“The First-Born” -- new health sciences short story by Brian W. Aldiss

Here’s another new short story written by award-winning British science fiction author Brian W. Aldiss. It’s titled “The First-Born” and it was published earlier this summer in Gateways (Tor, 2010) , an anthology of new, original stories by bestselling SF authors inspired by science fiction great Frederik Pohl and edited by his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull. Set on an arid Mars settled by bands of unemployed humans and their families thanks to subsidies from blocks of universities back on Earth, the plot revolves around the death of the first baby born on Mars, the medical issue of Martian infant mortality, and what it all means for the human colonization of the Red Planet. Here are the opening lines:

This week marks the first fifty years of humanity walking on the planet Mars. As yet, a better and more peaceful culture has to establish itself, but that the settlements still exist is a matter for congratulations.

Fadrum and his buddy Reet were kicking a ball against the alley wall, Fadrum to Reet, Reet back to Fadrum. Thud bump thud bump, went the echoing ball, in terms of complaint. They seemed never to tire, those two bored boys, but suddenly ceased their game.

Reet made off, ball under arm.

“You don’t say much these days,” he shouted back at Fadrum.

“Gotta study,” was his response.

Fadrum, before heading for his house, launched a jet of urine against the wall, that wall like most others made of processed rock and facbric-blend...

Brian W. Aldiss is also the author of the poem “There Are No More Good Stories About Mars Because We Need No More Good Stories About Mars” (1963), the short story “The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica” (1986) and the novel White Mars or, The Mind Set Free (1999).

Wanted: Info on Brain W. Aldiss’ new SF story “Finches of War”

Late last month, ThisIsOxfordshire.com reported that award-winning British science fiction author and artist Brian W. Aldiss has written a new science fiction short story set on Mars. It’s called “Finches of War”. Does anyone have any more information? Thanks.

Dark Horse to reprint John Carter of Mars comics from 1970's Weird Worlds and Tarzan

Dark Horse Comics is collecting and reprinting the John Carter of Mars stories that were originally published in the 1970's comic books Weird Worlds #1-#7 and Tarzan #207-#209. The forthcoming volume, titled John Carter of Mars: Weird Worlds and scheduled to be released in January 2011, features the handsome work of comics legends Marv Wolfman, Murphy Anderson, Gray Morrow, Sal Amendola, Joe Orlando, and Howard Chaykin.

[via JCOM Reader and Doc Mars]

New gender switch short story: “Amazon Arena of Mars” by Tara Loughead

Jekkara Press, the home of The Adventures of Bulays & Ghaavn and The Gender Switch Adventures, has an interesting, free short story titled “Amazon Arena of Mars” (2010). Written by Tara Loughead and dedicated to Leigh Brackett, the Queen of Space Opera and Martian Science Fiction, the story stars Erica Joan Stark, a character based on Brackett’s legendary male character, Eric John Stark. Here are the opening lines:

“PINT OF BITTER and your comm number.”

The big-breasted bartender regarded Bulays with amusement, because she’d certainly heard that one before.

“Bit desperate, aren’t you?” Called a deep female voice from a seat in the shadowy far corner of the bar.

The woman that stood as she spoke was tall and built and muscled like a lioness. She walked with a flat-hipped arrogance, more than a match for the swagger of Bulays. Her hair was like coiled midnight. She wore a kilt and sandals, her magnificent body bare above the waist. She carried a longsword sheathed across her back...

It’s worth noting that Jekkara Press takes its name from an ancient city located on the Mars of Leigh Brackett.

(Artwork by Vickie Shan)

Nonfiction book Packing for Mars lands on NYT best sellers list

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (Norton 2010), a new nonfiction book by the sexy popular science writer Mary Roach is currently resting at #8 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best sellers list, down from #6 last week. “A humorous investigation of life without gravity in the space program," Packing for Mars has an extensive marketing campaign and has received quite a bit of attention. Here are some links worth your time:

• The New York Times review: “Astral Bodies”

• The Space Review: “Review: Packing for Mars”

• The Space Show audio interview: “Guest: Mary Roach”

• Maclean’s review: “Tales of Space Dandruff and Chimponauts”

• The Washington Post review: “How do Astronauts go to the Bathroom in Zero Gravity?”


