Condensed version of 1964 film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Generally considered one of the worst films ever produced, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) is a serious “Yuletide science-fiction fantasy” in which the children of Mars become obsessed with Christmas television shows beamed from Earth. The solution to the Martian elders’ problem: Kidnap Santa Claus and bring him to the Red Planet so that he can make toys for the Martian children. Adventure and a positive message ensues.



Here’s a 10-minute edited version of the original 81-minute film, abridged but containing all of the “good parts.”

[via Suvudu]

Win a copy of Gilbert and Edgar on Mars, the new novella by Eric Brown

PS Publishing has the holiday spirit. The UK-based publishing shop announced that two randomly-drawn email newsletter subscribers will win a jacketed edition of Gilbert and Edgar on Mars (Nov 2009), the new novella written by British science fiction author Eric Brown, and one other title. The drawing will be conducted on Friday, December 18th, so if you don’t currently receive PS Publishing’s monthly e-newsletter, now is the time to sign up!

Gilbert and Edgar on Mars received positive reviews from The Baryon Review, Green Man Review and Fright.com.

Read the first 17 pages (PDF) of Gilbert and Edgar on Mars!

Invasion from Mars, a 1949 anthology selected by Orson Welles

Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories, selected by Orson Welles (1949)

At left: Paperback original (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1949), #305, 191 p. Ten short stories with an introduction by Orson Welles. Cover painting by Malcolm Smith.

Although the anthology contains ten short stories, only four pertain to Mars:

• “Invasion from Mars,” by Howard Koch. This is the script to the famous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898), which was presented by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air, October 30, 1938.

• “The Green Hills of Earth,” by Robert A. Heinlein, from The Saturday Evening Post (February 8, 1947). A “space bum” wanders around the universe writing songs.

• “Expedition,” by Anthony Boucher, from Captain Future Magazine (1943). The Martians attempt another invasion of Earth.

• "The Million Year Picnic,” by Ray Bradbury, from Planet Stories (Summer 1946). “Another group of fugitives from the grim results of man’s inhumanity to man finds a fairer sanctuary on Mars.” This story later became the final selection in The Martian Chronicles (1950).

The full list of stories published in Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories is detailed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Mission to Mars and Red Planet make John Scalzi’s list of worst SF films of decade

Award-winning science fiction novelist and AMC media critic John Scalzi has posted his list of the Ten Worst SciFi Blockbusters of the '00s.

Both Mission to Mars (2000), starring Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen, Tim Robbins and Don Cheadle, and Red Planet (2000), starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore and Benjamin Bratt, made Scalzi's list.

Pictured: Promotional poster for Red Planet.

[via Charles Tan of SF Signal]

Mars needs women: A critique of C.S. Lewis’ 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet

The blog Fannie’s Room has an interesting critique of Out of the Silent Planet (1938), a classic science fiction Mars novel written by British literary giant C.S. Lewis. Fannie concludes, in part: “As a visitor to Lewis' Mars, I saw a dying planet that was almost entirely devoid of female beings. They either weren't considered important enough to remark upon or, it was a planet in which male Martians enslaved 'their' female beings and then put Earthling visitors under some sort of bizarre hex so they would not notice or remark upon the utter absence of Lady Martians.”

New RPG: [Confederate] Rebels of Mars

Adamant Entertainment, a design studio that creates role-playing games (RPGs) and related products, just released Rebels of Mars, the first adventure release for its Savage Worlds setting of intrigue and adventure beneath the moons of Mars. Here's the formal description:

Rebels of Mars concerns a Confederate unit that is plucked from the American Civil War and transported to the Green Wastes of Mars. Stranded on the red planet, the Rebels manage to rally the Red Nomad tribes and fend off a group of slavers, freeing a key slave in the process.

Meanwhile, a noble of the Red Martains has ventured out into the wastes in an attempt to recover one of his escaped slaves (now with the Rebels), but ends up lost himself. The noble’s wife hires the player-characters to find her husband, throwing them on a collision course with the Confederates.

