Michael Chabon’s “The Martian Agent: a Planetary Romance” (1993)

In honor of Michael Chabon’s winning the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Novel for his The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Timothy McSweeney of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury fame has posted online an excerpt from Chabon’s 1993 short story, “The Martian Agent: a Planetary Romance.”

Originally published in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (Issue #10, 1993), which Chabon edited, “The Martian Agent” was recently published in Steampunk, an anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2008).

While we have not had an opportunity to read Chabon’s story, here is some feedback from those who have:

• A nod to another pulp magazine tradition, the serialized novel. This story takes place in an alternative past where the American Revolution was not successful. The story focuses on the young sons of a captured American rebel. -- The SF Site

• It kind of cheats the reader with expectations from its title. The story reads like the first chapter of a novel, featuring the exploits of two young brothers in a Post-Civil War alternate America, fleeing from their father’s enemies. Franklin and Jefferson Drake run, but to no avail; they are taken by the enemy and put in St. Ignatius Boys’ Home, which is a walk in the park compared to their parent’s fate, but it is nonetheless a melancholy situation. They are rescued by their uncle, Captain Thomas Mordden, inventor and aeronaut, who claims that it is possible for men to travel to the moon. But, alas, the story doesn’t go very far beyond this point, and we never learn who that Martian Agent is ... -- The Fix: Short Fiction Review

• Enough to send readers back into the cold but reliable arms of The New Yorker. -- The New York Times

Apparently, a note at the end of “The Martian Agent” indicated that Chabon intended to write a second installment of the story, titled “The Indistinguishable Operations of Empire and Fate." If so, it was never published. As sci-fi critic Rich Horton hinted, perhaps Chabon transformed an unpublished extended version of his story into a movie script instead. The Los Angeles Times noted in a 2002 article that “In 1997, Jan De Bont, the director of Speed, optioned Chabon’s script The Martian Agent which the writer describes as ‘Lawrence of Arabia on Mars in 1899.’ It was never made.”

Favorite SF Stories: Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains"

Thanks to a recent post by the blog QuasarDragon, we learned about sci-fi author, editor, and blogger Jason Sanford’s favorite science fiction story: “There Will Come Soft Rains,” by Ray Bradbury (1950).

As Sanford points out in his commentary on the blog BestScienceFictionStories, a version of "There Will Come Soft Rains" is printed as a chapter in Bradbury’s classic novel, The Martian Chronicles (1950), and can be read online as a pdf.

Sharing Cover Art: Lester del Rey, Henry Harrison, and H. Beam Piper

Trolling through Amazon.com's catalog of Kindle eBooks the other day, we found a record for Lester del Rey’s Police Your Planet (1956), a story in which “a disgraced, embittered Earth cop is exiled to a Mars that has been thoroughly corrupted by domed city life.” The cover art that Amazon is using to promote del Rey’s eBook is pictured here.

Much to our surprise, the same cover art, or some variation thereof, is being used by Amazon to promote at least three other science fiction eBooks: Planet of the Damned, by Henry Harrison, and Lone Star Planet and Four-Day Planet, both by H. Beam Piper. Please check the links to see our point.

Can anyone help us identify the artwork? Thanks!

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy Makes List of 20 Essential Science Fiction Books of Past 20 Years

Denvention 3, the recent 2008 Worldcon gathering in Denver, had a much-anticipated panel discussion titled “20 Essential Science Fiction Books of the Past 20 Years,” the results of which are posted on moderater, semi-retired science fiction critic, and Hugo Award winner Cheryl Morgan's blog. The other panelists were Charles N. Brown, Gary K. Wolfe, Graham Sleight, and Karen Burnham.

Perhaps not surprisingly, three of the five panelists (Wolfe, Sleight, Burnham) included Kim Stanley Robinson’s landmark Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars; 1992-1996) on his or her list of “20 Essential Science Fiction Books of the Past 20 Years.”

