‘The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. . . . Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms . . . ‘
–“Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson
Even in the cheesiest works about Mars, the ones that make you groan and roll your eyes and mutter, “Oh, yeah, right,” the ones featuring slimy green monsters with 14 ears and three mouths and 117 toes — even in those — there is typically a moment that takes your breath away.
A moment when you think, “Mars. Wow.”
Or as the narrator in the last volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy “Red Mars” (1992), “Green Mars” (1993) and “Blue Mars” (1995) puts it, “. . . She walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.”
Robinson’s books are not cheesy — they are, in fact, narrative gems of great depth, vibrancy and scrupulous scientific accuracy. But the point is, regardless of the quality of the works about Mars, they do a number on us. They resonate. They can leave a chilly fingerprint on the back of the neck; they can account for a sudden levitation of the collective weight of human aspiration.
On Wednesday, Earth’s rusty red neighbor — the place that launched a thousand films, songs, novels, short stories, TV shows, maps, posters and radio dramas — will draw closer to us than it has been in some 60,000 years, approximately 34.6 million miles away. The historical fly-by offers a fine opportunity to reflect on Mars as manifested in the arts and to wonder, “Why?”
Why, out of all the planets in our solar system with their come-hither attributes — Jupiter’s muscular bulk, Venus’ sultry secrets, Pluto’s frozen pluck — has our civilization traditionally picked Mars to write about, to visualize, to dream upon?
“It’s near and it’s mysterious and we’ve only begun to explore it,” says Ray Bradbury, author of the classic book “The Martian Chronicles” (1950), a weave of brief, powerful stories about future journeys to Mars.
“The mystique will always be there,” adds Bradbury in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home. Even as scientific discoveries pile up, exponentially expanding our store of information about Mars, the magic can’t be shoved into a forgotten corner, Bradbury believes. “Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.”
Mars has fired a great many imaginations, from Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and his luxuriously detailed map of the Martian surface, in which he anointed geographical features with poetic names such as Elysium, Cydonia and Lethes, to rock musician Alice Cooper, whose song “Might As Well Be On Mars” is included in the 1991 album “Hey Stoopid.” Mars books, Mars music, Mars images, Mars musings, Mars metaphors.
“Mars is an inkblot,” says Peter Doran, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied Martian geology. “People see what they want to see in it.”
And what they see, they share. Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” is joined on the long shelf of Mars-related literature by books such as “War of the Worlds” (1898) by H.G. Wells, the tale of invasion-minded Martians later made into a radio play that famously scared the bejesus out of a good half of the Eastern seaboard on Oct. 30, 1938; and works by major science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Ben Bova. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the man who created Tarzan, created someone else first: John Carter, Martian explorer and hero of “A Princess on Mars” (1912), Burroughs’ first published novel and the initial volume in a series of Martian escapades. A lot of the big names, it seems, have wanted a crack at Mars.
Mars-related films include goofy, endearing efforts such as “Invaders From Mars” (1953), intentional parodies such as “Mars Attacks!” (1996) and kid-friendly high jinks such as the 1999 film version of the TV series “My Favorite Martian” (1963-66), along with serious dramas such as “Red Planet” (2000). James Cameron, director of “Titanic,” announced earlier this year that he plans to create a film version of Robinson’s “Red Mars” trilogy.
Worth the price
While “Red Planet” is not an especially memorable film, it includes a moment that illustrates the planet’s powerful emotional lure. Shortly after the crew lands on the Martian surface, a character realizes he is fatally injured. “At least I got to Mars,” he says, and the line expresses a sentiment that just feels viscerally, indisputably true.
Death is not too high a price to pay to see Mars. To touch it. To bump the edges of those small red rocks with the toe of a boot.
What makes Mars an ever-promising subject for the artistic imagination could be a combination of elements, including its proximity and apparent similarities to Earth, its shade and even its single-syllable name. Among planets in our solar system, only Earth and Mars have one-syllable monikers.
Say the word “Mars” and the brief, brash little syllable trails off into a soft hiss, like the disappearing end of a contrail.
Keeping tabs on the vast array of Mars-centered arts has kept Gene Alloway busy for seven years. The University of Michigan librarian is in the midst of updating his Web site (www.marsearth.com) that lists imaginative works about Mars, from poems and short stories to scientific articles.
“Mars is a place of possibility,” Alloway says. “Our interest in Mars stretches back 3,000 years. Every star-watching civilization, from the Babylonians and Egyptians to the Chinese and the Mayans, found the planet different. It was partly the color, but partly the fact that it moved differently from the other planets — it went back and forth in a retrograde motion rather than across the sky.”