• NPR audio interview: “Packing for Mars and the Weightless Life”

• Los Angeles Times review: “After Tackling Dead Bodies, the Afterlife and Sex, Mary Roach Looks to the Cosmos”

• The New York Times review: “All the Right Stuff and the Gross Stuff”

• The Planetary Society audio interview: “Talking with Mary Roach, Author of Packing for Mars”

• Excerpt from Packing for Mars

Too bad I'm not artistically inclined, else I'd make a video titled Fuck Me, Mary Roach.

Black Hole Sun - new YA SF novel written by David Macinnis Gill

Black Hole Sun, a new Young Adult science fiction novel written by American author David Macinnis Gill and published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of behemoth HarperCollins, is scheduled to be released today, August 24, 2010. Billed as a "future-dystopia kick-ass action novel set on Mars," here is the promotional piece from the publisher:

Durango will take on any mission -- as long as it is dangerous, impossible, and hopeless. As long as it pays enough for him and his crew to get by. He doesn’t have a death wish, exactly, but he’s got a lot to run from and a whole lot to forget. Fortunately for Durango, he’s also got Mimi, a symbiotic nano-implant, to keep him on the straight and narrow (and to keep readers laughing along with the adrenaline rush), and a crew of loyal buddies -- male, female, and other. Readers of The Hunger Games and Pratchett’s Nation -- from casual fans of future dystopia to hardcore gamers who like fiction with depth -- will enjoy this action-jammed, cinematic saga set on a terraformed Mars.

HarperCollins has posted about the first 70 pages of Black Hole Sun and Gill has created a mock video trailer that is even more cheesy than the cover art for his novel. On a more positive note, Black Hole Sun received a starred review from Booklist.

Mixed reviews for Rick Moody’s new satirical novel The Four Fingers of Death

The Four Fingers of Death (Little Brown, July 2010), a new 725-page Vonnegutesque novel by award-winning author Rick Moody that features “a hard-luck writer in 2025, whose novelization of a remake of the 1963 horror cult classic, The Crawling Hand, spins a satirical tale of a returning Mars expedition,” has received mixed reviews over the past few weeks. Here’s a selective recap:

• The New York Times: “It may be that Moody is intentionally turning [main character and author Montese] Crandall into a pathetic figure here by giving him bad jokes, or Moody may himself be straining for humor that doesn’t work. Unfortunately, either way, it’s no fun to read.”

• The Globe and Mail: Moody’s “epic postmodern paean to schlocky old horror films kicks realism in the ass."

• The Wall Street Journal: “If nothing else, The Four Fingers of Death provides further evidence for the inverse relationship between literary theory and literary quality. As a ‘project’ -- that's what the author calls the book in his acknowledgments -- it succeeds; as a novel, it's harebrained and largely unreadable.”

• Bookslut: “Four Fingers seems admirable -- ‘novelicious,’ let’s say, to coin a term in keeping with the text’s ludic anarchy, the tickling it gives a form that’s so often been labeled as dying or dead.”

• NPR: Moody’s “energy and sheer inventiveness make The Four Fingers of Death an original and exhilarating read.” Severed Thumbs Up.

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Moody’s “new book, chockablock with the novelist's stylistic mastery, is a parody of science fiction with its dystopian pessimism and contemporary meta fiction with its personal obsessions. (Told you it was annoying.)” One finger short.

• The Washington Post: “Any similarities between Vonnegut's work and Moody's novel are superficial. The best of Vonnegut's novels were lean and focused; he didn't need 700 pages to write Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Both NPR and The Wall Street Journal have posted the introduction to The Four Fingers of Death.

