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Footprints on the Sands of Mars
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11430 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
3,596 Words |
| Author
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Jack Ketch
Jack Ketch writes on music and the arts. |
RED MARS
Kim Stanley Robinson
New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993
572 pp., $5.99
GREEN MARS
Kim Stanley Robinson
New York: Bantam Spectra, 1994
552 pp., 22.95
The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," says one of the astronauts in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. "It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning."
Mars' red color and odd surface markings attracted the attention of astronomers, thinkers, and dreamers long before space travel became a reality. Presuming Mars to be an abode of life, explorers of the imagination like Athanasius Kircher and Emanuel Swedenborg voyaged there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and mined it for utopian, philosophic, and theological ideas. Later, C.S. Lewis continued this genre in his own trilogy about Mars: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945).
Late in the nineteenth century, when astronomers Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell claimed they detected artificial canals on its surface, writers like Percy Gregg (Across the Zodiac, 1890), and Garrett P. Serviss (Edison's Conquest of Mars, 1898) hopped on rocket ships and journeyed there to battle intelligent and hostile aliens. Meanwhile, the Martian astronomers were watching us, and in his classic War of the Worlds (1898) H.G. Wells imagined fearsome Martians leaving their dying planet to conquer Earth.
In the pulp magazines of the first half of this century, the Red Planet became a vital geography, a crossroads for interplanetary adventurers and bizarre alien creatures. The most fondly remembered (and still read) of these swashbuckling sagas was the twelve-volume "John Carter" series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in All-Story Magazine in 1912. Carter, an ex-Confederate Army captain, is transported to Mars--called "Barsoom" by its exotic races of red and green inhabitants--through an accident of nature. Carter's description of his journey from the Arizona desert to Mars--via a kind of astral projection--is among the most memorable passages in the literature:
My attention was quickly riveted
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