Astronomers such as Schiaparelli and later Percival Lowell — who published three books about his close observations of Mars over a 15-year period beginning in 1894, and who popularized the now-discredited notion of Martian canals — were enraptured by the planet, convinced that its similarity to Earth meant that life existed there. Lowell’s excitement is almost palpable in the opening passages of “Mars” (1895):
“Once in about every fifteen years a startling visitant makes his appearance upon our midnight skies — a great red star that rises at sunset through the haze about the eastern horizon, and then, mounting higher with the deepening night, blazes forth against the dark background of space with a splendor that outshines Sirius and rivals the giant Jupiter himself. Startling for its size, the stranger looks the more fateful for being a fiery red. Small wonder that by many folk it is taken for a portent.”
Temptingly close
Such exhilaration spiders its way through many works on Mars, from scientific accounts to fiction and film. “Whereas Venus was clouded,” Alloway notes, “Martian surface features could be glimpsed with Earth-based telescopes, just enough so that many exciting ideas could be put forth — an ancient civilization of canals and jungles, or a dying one that might possibly be more advanced than our own, or even one already gone, with all kinds of secrets waiting to be discovered.
“Much of the current interest in Mars,” he adds, “is as a place where clues about how life began can be found — and not just life on Earth. Also, it is seen as a frontier, as the most likely place other than Earth where humans can travel, live and even remake themselves politically and socially.”
The political and social dimension is what distinguishes Robinson’s “Red Mars” series, as it traces the fate of an astronaut team in 2026 that attempts to colonize Mars. The ideological split — some want to make Mars more like Earth, others want to let Mars stay like Mars — results in catastrophes that echo through the sequels “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars.”
Robinson’s fidelity to the planet’s geographical realities makes his work appealing to scientists such as Doran, who calls the books his favorites among Martian-themed literature.
“Mars does not have any plate tectonics, so there’s no refreshing of the surface,” Doran says. “Our surface is renewing constantly. Not on Mars. On Mars, you can see features frozen in time, just as they were billions of years ago.
Similar to Earth
“Mars is more Earth-like than any other planet,” he adds. “There’s an exciting possibility that Mars was very much like Earth was, three billion years ago. Around the same time life was evolving on Earth, it may have been evolving on Mars.” So what happened? No one knows — but artists, of course, can speculate.
Doran met Robinson on an expedition to Antarctica, he says. “He told me NASA had given him a piece of Mars rock after he’d written his trilogy. He couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Finally, he ground it up with a mortar and pestle and sprinkled it on his breakfast cereal and ate it — so that he’d always have a piece of Mars inside him.”
Red-dust pioneers
Robinson’s work is filled with subtle tributes to Burroughs and Bradbury, who preceded him in scratching their names in the red Martian dust. Bradbury, though, wasn’t really writing about the physical reality of Mars, notes Sam T. Weller, who is writing an authorized biography of Bradbury.
“Most purists of the [science fiction] genre will tell you that his science is embarrassingly flawed. Science is just not the point for Bradbury,” says Weller, a professor of creative non-fiction at Columbia College Chicago. “It is just a tool for him to articulate a much larger allegory. His Mars is beautifully impossible.
“The story, more than 50 years after its publication, continues to serve as a metaphor for the issues that vex our own planet — racism, destruction of the environment, censorship and the threat of nuclear annihilation,” Weller continues. “Ray Bradbury uses Mars as a metaphor to say, `Look, with all of the promise of pioneering into outer space, if we don’t shape up as a society and as a species, we will just take our problems with us.'”
Beautiful obsession
Bradbury, 83, says his obsession with Mars started on his 9th birthday when he received a copy of one of Burroughs’ Martian adventures.
To contemporary readers, the Burroughs series seems excruciatingly melodramatic, like Harlequin romances with a dusting of interplanetary intrigue. But to Bradbury, they were bliss.
“I drowned in those books,” he recalls happily.
“Burroughs gave Mars magic and illusion and mystery,” Bradbury says.
And no matter how relentless our scientific advances, those attributes stick to Mars like ships that can’t quite achieve escape velocity, Bradbury believes.
“A hundred years from now, when we’ve landed on Mars and built cities there, boys will still go to sleep at night with copies of `The Martian Chronicles’ in bed with them,” the author says. “They’ll listen to the faint winds and see the bleak landscape outside and they’ll prefer my Mars — the Mars of the imagination.”
