Hugo Award-winning SF&F artist Frank Wu has embedded several of astronomer Percival Lowell’s infamous early 20th-century maps of the canals on Mars in a panel of his forthcoming Guidolon graphic novel..JPG)
The German website Fantasy-Atlas.org has about a hundred cool maps based on various books, including one depicting the Mars of science fiction & fantasy author Leigh Brackett’s classic novel Das Erbe der Marsgötter (The Sword of Rhiannon, 1953). I can’t read German, but I recognize several of the sites on the map: Jekkara, Valkis, Barrakesch, Sark and Khondor. Presumably, “Rhiannons Grab,” in the right hand corner of the map, marks the location of the Tomb of Rhiannon!
Adamant Entertainment, a design studio that makes Role-Playing Games (RPGs) and related products, recently released a new sword-and-planet campaign setting titled MARS: Savage Worlds Edition. “From character creation, to creatures, to tips on the planetary romance genre, MARS: Savage Worlds Edition features everything you need to get started telling savage tales of adventure beneath the moons of Mars." Here's a detailed description of the new RPG:
The Red, Green & Blue Mars Site, a website inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series and maintained by Frans Blok of Rotterdam, has a beautiful map of a future terraformed Mars in the year M-100 (2219 AD). The map is based upon Robinson's novels.
Thanks to a tip from independent filmmaker Steve Weintz, here’s a neat diagram by engineer Charles E. Housden of a Martian canal system that one would have found on the Mars of astronomer Percival Lowell.
This afternoon NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday radio program, hosted by Ira Flatow, discussed two neat topics: the contamination of Mars by bacteria from Earth, and the new Google Mars maps. Here's the coolest line from the broadcast: "The moon is dead, Jim."
A few days ago the blog SF Signal had a wonderful suggestion for a holiday gift: a Celestial Globe of the Earth that, when the lights go down, displays the 88 constellations of the night sky in a cool blue hue. Now, the used and rare book site AbeBooks has a listing for another, slightly more expensive, globe that the space entrepreneur, NASA administrator, or planetary adventurer in your family might enjoy as a holiday gift: the Mariner 9 Mars Globe.Mariner 9 Mars GlobeInterestingly, NASA's website appears to have a picture of the same globe, displayed above, which, apparently, the space agency uses
Description: (MARS - MARINER 9) NASA. The Many Faces of Mars: 16" Visual-Relief Mariner 9 Mars Globe. Chicago, IL (globe); Pasadena, CA (booklet): National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1973. Original globe, measures 16 inches in diameter, resting on original wooden stand; accompanying quarto booklet, pp. [13], original wrappers. $7500. First edition of the globe produced by NASA incorporating the results of the photography and data collected by the Mariner 9 spacecraft. NASA launched Mariner 9 toward Mars on May 30, 1971. The unmanned spacecraft reached the red planet on November 13 of the same year ... "Mariner 9 exceeded all primary photographic requirements by photo-mapping 100 percent of the planet's surface" (NASA). The crucial findings underpinned the later Viking program. Mariner 9 completed its final transmission on October 27, 1972; this globe and supplement were published in December, 1973. The probe remains in stable orbit around Mars until at least 2022. After analysis of the results of Mariner 9, NASA tentatively selected potential landing sites for the Viking probes which were intended to soft-land instrument packages onto Mars in 1976. NASA selected four potential landing sites for the two Viking probes ... These four sites are indicated on the globe with adhesive decals, as issued (NASA had selected the sites by July, 1973). Small typed label indicating where Viking Lander 1 touched down (most likely affixed by a previous owner). Fine condition.
Price: $7,500
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:
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.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 ...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.
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.
A brilliant nonfiction work of scientific journalism, Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World (2002), by science writer Oliver Morton, “explores the peculiar and fascinating world of the new generation of explorers: geologists, scientists, astrophysicists and dreamers. Morton shows us the complex and beguiling role that mapping will play in our understanding of the red planet, and more deeply, what it means for humans to envision such heroic landscapes. Charting a path from the 19th century visionaries to the spy-satellite pioneers to the science fiction writers and the arctic explorers ... Morton unveils the central place that Mars has occupied in the human imagination, and what it will mean to realize these dreams.”67.JPG)
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