In the midst of this, the Grey Martian responsible for transporting the Earthmen in the first place has decided to rectify his mistake. He is hunts the Green Wastes in a powerful Tripod, looking to cleanse them from the surface of Mars with his heat ray.

Just another day on the Red Planet…

Note that the core Savage Worlds rules and a copy of MARS: Savage Worlds Edition are required to play Rebels of Mars.

An interview with John Carter of Mars script writer Michael Chabon

Award-winning science fiction author Michael Chabon was recently interviewed by Zack Smith over at Newsarama.com. In a wide-ranging discussion, Chabon touched upon the long-awaited Disney/Pixar film John Carter of Mars (2012), which will star actor Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, actress Lynn Collins as princess Dejah Thoris, and actor Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas:

I was brought in by the director, Andrew Stanton, to do a revision of the script that he wrote with Mark Andrews. Andrew and I had met a few times over the years, and he had heard I was a big fan of the ERB Mars books, and that I had written an original screenplay many years ago (The Martian Agent) that was in development for a while at Fox/ILM.

So he asked me to take a whack at it. That was a huge thrill. I was impressed by the way he and Mark had found ways to honor the source material, be true to the romance and the spirit and the wild invention, not to mention the characters' natures, while constructing a tight (yet still faithful) film narrative out of a pretty loose and rangy pulp-serial seat-of-the-pants plot. I just tried to do the things that Andrew thought the script still needed.

I wonder if Michael Chabon plans to purchase Princess of Mars (2009), The Asylum’s forthcoming low-budget, direct-to-DVD film featuring actress and former porn star Traci Lords as Martian princess Dejah Thoris and Antonio Sabàto, Jr. as Confederate Civil War veteran John Carter. The film, classified as science fiction, is scheduled to be released later this month.

Podcast of "Martian Chronicles," the new YA Mars story by Cory Doctorow (Part 3)

Thanks to Canadian blogger, copyright activist and SF author Cory Doctorow, you can listen to Part 3 of his podcast of “Martian Chronicles,” a new Young Adult short story that he is writing for Australian editor Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming YA Mars anthology, Life on Mars (2010). According to Doctorow, “It's a story about the colonization of Mars by free-market absolutists and the video-games they play.” You can download Part 3 (MP3, 14 min.) from Archive.org, or stream it through this toolbar:



In case you missed it, here are the links to download Part 1 (MP3, 7 min.) and Part 2 (MP3, 15 min.) from Archive.org. Enjoy!

“First Words,” a new piece of flash fiction by James Marshall

The free SF story site 365 tomorrows has a new piece of flash fiction titled “First Words” (2009), by James Marshall. It’s about a discussion over what an astronaut should say when he becomes the first human to set foot on Mars. Here is the opening line: “Captain Will Kano of the Aries was sitting on an air-chair watching baseball with the sound muted.”

Interestingly, Marshall’s piece of flash fiction mentions Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Red Mars (1992) and Geoffrey A. Landis’ novel Mars Crossing (2000).

Mammographic cover art: Shambleau

Here’s some interesting mammographic cover art from the late 1970s: Shambleau (J’ai Lu, 1979, No. 415), a French paperback containing some of Catherine L. Moore’s mid-twentieth-century stories, including the classic SF-Horror, Medusa-on-Mars title tale, “Shambleau” (1933). Note what appears to be a subtle change to Shambleau’s face when this paperback was reprinted again by J’ai Lu in 1987. Is it just me, or does Shambleau look a tad older and a bit more serious in 1987?

Pictured: Shambleau (J’ai Lu, 1979)

Compare: Shambleau (J’ai Lu, 1987)

Top 10 Marooned posts for November 2009

The Top 10 Marooned posts for November 2009:

1. Montage of deaths from 1990 film Total Recall

2. Joel Jenkins working on fourth novel in his Dire Planet pulp SF series

3. Authors Guild et al. files revised $125m Google book settlement; ignores Chabon, Doctorow & Newitz’s privacy concerns

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

5. Creepy Soviet animation based on Bradbury's 1950 short story "There Will Come Soft Rains"

6. Podcast of "Martian Chronicles," a new YA Mars story by Cory Doctorow (Part 1)

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

8. 10 awesome The War of the Worlds items for bibliophiles listed on AbeBooks

9. House health care bill is longer than Kim Stanley Robinson’s colorful Mars trilogy

10. After the Mars Exodus, a new LGBT novel written by Jackson Scheerer

NaNoWriMo writers reach destination Mars

Congratulations to Joi Weaver and Tresa Cho, the two twenty-something women writers I followed over the course of National Novel Writing Month 2009. Each reached her goal: Mars!

