Abstract
The year 1971 was a watershed for the modern cultural history of Mars. When Mariner 9 sent back its stunning close-up pictures of desolate sandscapes and complex geological formations, an end finally came to what Arthur C. Clarke calls ‘the prehistory of Martian studies’. That prehistory, launched during the Enlightenment with Huygens’ drawings of Syrtis Major, Cassini’s observation of the polar caps and Herschel’s speculations about Martian seas and sailors, reached its first apex in the Mars mania that followed Schiaparelli’s report of ‘canali’ in 1877 and, even more, Percival Lowell’s relentless mapping of ever more intricate, ever more rationalised networks of waterways, the tokens of heroic resistance to planetary decline.1
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Notes
Arthur C. Clarke in Ray Bradbury et al, Mars and the Mind of Man (New York: Harper, 1973), p. 79. For detailed general discussion of the early discoveries and speculations about
Mars see William Sheehan, The Planet Mars: a History of Observation and Discovery (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1996), pp. 1–97.
Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals (New York: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 376, 382.
Robert Heinlein, Red Planet (1949; New York: Ballantine, 1977), p. 11.
C. S. Lewis, ‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. 76. J. B. S. Haldane’s critique of Lewis’s three interplanetary romances appeared as ‘Auld Hornie, R R. S.’ in Modern Quarterly, n.s. 1 (autumn 1946) and was reprinted in Shadows of Imagination: the Fantasies ofC. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, ed. Mark R. Hillegas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 15–25.
Fredric Brown, Martians, Go Home (1955; New York: Baen, 1992), p. 2.
Leigh Brackett, The Coming of the Terrans (New York: Ace, 1967), p. 5.
The prefatory material to Frederick Turner, Genesis: an Epic Poem (Dallas: Saybrook, 1988), p. 1. The poem is organised dramatically into five ‘Acts’, each with five scenes; citations from the poetry are given in my text by act, scene and line numbers.
Greg Bear, Moving Mars (New York: Tom Doherty, 1993), p. 309. Asimov had the ice harvested from Saturn’s rings rather than from Triton. Among Bear’s allusions are a quotation from the opening of Wells’s War of the Worlds (p. 176), a glance at the Martian Clay People in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (p. 166), and a city named for Burroughs’s Carter (p. 125).
Kim Stanley Robinson, ‘Exploring Fossil Canyon’ in Universe 12, ed. Terry Carr (New York: Doubleday, 1982), p. 44.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 89.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. 2.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (New York: Bantam, 1996), p. 224.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950; New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 41
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1937; New York:Macmillan, 1965), p. 42.
I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 299.
Kim Stanley Robinson with David Seed, ‘The Mars Trilogy: an Interview’, Foundation, 68 (autumn 1996), 76.
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Crossley, R. (2000). Sign, Symbol, Power: the New Martian Novel. In: Sandison, A., Dingley, R. (eds) Histories of the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1929-8_11
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