martian science fiction about the Barsoom Glossary. Compiled by David Bruce Bozarth, the glossary defines the animals, plants and minerals created by author Edgar Rice Burroughs for his Barsoomian series of novels. Interestingly, many of the animal entries in Bozarth’s glossary also appear, word for word, in the Dictionary of Animals (Gyan Books, 2005).

New collection of J.G. Ballard stories reprints his 1992 work “The Message from Mars”

British science fiction author and “imaginer of dystopian nightmares” J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Message from Mars” (1992) has been reprinted in the The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard (Norton, 2009), a collection published in the United Kingdom in 2001 and now released in the United States. According to a review in The Seattle Times, "The Message from Mars" “tries to penetrate the mindset of five astronauts who, returning to Earth from a successful Mars mission, refuse to leave their space capsule upon landing. What can it mean? Should it be televised? Can any ‘ruses, pleas and stratagems’ lure them back into the world?”

Review of In the Hall of the Martian King, a 2003 novel by John Barnes

A few years ago, In the Hall of the Martian King (2003), a science fiction novel by author John Barnes about a secret agent named Jak Jinnaka and his hunt for a document known as a “lifelog,” was reviewed for the SF Site by noted critic and anthologist Rich Horton.

Horton concluded, in part: “As with all the novels in this series, the wheels-within-wheels of the plot are almost exhausting, and not quite believable. But Jak is an interesting and ambiguous character, well worth reading about. The action of the books is quite enjoyable, even if not always what it seems on the surface.”

Rich Horton maintains the blog The Elephant Forgets.

Screamfest LA 2009 to screen Sci-Fi spoof film Mutant Swinger from Mars

Screamfest LA 2009, a ten-day, annual horror film festival held in Hollywood, will screen the film Mutant Swinger from Mars, a science fiction film that is a parody of sci-fi movies from the 1950s, on Saturday, October 24th. A "long lost" work made in 1998 by infamous horror and Sci-Fi director Orton Z. Creswell and shown at San Diego’s Comic-Con in July 2009, Mutant Swinger from Mars tells the tale of a band of Martians who travel to Earth and force a mad scientist to create a device to lure women so they can take them back to Mars. The film is perhaps most noted for including the acting debut of Jack White, a musician who later co-founded the band The White Stripes.

Check out the trailer for Mutant Swinger from Mars on YouTube.

Online short story club discussing Ken MacLeod’s 2009 work “A Tulip for Lucretius”

I’m a bit late in posting this, but today, Sunday, October 18, 2009, Niall Harrison of Torque Control (a blog maintained by the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association) will be leading a discussion of award-winning Scottish science fiction author Ken MacLeod’s 2009 short story “A Tulip for Lucretius.” Published in the online Spring 2009 issue of Subterranean Press Magazine, MacLeod's story is set in a colony on Mars and revolves around an uprising of synthetic humans, who are treated as slaves.

If you have read “A Tulip for Lucretius”, feel free to participate in or follow the discussion over at Torque Control. If you haven't read the story, today's a great day to read it!

[via Big Dumb Object]

Flash Gordon’s 1938 trip to Mars

In 1938, Universal Pictures released Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, a serial film consisting of 15 episodes (299 min.), based on the popular comic strip Flash Gordon. Starring Buster Crabbe as the hero Flash Gordon, Jean Rogers as the heroine Dale Arden, Charles B. Middleton as Ming the Merciless, and Beatrice Roberts as the evil Queen Azura of Mars, the plot revolves around Flash Gordon's courageous attempt to destroy a Nitron Lamp based on the Red Planet that is draining a valuable element from Earth’s atmosphere.



This clip, if I’m not mistaken, is a compilation of selected scenes from Episode 10, “Incense of Forgetfulness,” and Episode 11, "Human Bait." Here, the peoples of the Forest Kingdom on Mars capture the heroine, Dale Arden, and force her to inhale Lethium, the "Incense of Forgetfulness.” After turning against Flash Gordon and stabbing him with a dagger, Dale is whisked away and presented to Ming the Merciless and Queen Azura!