Weaver’s untitled novel, which is set in the year 2052 and stars a woman named Dejah Sorenson and NASA’s long-lost Phoenix Lander, hit the 200,000-word mark! She is in the process of posting the entire novel on her blog, Dreamer of Mars. This was the 6th time Weaver participated in NaNoWriMo. Her favorite writers include C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She resides in OC, California.

Cho’s novel, which is entitled Of All Things Forgotten and revolves around humans on Mars, passed the 100,000-word mark! She has posted an excerpt on her NaNoWriMo webpage. This was the 5th year Cho participated in NaNoWriMo. 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.

Psychedelic animation of the Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel

Although the building mentioned in the title of the Grateful Dead’s 1974 album Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel is a shabby hotel that once stood in a neighborhood in San Francisco, the art on the front cover of the album seems to depict a hotel on the planet Mars, while the art on the back cover seems to portray the band members as some kind of aliens. In any case, check out this 6-minute sequence of psychedelic animation that I believe was created by Gary Gutierrez for The Grateful Dead Movie (1977).



Presumably, award-winning science fiction author Allen Steele is a big Dead fan, as his first published piece was a short story entitled “Live from the Mars Hotel” (1988), reprinted in the anthology Isaac Asimov’s Mars (1991).

Book, newspaper and magazine stock watch

Here’s an update to the list of 14 book, newspaper, magazine and publishing stocks I’m watching, ranked by year-to-date performance:

1. Borders Group (+ 250%)

Red Planet Noir, a new retro Sci-Fi detective novel by D.B. Grady

Red Planet Noir (2009), a new science fiction detective work and debut novel by freelance writer D.B. Grady, was just published as a paperback original by Brown Street Press of Lexington, Kentucky. A hard-boiled detective tale written in the pulp tradition of the 1930s, Red Planet Noir is “a Raymond Chandler mystery in a Robert Heinlein world.” Here's a description of the novel, taken directly from Grady’s blog:

Michael Sheppard was the best private eye in New Orleans, and then his wife left him. After finding solace in the bottle, he finds his career in the toilet. Nights at the casino pay the bills, until they don’t, and leg breakers start knocking at the door, and knocking out his teeth.

When a socialite on Mars offers him work, it’s a chance for a new start. Her name is Sofia Reed and her father is dead. The coroner says suicide, but Sofia suspects foul play. A leader of the Martian police state, her father had powerful enemies, and nobody on Mars will touch the case for fear of retribution. Michael Sheppard is her only hope.

Chased by cops and gangsters, his investigation takes him from stately mansions to smoke-filled speakeasies, from deserted ice colonies to mining towns on the asteroid belt.

All he wanted was a paycheck to clear some gambling debt. Now Michael is the key figure in a murder conspiracy that’s left a vacuum in the halls of power, with the labor union, mob and military vying for control of Mars.

You can read Chapter 1 (PDF) of Red Planet Noir for free!

D.B. Grady is a graduate of Louisiana State University and lives in Baton Rouge with his wife and family. He is a former paratrooper with U.S. Army Special Operations Command and is a veteran of Afghanistan. His writings have been published in The Atlantic and Boys’ Life.

Commodities of Martian Rails: Alien Artifacts

Martian Rails, the new board game made by Mayfair Games about railroading on the Red Planet in which players build tracks and haul freight, has a long list of cool commodities that players can transport to generate revenue for their rail companies. For example:

Alien Artifacts -- Over the millennia, Mars has been visited by and temporarily housed beings from beyond our Solar System. The Face is a huge artificial construct marking their presence. Excavations occasionally discover objects from these ancient visitors.

Martian Rails is loaded with references to Martian SF!