“The Marriage” a previously unpublished Martian tale by Ray Bradbury

In last week’s post about the new, sold-out, expanded, limited, signed, 750-page The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009), by literary giant Ray Bradbury, I blogged about the exodus of “The Wheel.” Today, I’m highlighting another tale that explores the intricacies of race relations: “The Marriage"

“The Marriage” (2009) is a simple but hopeful two-page piece about the marriage of a human, Captain Samuel Pace of the Space Service, to Elta, a native Martian woman with eyes like gold. Here are the opening lines:

IT WAS a fine night in the Martian August. The double moons threw down a radiance that put away the shadows, and the warm sky was covered with a great variety of stars. It was a splendid night for the wedding.

Mr. Samuel Pace paused long enough in polishing his shoes to go to the window and look down into the open courtyard of this ancient Martian house. Torches were lit everywhere...

“The Marriage” is the fourteenth of Bradbury’s "Other Martian Tales” and the last of his previously unpublished tales. Stay tuned for details about my The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition giveaway!

Retro collection by Scott Edelman includes 2002 story “Mom, the Martians, and Me”

A new retrospective collection of American science fiction, fantasy and horror author Scott Edelman’s best science fiction short stories from the past thirty years has just been published by Fantastic Books. Titled What We Still Talk About, the collection includes “Mom, the Martians, and Me,” which was originally published in British editor Peter Crowther's anthology Mars Probes (2002) and is one of my favorite stories about Martians!

A clever short story in which the owner of a small-town newspaper tries to convince a police officer that his mother, who is obsessed with UFOs and believes her husband was abducted by aliens, was kidnapped by little green men from the Red Planet, “Mom, the Martians, and Me” has a cool passage describing how Mom turned her bedroom into an astronomical museum and space library:

With Dad gone, the bedroom that they had shared for years was transformed into a makeshift astronomical museum. Star maps covered every available inch of wall space, even hiding the bay window that had once cast light over their twin beds. A floor-to-ceiling mosaic of the surface of Mars as seen from space filled one wall of the room, looming like a giant unblinking eye. Mom had planted a silver pushpin where she was sure he was being kept.

Odd books were everywhere. She’d always been an avid reader, but only of nonfiction. She could not stand made-up lives. Science fiction distressed her most of all. It had nothing to do with real life, she said. Now, she might as well have been living in a science fiction novel, for the library she’d built to wall off the world was so fantastic as to make any fiction, however wild, seem mundane by comparison. Until Mom went strange and I lost her, I had not realized that there were so many first-person accounts by people who claimed to have been scooped up by spacecraft and later returned. On the bulging shelves next to these grew scrapbooks of clippings from supermarket gossip rags, stories telling of women who had been impregnated by Martians, teenagers who had been stolen as youths and returned middle-aged, and old men whose end-stage colon cancer had been cured by the touch of alien fingers.

Children’s small windup toys decorated her end table, rocket ships and alien robots that were sometimes left scattered on the floor where I would trip over them. The area around her bed became littered with badly printed newsletters which purported to tell the truth about a government conspiracy to hide from the public the secrets of crashed alien crafts and their inhabitants....

Scott Edelman was the editor of the 1990s magazine Science Fiction Age and is currently the editor of the SF website Blastr. He maintains his own website and a LiveJournal.

[via Ian Randal Strock of SF Scope]

“The Wheel” a previously unpublished Martian bridge by Ray Bradbury

In last week’s post about the new, sold-out, expanded, limited, signed, 750-page The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009), by literary giant Ray Bradbury, I blogged about the historical “They All Had Grandfathers.” This week, I’m highlighting “The Wheel,” a bridge which, according to Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005), was “excised” from the working manuscript of The Martian Chronicles before that work was first published in 1950.

“The Wheel” (2009) is a short bridge that describes how “the black people” missed Mars and ended up landing upon Venus, where “they were happy.” Here is the opening line:

THEY SANG on their way. They sang Joshua Saw the Wheel, and they sang Go Down, Moses, and they sang a lot of other songs. They sang songs of all kinds, but they missed Mars....