Photos of actress Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris in forthcoming film Princess of Mars

The Asylum, a motion picture studio located in Burbank, California, has posted beautiful production stills featuring actress and former porn star Traci Lords from its forthcoming low-budget, direct-to-DVD film Princess of Mars. An adaptation of the classic early 20th-century novel written by author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film also stars Antonio Sabàto, Jr., as Confederate Civil War veteran John Carter. The film, classified as science fiction, is scheduled to be released in late December 2009.

Pictured: Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris.

[via the blog JCOMreader]

Red planets: Marxism, SF and Noam Chomsky

Michael Froggatt of Strange Horizons has an interesting review of a new nonfiction book entitled Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Pluto Press, July 2009), edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville. Although the review mentions Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Blue Mars (1996), Froggart concludes that it “seems likely that this volume [Red Planets] will remain more at home in the seminar rooms of cultural studies departments than on the bookshelves of interested lay-persons.”

Reminds me of “The Journalist from Mars,” a speech given in 2002 by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky about his conspiracy theory of media control: How would an intelligent male Martian who went to Harvard University and Columbia Journalism School report the War on Terror to his readers back on the Red Planet?

Listen to a reading of Robert J. Sawyer’s 2003 short story “Come All Ye Faithful”

Thanks to the folks at Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine, you can listen to Mike Boris read “Come All Ye Faithful” (MP3, 34 min.), a short story written by award-winning Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer that was first published in the anthology Space Inc. (2003). A tale about Father Bailey, the one and only priest on the Red Planet who is called upon to investigate an apparent miracle on the desolate plains of Cydonia, here are the opening lines of “Come All Ye Faithful”:

“Damned social engineers,” said Boothby, frowning his freckled face. He looked at me, as if expecting an objection to the profanity, and seemed disappointed that I didn’t rise to the bait.

“As you said earlier,” I replied calmly, “it doesn’t make any practical difference.”

He tried to get me again: “Damn straight. Whether Jody and I just live together or are legally married shouldn’t matter one whit to anyone but us.”

I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of telling him it mattered to God; I just let him go on. “Anyway,” he said, spreading hands that were also freckled, “since we have to be married before the Company will give us a license to have a baby, Jody’s decided she wants the whole shebang: the cake, the fancy reception, the big service.” …

Thanks to Jesse Willis of SFFaudio for the tip.

Heroine to recover NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander in NaNoWriMo novel

Joi Weaver, a twenty-something woman who dreams of Mars, is preparing to write a novel set on the fourth planet for National Novel Writing Month 2009, which runs from November 1st to November 30th. Here’s how "SaintJoi" described her yet-to-be-written novel in a recent NaNoWriMo forum:

"My story is based on a very short story I wrote last year, when the Mars Phoenix Lander shut down in Martian winter. My story is set in the nearish future, in one of the first colonies on Mars. My heroine is Dejah Sorenson, a college student (at the beginning of the story) who makes it her mission to go out and recover the long-lost Phoenix."

Check out the one-minute book trailer on Viddler.com!

This will be the sixth time SaintJoi has participated in National Novel Writing Month. Her favorite writers include C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She resides in Orange County, California, and maintains a blog called Dreamer of Mars.

Best of success, Joi!

10 Stories you wouldn’t know are Martian Science Fiction, Volume 4

This is Volume 4 of a project whose goal is to compile a long list of stories you wouldn’t know are about Mars or Martians by simply reading the titles. Some of the stories you can read online or purchase through sites such as Fictionwise, but most you cannot. The Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database are good tools for obtaining citations that you can take to your local library. If your library does not have the anthology or magazine mentioned in the citation, ask your librarian about an “Interlibrary Loan Request.” I’ve been able to borrow old anthologies and get photocopies of stories from old pulp magazines with few problems.