Just how highly regarded is Robinson’s trilogy? In commenting on Red Mars back in 1992, Arthur C. Clarke called it “A staggering book ... The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written ... It should be required reading for the colonists of the next century.”

Interview with Paul Mantee, Starred in Cult Film Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Paul Mantee, a movie and television actor who is perhaps best known for his role as shipwrecked astronaut Commander Christopher “Kit” Draper in the 1964 cult sci-fi film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, discusses the film in a recent interview with Ron Garmon of Los Angeles CityBeat.

A more detailed interview with Mantee about the film was published in Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks: Conversations with 24 Actors, Writers, Producers and Directors from the Golden Age, by Tom Weaver (2004). The bulk of this interview can be read online through Google Book Search.

Shot in California’s Death Valley, Robinson Crusoe on Mars was based upon Daniel Defoe’s classic novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), and a Rex Gordon science fiction novel, First on Mars (1956). After crashing at the box office in 1964, a restored letterbox version of the film was released with related material as a DVD in 2007.

Leigh Brackett’s “Black Amazon of Mars” (1951)

In the afterglow of last winter's Paizo Publishing reprint of The Secret of Sinharat / People of the Talisman, Leigh Brackett's classic 1964 Ace double novel, it’s worth recalling that the latter work is an expansion of an early Brackett novella, “Black Amazon of Mars.”

First published in Planet Stories in March 1951 and featured on the magazine’s cover, "Black Amazon of Mars" received immediate praise from aspiring science fiction writer Lin Carter, whose letter to the magazine's editor, Jerome Bixby, was published a few months later:

Dear Bix:

For some reason or another, it seems to be a long time between letters. ... Well, on to the meat of the mag, yclept Black Amazon of Mars, or Stark Rides Again! This was a good, rousing bradswords-and-atom-blaster sort of science-fantasy, in the reliable Planet style. This sort of yarn has been appearing in PS ever since Vassals of the Master World, Black Friar of the Flame, and Red Witch of Mercury, and will undoubtedly keep right on appearing in PS as long as that magazine continues to grace the newsstands. Not that I have anything against this sort of story, but after seeing it so often it becomes tiresome. The story is always the same; hero is bronzed Earthman, heroine is proud Martian princess (or proud Venusian sorceress, or proud Saturnian warrior-queen, etc. cetera), villain who is a ruthless and ambitious fellow Martian or Venusian or Saturnian, who resents the Earthman, having a crush on said proud MP (or PVS, or PSWQ etc.). Repetition does not endear this sort of thing, it just becomes silly.

Now, the only thing that saves Black Amazon from being dull, boring and silly, is that it was written by Leigh Brackett, a talented and imaginative authoress. She took this weary old plot, that would have been limp, uninspired and unreadable hack in the hands of an Erik Fennel or an Emmett McDowell, and turned it into poetry. "The great tower of stone rose up monstrous to the sky. It was whole and there were pallid lights within that stirred and flickered, and it was crowned with a shimmering darkness." She knows the secret of fusing poignant emotion, rich description, convincing action, and above all, a tremendous sense of atmosphere and lavish, excellent use of the English language, to her bare plot and turning it into something damn readable, Black Amazon was a good story, colorful, poetic, and exciting. Let’s have more from Brackett. ...

Sincerely,

Lin Carter, the Sage of St. Pete
The One, the Only, the Original Sage!

More than forty years later, the original “Black Amazon of Mars” novella was republished in Stark and the Star Kings (2005), a collection of material by Brackett and Edmond Hamilton, her husband. Interestingly, this collection was reviewed by writer and critic John Clute of SciFi.com. Clute's review prompted a letter to the editor by opposing critic Rich Horton regarding the expansion of "Black Amazon of Mars," which in turn triggered a hilarious response and (Ace) “double thanks” from Clute.

Pictured above: Brackett’s “Black Amazon of Mars,” featured on the cover of Planet Stories (Vol. 4, No. 11, March 1951). Art by Allen Anderson.