“The Wheel” is the twelfth of Bradbury’s "Other Martian Tales" and if reincorporated back into The Martian Chronicles, it would, presumably, be placed after the racially-charged chapter “Way in the Middle of the Air” (June 2003/2034). Interestingly, “Way in the Middle of the Air” was scrubbed from the 2006 William Morrow/Harper Collins reprinting of The Martian Chronicles and is only included in The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009) as an "other Martian tale."

New short fiction: “How to Become a Mars Overlord” by Catherynne M. Valente

The third (August 2010) issue of Lightspeed Magazine, a new, free, online science fiction publication edited by John Joseph Adams, has several pieces related to Mars. First, is “How to Become a Mars Overlord,” a sweeping short story written by Catherynne M. Valente that features some stellar writing and casts Mars in a brilliant metaphorical light. Here are the opening lines:

WELCOME, Aspiring Potentates! We are tremendously gratified at your interest in our little red project, and pleased that you recognize the potential growth opportunities inherent in whole-planet domination. Of course we remain humble in the face of such august and powerful interests, and seek only to showcase the unique and challenging career paths currently available on the highly desirable, iconic, and oxygen-rich landscape of Mars....

Interestingly, “How to Become a Mars Overlord” is also available as a podcast, narrated by Robin Sachs (mp3, 32 minutes).

Second, is an excellent interview with Valente in which she discusses the specifics of “How to Become a Mars Overlord.” Indispensable for simpletons like me who have difficulty seeing beyond the literary glare of stories.

Third, a nice piece of nonfiction titled “Dead Mars” by Pamela L. Gay.

All worth reading!

New university anthology includes four classic Martian SF stories

Weslayan University Press has posted the table of contents for its mammoth new anthology: The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (August 2010). Among the 52 short stories are these four Martian classics: “Shambleau” (1933) by Catherine L. Moore; “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) by Stanley G. Weinbaum; “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) by Ray Bradbury; and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) by Philip K. Dick. Also, it’s refreshing to see that the anthology includes a story by early 20th-century SF writer Leslie F. Stone.

[via SF Signal]

“They All Had Grandfathers” a previously unpublished Martian tale by Ray Bradbury

In last week’s post about the new, sold-out, expanded, limited, signed, 750-page The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009), by literary giant Ray Bradbury, I blogged about a beautiful little gem titled “Jemima True.” This week, I’m highlighting “They All Had Grandfathers,” which, according to Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005), was “excised” from the working manuscript before The Martian Chronicles was first published in 1950.

“They All Had Grandfathers” (2009) is six-and-a-half page tale about a Western “cowpoke” named Samson Wood (1935-2001), who came to the Red Planet to “find something” and finds something in establishing the first bar, The Milled Buck Saloon (dancing girls, entertainment, good food & liquor), in the first human town on the planet. Here are the opening lines:

IT WAS Wednesday, May 17th, 2001 A.D. on the planet Mars.

The men were stalking across the rough grass with white twine in their big hands, followed by men with steel hammers and wedges they drove into the earth. They tied the white twine into place. All over the land the twine was humming, like a great spider web.

“Here’s the post office, there’s where’ll be the city hall, the grocery, the jail, the dry-goods, the dime store …” Hands swept to all horizons, pointing. Men spat and took hold of their hats in the wind....

The most striking feature of “They All Had Grandfathers” is the concept of the frontier. As the first settlement is staked out on Mars, Samson Wood is reminded of the frontier in American history, how his grandfather went West in 1890, and how “A man could say, I don’t like New York and go to Illinois, and when Illinois got too full he could hit the Oklahoma Territory. And on out through Texas, open spaces and then the sea.” You see, Samson Wood “grew up in an age when you couldn’t ride the rods of a freight train because they took away the rods and you couldn’t hitch-hike the highways because every state passed laws against it. There was nothing for a man to do who just wanted to run away.” Perhaps appropriately, Samson Wood ends up being the first civilian to die on the new Martian frontier.