Here are the ten stories that comprise Volume 4:

Cover artist Edward Valigursky (1926-2009)

Commercial illustrator and science fiction and fantasy cover artist Edward Valigursky died September 7th, at the age of 82. An obituary in the September 20th issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette states that Valigursky painted covers for SF&F magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as illustrating book covers for Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Valigursky also did the cover art for several Ace double novels, including The Martian Missile (1960), written by David Grinnell (Donald A. Wollheim).

[via Mike Glyer of the fanzine File 770]

Caitlín R. Kiernan buries her YA Mars story

Sadly, award-winning SF&F author Caitlín R. Kiernan has decided to bury “Romeo & Juliet Go to Mars,” her nascent Young Adult short story in which “lesbianism is the normative state” on the Red Planet, because of more pressing commitments. She hopes to unearth it at some point in the future and finish it as an adult story. You can read the details in her LiveJournal.

Why Jeff Mayersohn and his wife bought a bookstore in the age of e-books

The Huffington Post has a neat piece written by Jeff Mayersohn explaining why he and his wife acquired the Harvard Book Store, a privately-owned, independent bookstore located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2008. Speaking of the bookstore, check out its print-on-demand database, a growing catalog of more than 3.5 million books. If you see something you like, Paige M. Gutenborg, the store’s new book-making robot, will print it up in less than five minutes and ship it to any point on the globe!

Gunslingers of Mars, a new graphic novel

Gunslingers of Mars (2009), a new 60-page graphic novel written and illustrated by two Australians, Darran Jordan and Nicholas Shepherd, is available for purchase through the self-publishing site Lulu.com. Here’s a description of the work:

A sci-fi Western where two grim gunslingers from the wild west are abducted by an alien and end up trapped on Mars, a planet now populated by the cast off experiments of many an alien encounter. Giant bugs, living buildings and alien relics meet wandering heroes in a bid for survival on the red planet of war.

Shepherd’s blog, called Nick’s Art Gallery, has some sample artwork from Gunslingers of Mars. Check out page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, and page 5.

Pictured: Artwork by Nicholas Shepherd.

Interview with Mars SF author Jason Stoddard

Last week, the blog Stomping on Yeti posted an awesome interview with Martian science fiction author Jason Stoddard. In a wide ranging conversation, Stoddard discussed his short story “Willpower” (2008), the 2010 publication of his revised Creative Commons novel Winning Mars (2005), Dr. Robert Zubrin and the scientific exploration of the Red Planet, and the revolution in e-publishing. Stoddard even managed to work in a clever reference to an older short story about Mars written by Theodore Sturgeon: “The Man Who Lost the Sea” (1959).

[via John DeNardo of SF Signal]

“The Green Hills of Mars,” a new piece of flash fiction by Roi R. Czechvala

The free SF story site 365 tomorrows has a new piece of flash fiction titled “The Green Hills of Mars” (2009), by Roi R. Czechvala. It’s about a small group of Earthmen who land on the Red Planet and are invited to a historic banquet by the local creatures. Here's the opening line:

“When the last Earthmen landed on the Martian surface, they would have sworn they were suffering from some form of mass hallucination or hysteria.”

[via Tinkoo Valia of Variety SF]

Trailer: 1966 space vampire film Queen of Blood

Here’s the trailer for the freaky science fiction/ horror film Queen of Blood (1966), starring John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, Judi Meredith, Dennis Hopper, and Florence Marly as Velena, the queen of blood. Set in the year 1990, the plot revolves around a team of astronauts who venture to Mars to aid an alien space ship that crashed there. After finding a wreck on the Red Planet, the astronauts rescue a comatose alien woman in an escape pod on the nearby Martian moon of Phobos. Unfortunately, the astronauts discover on the return voyage back to Earth that the green-skinned lady has a few vampire-like qualities.


Forrest J Ackerman even makes an appearance in the film!