Top Martian Sci-Fi Audiobooks on iTunes

One of the neat things about iTunes is its list of Top 100 Sci Fi & Fantasy audiobooks. While it is unclear to us whether the list is based on the number of times a title has been purchased by consumers or the average rating of customer reviews, it is updated on a regular basis. At the moment, several Martian Sci-Fi titles are on the list:

   #51. Minority Report and Other Stories (2002), by Philip K. Dick, includes “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1966)

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

   #61. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (1950)

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

Other Martian Sci-Fi audiobooks available at iTunes include Joe Haldeman’s new book, Marsbound (2008).

New Collection of Judith Merril Novels

Spaced Out: Three Novels of Tomorrow, by Judith Merril (2008), was published earlier this summer by NESFA Press, the “publishing pseudopod” of the New England Science Fiction Association. A hardcover collection including two works about Mars co-written by C. M. Kornbluth, here are the contents:

• Shadow on the Hearth (1950), by Merril. The story of nuclear war on Earth from the perspective of Gladys Mitchell, a housewife who must cope with threats to her family.

• Outpost Mars (1952), by Merril and Kornbluth, writing as Cyril Judd. The story of Dr. Tony Hellman and fellow humans of Sun Lake Colony on Mars, who are accused of stealing a supply of marcaine, a Martian drug, from the planet’s most powerful magnate. (Note that Outpost Mars is part of the Planetary Society’s Visions of Mars library aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander.)

• Gunner Cade (1952), by Merril and Kornbluth, writing as Cyril Judd. The story of Gunner Cade, a professional soldier of the Realm of Man, who is captured by rebel forces on Mars but escapes, only to find that he is being hunted by fellow gunners.

The cover art for this collection is by William K. Hartmann, painter, scientist, and author of Mars Underground: a Novel (1997)

Surprisingly, Spaced Out: Three Novels of Tomorrow does not include Merril’s The Tomorrow People (1960), a novel about Johnny Wendt, sole survivor of a failed expedition to Mars.

Also, it's worth noting that The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy at the Toronto Public Library is named after Judith Merril. Donated in 1970, the collection was originally known as The Spaced Out Library and consisted of items from her personal collection.

Lastly, Suford Lewis, editor at NESFA Press, just won the 2008 Forrest J Ackerman Big Heart Award, the highest service award in the science fiction community, at Denvention 3. Congratulations!

New Short Fiction: “Tenbrook of Mars” by Dean McLaughlin

“Tenbrook of Mars,” a new novella by Dean McLaughlin, has been published in the July/August 2008 issue of Analog.

As SFRevu describes the plot, “Don Tenbrook had wound up acting manager on an outpost on Mars when a disaster cut off their supplies. While he won't admit to it, he's credited with ‘saving the colony.’ He's coming home to a hero's welcome and finding something
out about how help from Earth was handled. We get his history and how survival was engineered. Does he have a surprise waiting for him?”

A more complete synopsis and brief analysis is provided by The Fix: Short Fiction Review.

Interestingly, McLaughlin pays tribute to several authors and students
of the Red Planet by incorporating the following spaceships into his storyline: the Edgar Burroughs, the Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Percival Lowell, and the Raymond Bradbury.

An active science fiction writer since the early 1950’s, McLaughlin’s best known work is "Hawk Among the Sparrows" (1968), which was nominated for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Best Novella.

Kindle Report Ignites Amazon’s Stock

Shares of online retailer Amazon.com rocketed nearly 10% today on speculation that 2008 sales of its Kindle electronic book reader will be twice as high as originally expected. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney projected in a research report that sales of Kindle will reach about 380,000 units this year and could generate more than $1 billion for Amazon by 2010. "Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," Mahaney wrote.

Launched in 2007, Kindle offers readers more than 4,500 science fiction titles, including classics such as Stowaway to Mars, by John Wyndham (1936), Rebels of the Red Planet, by Charles L. Fontenay (1961), and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick (1965), as well as more recent works such as Semper Mars, by Ian Douglas (1998), Starstrike: Task Force Mars, by Douglas Niles (2007), and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, by S. M. Stirling (2008).