“They All Had Grandfathers” is the eighth of Bradbury’s "Other Martian Tales" and if reincorporated back into The Martian Chronicles, it would, presumably, be placed after the chapter titled "The Third Expedition" (April 2000/2031) but before the chapter titled "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" (June 2001/2032).

Review: Rick Moody’s new Vonnegutesque novel The Four Fingers of Death

If you can believe this, The Wall Street Journal has devoted even more pixels (a review) to award-winning author Rick Moody and his new Vonnegutesque novel, The Four Fingers of Death (Hachette, July 2010), which “features a hard-luck writer in 2025, whose novelization of a remake of the 1963 horror cult classic, The Crawling Hand, spins a satirical tale of a returning Mars expedition.” This follows last week’s interview with Moody and excerpt from The Four Fingers of Death.

Short student film to be based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 story “The Field of Vision”

This is Local London reports that two film students at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, have received permission from science fiction author and SFWA Grand Master Ursula K. Le Guin for the rights to make a film based on one of her short stories, “The Field of Vision” (1973). The 20-minute film, also entitled The Field of Vision, has a budget of about £12,000 and will premiere in February 2011. The film’s plot revolves around “a group of astronauts embarking on a mission to Mars, which then goes wrong and some are left psychologically affected.”

According to another source, Le Guin’s story, which was originally published in the October 1973 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, has a slightly different plot: “After a visit in the mysterious 600 million year old City on Mars, the astronauts experience some strange effects. One of them sees things, and another hears things. After a long struggle, they learn to interpret -- to make sense -- of their sounds and visions. They see the world as it really is, and see God in everything.”

Dynamite to publish John Carter, Warlord of Mars comic book series

The website Bleeding Cool reports that Dynamite Entertainment will publish Warlord of Mars, a comic book adaptation and expansion of beloved pulp author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fantastical science fiction novel A Princess of Mars (1912), later this year. Written by Arvid Nelson, drawn by Stephen Sadowski and Lui Antonio, with covers by Alex Ross, Joe Jusko, Lucio Parillo, and J. Scott Campbell, Warlord of Mars Issue #1 will have several different covers. Check out the sneak peak, which includes the covers and an awesome illustration of some ancient Martian ruins!

[via JCOM Reader]

Rocket Summer: “Jemima True” a previously unpublished piece by Ray Bradbury

In last week’s post focusing on the new, long-awaited, already-sold-out, expanded, limited, signed, 750-page The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009), by literary giant Ray Bradbury, I blogged about the little-known bridge “The Martian Ghosts.” This week, I’m looking at another gem: “Jemima True.”

“Jemima True” (2009) is a previously unpublished one-page “dizzying fragment” that begins with the arrival on Mars of a woman, presumably a prostitute, named Jemima True, moves into the building of an Earth-like town, and ends with a child running around with a Halloween mask. Here are the opening lines:

JEMIMA TRUE came to the planet Mars in the spring of the year 2160 and the men of the new town put down their feet and turned to watch her pass. For she was a lovely thing, a thistle, and they stood looking long after she drifted from sight.

It was the sixth building in the town to be hammered together and it had a flight of stairs leading up and a door at the top to be opened, and a long hall beyond the door into which you might peer at women with bodies like mother-of-pearl....

“Jemima True” is the seventh of the "Other Martian Tales" but there is no firm indication as to when it was originally written.

Interestingly, the name “Jemima” has Biblical significance, for she was the first daughter of Job. Also, there were several women in 17th and 18th-century New England named “Jemima True,” one of whom married a fellow named Thomas Bradbury. And, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, a work written by Mary Wollstonecraft that was published posthumously in 1798, features an abused working-class domestic servant named “Jemima” who ends up turning to prostitution.

