The red planet Mars, our closest celestial neighbour (at the time of writing) began exerting an extraordinary influence over nascent science-fiction writers back in the 18th century but what’s often referred to as ‘The Golden Age of Martian Fiction’ began in the 1880s following astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s erroneous identification of ‘canals’ zig-zagging the planet’s topography. The possibility that the planet might be capable of supporting intelligent life led inevitably to a veritable tidal wave of speculative fiction which allowed writers to create stories of Martian worlds teaming with indigenous alien life forms and, more interestingly perhaps, stories depicting Mars as a dead, barren – occasionally abandoned – wilderness incapable of supporting human life. To the layman, or to those with only a passing interest in the genre, Mars is forever associated with H. G. Wells’ iconic The War of the Worlds (1897) but the ten public domain short stories gathered together in Lost Mars are a useful reminder that there’s more to Martian fiction than capsules falling to Earth on Horsell Common, rampaging tripods cutting a swathe across the Earth and aliens susceptible to human lurgy.
Appropriately enough it’s Wells who kicks the collection off with The Crystal Egg, the quaint story of a mysterious artefact which opens a curious window to another world and indeed War of the Worlds is clearly the inspiration (to the extent that Wells himself is namechecked in the story) for George C. Wallis’s atmospheric The Great Sacrifice in which the human race is facing extinction from a collision with a massive swarm of meteorites until an unsuspected intelligence on Mars takes extraordinary steps to save Mankind. The best stories here, in fact, are those that genuinely inhabit a true spirit of page-turning adventure; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Measureless to Man tells of a near-extinct Martian civilisation turned into pure consciousness, surviving by benignly inhabiting other lifeforms, however lowly, J. G. Ballard’s The Time Tombs is a gritty tale of intergalactic tomb raiders desecrating and pillaging long-dead Martian artefacts and P Schuyler Miller’s The Forgotten Man of Space predates Andy Weir’s The Martian with its story of an abandoned explorer staying alive for decades with the help of the planet’s strange native life-forms. Several stories – EC Tubb’s Without Bugles and Walter M. Miller’s Crucifixus Etiam posit a bleak and inhospitable Martian surface on which Man is struggling to secure a foothold. Only two of the stories seems a little underpowered; W. S. Lach-Szyrma’s Letters from Mars is one of a series of stories by the writer chronicling the rather uneventful Martian travels of a winged Venusian which just rolls to a stop without having accomplished anything even remotely dramatic and Ray Bradbury’s Ylla is a slight but contemporary tale of an established Martian society wary of receiving potential visitors from planet Earth.
Lost Mars presents a rich variety of tales and, inevitably, some are more engrossing than others. But almost without exception they are formidable works of early science fiction imagination that deftly avoid the clichés of monstrous belligerent alien invaders and dare to conjure up, years before it was established that the planet is a lifeless husk, tales of unimaginable intelligence and the stoicism of Mankind striking out into space and exploring a nearby world which, even today, enthrals and fascinates.
LOST MARS: THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE RED PLANET / EDITOR: MIKE ASHLEY / PUBLISHER: BRITISH LIBRARY/ RELEASE DATE: APRIL 5TH