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is founder of Blue Origin, a privately-funded aerospace company which might actually transport a reader to Mars some day.

Space Artist Michael Carroll to Speak at Mars Society Convention

Michael Carroll, an internationally recognized astronomical and science fiction artist, is scheduled to speak at the 11th Annual Mars Society Convention, to be held at the University of Colorado at Boulder, August 14th to 17th, 2008.

Carroll’s artwork has appeared in magazines, on television programs, at museums, and in several books, including the nonfiction Mars 1999 (1987) and Race to Mars (1988). His paintings also cover numerous nonfiction and science fiction books, including Fourth Planet from the Sun: Tales of Mars from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2005). An image of one of Carroll’s paintings, Russian Rover (1992), is currently on the surface of the Red Planet as part of the Visions of Mars library aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander.

The author of several children’s science books, Carroll also edited Eat My Martian Dust: Finding God Among Aliens, Droids, And Mega Moons with Robert Elmer (2005), a collection of fourteen science fiction short stories with Christian themes.

New Book: Mars Life by Ben Bova

Mars Life (Tor Books, 2008), a new novel by Ben Bova, has been published and is now available in bookstores. Following Mars (1992) and Return to Mars (1999), this is his third science fiction book about geologist Jamie Waterman and the human exploration of the Red Planet.

A prolific writer who has authored more than one hundred works, Bova is a six-time winner of the Hugo Award and past president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Here’s a description of Mars Life: Jamie Waterman discovered the cliff dwelling on Mars, and the fact that an intelligent race lived on the red planet sixty-five million years ago, only to be driven into extinction by the crash of a giant meteor. Now the exploration of Mars is itself under threat of extinction, as the ultraconservative New Morality movement gains control of the U.S. government and cuts off all funding for the Mars program.

Meanwhile, Carter Carleton, an anthropologist who was driven from his university post by unproven charges of rape, has started to dig up the remains of a Martian village. Science and politics clash on two worlds as Jamie desperately tries to save the Mars program and uncover who the vanished Martians were.

A 25-page excerpt of Mars Life is available at Bova’s website and he discusses the issue of financing space exploration in an interview with ColoradoBiz Magazine.

A review by John Joseph Adams is posted on Sci Fi Wire.

Conveniently, the publication of Mars Life coincides with the real world debate as to whether NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission has discovered life on Mars. Bova speaks to both in "How would we react to Martian life?", his most recent column for the Naples Daily News.

Project Blue Mars: An Online Virtual World

While Phoenix Mars Mission scientists are diligently investigating perchlorate salts on the Red Planet, computer programmers at Avatar Reality, Inc., are busily completing production of Blue Mars, a new “online massively multiplayer virtual world ... featuring stunning graphics, realistic characters and endless social bonding opportunities. Set on Terraformed Mars in the year 2177 AD, players will be able to live out their fantasies through personalized avatars.” Blue Mars is scheduled for beta release at the end of 2008.

Who knows, perhaps a player will be able to create an avatar who is a science fiction fan, relaxing by the side of a swimming pool reading a first edition hardcover of Stranger in a Strange Land in pristine condition.

For more information about Blue Mars, read “Will Martian water discovery fuel interest in sci-fi Blue Mars world?” at The Industry Standard’s website.

“The Memory of Mars” by Raymond Jones (1961)

Below is a bookish passage from “The Memory
of Mars,” a piece of short fiction written by Raymond F. Jones and published in Amazing Stories magazine in December 1961.

The story’s plot revolves around a news reporter on Earth named Mel Hastings, his dead wife Alice, a vacation to Mars, and a clandestine Galactic Council that replaces humans with androids. With implanted memories and therapy through psycho-recovery, it reminds us somewhat of Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966).

In the second layer of junk in the drawer he came across the brochure on Martian vacations. It must have been one of the dreams of her life, he thought. She'd wanted it so much that she'd almost come to believe that it was real. He turned the pages of the smooth, glossy brochure. Its cover bore the picture of the great Martian Princess and the blazoned emblem of Connemorra Space Lines. Inside were glistening photos of the plush interior of the great vacation liner, and pictures of the domed cities of Mars where Earthmen played more than they worked. Mars had become the great resort center of Earth.

