7. Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (1964) is one of his best novels and one of the best Martian novels, too. This time the colonists are trying their best to be ordinary American suburbanites, led by the head of the plumbers’ union, but their effort is failing. The native Martians, the Bleekmen, are wizened primitives, aborigines who wander the surface. They live in a different time and interact better with an autistic boy than with the sane but desperate colonists. Funny, sad, compact, and moving, this one shouldn’t be missed. Dick also set a similar colony of desperate suburbanites on Mars in a novel from 1965, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch . Try both together for a bracing dose of PKD and Mars.
8. The excellent collection Mars, We Love You , edited by Jane Hipolito and Willis E. McNelly (published in 1971 and rereleased in 1976 as The Book of Mars ), allows me to mention some of the really great short stories written about Mars through the years. Many of them are collected here, including Stanley G. Weinbaum’s fine ”A Martian Odyssey” (1934). Not in this book, alas, but well worth hunting for, are C.L. Moore’s ”Shambleau” (1933), Walter M. Miller Jr.’s haunting ”Crucifixus Etiam” (1953), and Roger Zelazny’s ”A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (1963), which bids a fond farewell to the watery Lowell Mars.
9. In the 1970s, everything Martian hovered on the brink of major change. The Mariner satellites had photographed the surface, Carl Sagan and others began talking about the possibility of terraforming Mars, and then the Viking missions changed our image of Mars forever. At this moment, Frederik Pohl used the Mariner findings to portray a very realistic Mars and ask the question, How far would we go to adapt ourselves to the place, rather than the place to us? The chilling answers found in Man Plus (1976) make it one of Pohl’s best novels.
10. Genesis, an Epic Poem , by Frederick Turner (1988). It doesn’t seem like an epic poem about the terraforming of Mars, using characters modeled partly on Greek mythology, would be a recipe for success. But Turner is an exceptionally skillful poet, who when he wrote this book had already completed a fascinating Mars novel, A Double Shadow (1978), and another fine book-length narrative poem, The New World (1985). Here, the Olympian grandeur of the characters and plot match well with the Martian landscape, which under its rapid terraforming is still recognizably a place established in the popular imagination by the Viking landers. The result is a triumph that deserves to be better known.
In the 1990s there was a veritable flood of Mars novels, but I was so busy writing my own that I never read them! Someone else will have to sort out that part of the story. But as you can see from the above, by then we were working in a very rich tradition.
For more articles, go to Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?
About the Author
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON made his mark as a science-fiction writer with the 1990s Mars Trilogy: Red Mars , Green Mars , and Blue Mars . For this issue, he sifts through more than a century’s worth of fiction on the Red Planet to bring us ”My 10 Favorite Mars Novels”.
To Probe Further
For more on movies from Mars, see "Mars movies: the good, the bad, the ridiculous"
