First fantasies

For fiction writers, 1965 was a watershed year. It’s when the Mariner-4 spacecraft completed the first successful flyby of Mars, sending back actual images of the red planet. Alas, no aliens. No canals either. But plenty of craters and rocks. Sci-fi novels changed tack, adjusting fantasies to what they now knew. The preceding books, however, are in a genre of their own.

In Russia, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908) imagines a communist society on Mars, as a visiting scientist learns of technologically efficient Martian ways.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (best known for his Tarzan stories) was the man who turned Mars into an adventure setting. His hero, John Carter, was an American Civil War veteran transported to Mars, which he finds out Martians call Barsoom. The series of hit stories, published since 1912, were assembled into a novel titled A Princess of Mars in 1917. Burroughs would eventually write a total of 11 Barsoom novels, full of fantastical low-gravity jumps, battles, betrayals and romance.

Narnia author CS Lewis gave Mars a shot too. Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was the first in his Cosmic Trilogy, linking myth and spirituality to a fast-paced adventure story. But it was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) that seriously looked at settlement there, as our world is devastated by nuclear war. His shiny red Martians had telepathic powers, unhappy marriages, and ultimately horror and dystopia. A year later, Arthur C Clarke wrote his first novel, The Sands of Mars (1951), a slower, more exploratory look at a fictitious research station on the planet, four years before the Us-soviet Union space race began. Things calmed down a bit in the next decade. Judith Merril wrote one of the earliest sci-fi mysteries, with the tale of the lone surviving astronaut on a Mars mission. The ship’s log is missing pages. There are hints of life on Mars. But what happened? The Tomorrow People was published in 1960, but it knew exactly how to harness the unknown to create suspense. Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 story Stranger in a Strange Land, of a Martian-raised human visiting

Earth as an adult, is less about adapting to Mars and more about understanding one’s home planet. It gave sci-fi a philosophical twist.