The full text of "The Memory of Mars" is available free of charge at ManyBooks.net and Project Gutenberg.

Jones also wrote two other pieces of Martian short fiction, “The Martian Circe” (1947) and “The Lights of Mars” (1973), as mentioned in Richard Simms' checklist of Jones' short fiction.

Pictured above: The Vol. 35, No. 12, December 1961 issue of Amazing Stories.

Denvention 3: World Science Fiction Convention

Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, is being held this week, from Wednesday, August 6, through Sunday, August 10, 2008, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

The 170-page quick reference guide lists some interesting events, including:

• Mars Update, a panel discussion about the latest buzz on the Red Planet, featuring scientist Bill Higgins, author Geoffrey Landis, and scientist and author Steven Howe.

• Mars Through the SF Ages: ERB to KSR, a panel discussion about how the Red Planet has fascinated science fiction writers from Edgar Rice Burrough to Kim Stanley Robinson. Panelists D. Douglas Fratz, Jeff DeLuzio, editor and reviewer John Joseph Adams, educator Margaret McBride, and author Mary Turzillo talk about visions of Mars and how they have changed over the course of time.

• Trends in Book Collecting, a panel discussion featuring nonfiction author and former educator Bradford Lyau, long-time SF fan Mark Olson, bookseller Tom Whitmore, and William Priester: “Don't you wish that you had kept that first edition hardcover of Stranger in a Strange Land in pristine condition instead of taking it with you to the swimming pool? Our panel of book collectors will discuss how to make an educated guess as to what current books are going to be worth more in the future, and what volumes in your library might be worth more than you think.”

• Timeless Stars panel discussions about C. M. Kornbluth and Clifford D. Simak.

• A showing of the film, Mission to Mars (2000), starring Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, and Kim Delaney.

Also, “Mars Attracts Sci-Fi Author Ben Bova,” a recent article in the Rocky Mountain News, notes that Bova will receive the Robert A. Heinlein Award at Denvention 3. Bova’s latest novel, Mars Life, his third about the Red Planet, has just been published by Tor Books.

Home from a Long Voyage ...

Recently, we returned home from a five-month voyage that began last March. Here are some notable developments in Martian science fiction that occurred while we were away:

• Sir Arthur C. Clarke, a space visionary and pillar of science fiction writing for more than fifty years, died on March 19, 2008. Among his many works is The Sands of Mars (1951).

• In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, a novel by S. M. Stirling, was published by Tor Books in March 2008. Sample chapters are posted on Stirling's website and a review by Tom Easton is posted on Analog's website.

• Lord of the Spiders, by science fiction Grand Master Michael Moorcock, was republished by Paizo Publishing in April 2008. This pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs was originally published in 1965 as Blades of Mars under a Moorcock pseudonym, Edward P. Bradbury.

• The Martian General’s Daughter, a novel by Theodore Judson, was published by Pyr in April 2008. A summary, sample chapters, and reviews are available at Pyr’s website.

• Chronicling Mars: The 2008 J. Lloyd Eaton Conference of Science Fiction was held in mid May 2008 at the University of California, Riverside. The conference featured appearances by Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, Kim Stanley Robinson, Geoffrey Landis, Mary Turzillo, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and Gregory Benford, and the presentation of a number of interesting papers.

• NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission spacecraft landed on the Red Planet in late May 2008. The spacecraft contains Visions of Mars, a library in DVD format of Martian-related material, including science fiction classics by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Kim Stanley Robinson. The DVD is designed to survive at least 500 years on the cold Martian surface.

• Masters of the Pit, by Michael Moorcock, was republished by Paizo Publishing in July 2008. This epic of sword-and-planet adventure was originally published in 1965 as Barbarians of Mars under Moorcock’s pseudonym, Edward P. Bradbury.