Lastly, it's worth noting that Bradbury’s “Jemima True” mentions a man named “Tom Wolfe.” According to The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005), by Sam Weller, writer Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) “taught me how to throw up. His books were immense upchuckings. Not much plot, but he was wild about life and he tore into it and he jumped up and down and he yelled."

Comments, additions, or corrections are welcome!

Update: Birdwatching from Mars comic book

Dark speculative fiction author Barry Napier has provided an update for his forthcoming comic book series, Birdwatching from Mars, which involves artists Luis Puig, Ryan Burt and Keith Draws. In short, Issue #1 is near completion and may be available by the end of the year. Work continues on Issue #2 and Issue #3. Meanwhile, check out these cool character models of Frank Galveston and Colonel Stone that artist Keith Draws created!

WSJ on author Rick Moody and his new novel The Four Fingers of Death

The Wall Street Journal has devoted more than a few pixels to award-winning author Rick Moody and his new novel, The Four Fingers of Death (Hachette, July 2010), which “features a hard-luck writer in 2025, whose novelization of a remake of the 1963 horror cult classic, The Crawling Hand, spins a satirical tale of a returning Mars expedition.” First, there is an interesting interview in which Moody states that legendary SF writer Robert Heinlein “is not line-by-line a great writer.” Here’s the relevant excerpt:

WSJ: What do you make of those who see the work of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and other science-fiction writers as genre fiction and not literary?

Rick Moody: I think he's unfairly shunted into a commercial spot in the food chain by literary writers. I think his books are really beautiful. They're simple, and they're simply told but they're also strange and emotionally complex and much worthy of attention. The genre stuff, which I did read, is challenging if you're really into literary writing. I think Robert Heinlein is not line-by-line a great writer. But I feel great affection for the way in which those books were important to younger people back in the '70s when I read them.

Next, there is the lengthy introduction to Moody’s new novel, The Four Fingers of Death. The opening lines:

People often ask me where I get my ideas. Or on one occasion back in 2024 I was asked. This was at a reading in an old-fashioned used-media outlet right here in town, the store called Arachnids, Inc. The audience consisted of five intrepid and stalwart folks, four out of the five no doubt intent on surfing aimlessly at consoles. Or perhaps they intended to leave the store when instead they were herded into a cluster of uncomfortable petrochemical multi-use furniture modules by Noel Stroop, the hard-drinking owner-operator of the shop in question. I'd been pestering Noel about a reading for some time, months, despite the fact that Arachnids was not celebrated for its calendar of arts related programming...

Finally, there is a short piece in which Moody discusses his favorite classic horror films.

The Four Fingers of Death crawls onto bookstores shelves July 28th.

“The Martian Ghosts” a previously unpublished short story by Ray Bradbury

In last week’s post focusing on the new, long-awaited, already-sold-out, expanded, limited, signed, 750-page The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009), by Ray Bradbury, I blogged about the vignette “Dead of Summer.” This week, I’m looking at another previously unpublished piece: “The Martian Ghosts.”

“The Martian Ghosts” (2009) is a fractured three-page short story in which the ghosts of dead Martians, presumably killed by the disease, spook the human settlers. The opening lines:

“I FOR ONE don’t believe it,” said the mother.

“Come see for yourself, then,” said Eem, and ran.

Well, she waddled down to the cellar into sandy dark and moistness, along a corridor or two past some old prison cells, for their house had been founded on an ancient seaport gaol, and when she reached the end of the stone passage she threw her hands to her bosom and said “Ah!”

“Get us out of here!” cried the Ghost.

“Unlock the door!” shouted the second Ghost, paler than his mate.

The mother fled upstairs and vomited straight off….

Interestingly, the mother and her husband are accused of being “witches” and after their house is demolished, they are “cut into a thousand pieces and buried in a thousand towns.” “The Martian Ghosts” is the sixth of the "Other Martian Tales" but there is no indication as to when it was originally written.