So you want to read all the important fiction written about or set on the fourth planet from the sun? I suggest the following twelve-plus novels and seven-plus shorter works. But first a word about structure.
The history of fiction about Mars in English has a line dividing it in two. Mariner 4 shot the historic first “close-up” images (from about six thousand miles away) of Mars in a flyby in 1965, with a result summarized in a New York Times editorial: “Mars is probably a dead planet.” True believers still clung to the fantasy that Mars teemed with life, or had at some time, but subsequent Mariner and other program missions piled on the evidence to the contrary.
The taxonomy of Martian fiction has other labels–you could say that there is a “romantic” category in the Martian fiction subgenre, and that Ray Bradbury’s seminal The Martian Chronicles (1950) is the best example of it–but no other contrast is as sharp as pre-Mariner 4 and post-Mariner 4. So it appears below.
Some mild spoilers may be revealed.
Pre-Mariner 4: Martians!
The foundational work of fiction about Mars takes place entirely on Earth, but H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) taught us to consider the red planet as a source of menace, evoking a sense of dread that in many ways persists to this day when, for example, Mark Watney takes stock of his chances for survival.
The Martians in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) are also bad news. Virus-sized, swarming together to form great hive-minds, they invade Earth for its water. As in Wells, getting them sick becomes important to their defeat, but unlike Wells, there are some unfortunate, unforeseen consequences.
Mars was often seen through the lens of colonialism on Earth, with Martians as the inferior (so the colonial narrative went) natives. Standing tallest among these you-Martians-would-be-OK-if-we-could-just-civilize-you stories is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1917) and the rest of the John Carter novels.
Nearly fifty years later, on the cusp of Mariner 4, Roger Zelazny’s celebrated story “A Rose For Ecclesiastes” (1963) depicts a Martian matriarchal society which the old white male poet/main character saves from its obvious-to-the-author deficiencies. It’s a science fiction trope, not just a Martian fiction one, but pre-Mariner 4 Mars was fertile ground for it.
Owing a clear debt to ERB though spinning the narrative in unique ways was Leigh Brackett, particularly in her early Eric John Stark stories. Brackett’s and Stark’s Mars is at its high-pulp best in the stories “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” (1949) and “Black Amazon of Mars” (1951).
More indispensable Martian pulp comes to us from the pen of C.L. Moore, principally via her smuggler Northwest Smith. See Moore’s most famous story, the horror/sci-fi classic “Shambleau” (1933) and many others.
Martians don’t come much weirder than in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s story “A Martian Odyssey” (1934). Weinbaum gave a lot of thought to how lower gravity, scarcer resources, and sheer difference would color the experiences of the first Martian expedition, and the natives they might encounter.
“Omnilingual” (1957) by H. Beam Piper is acclaimed by Jo Walton as “the classic SF short story, the one everyone ought to read if they’re only going to read one,” and concerns archaeologists trying to crack a long-dead Martian native language.
The Martian Chronicles represents a high-water mark for Martian fiction as it does for science fiction in general. Bradbury’s elegiac and evocative prose paints a Mars that represents both hope and danger. You shouldn’t just read Bradbury if you’re interested in Mars, you should read him if you’re interested in great writing and storytelling.
Finally, “once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith,” begins Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Smith of course is human, but raised as a Martian, and tries to be the savior of humankind, contra Zelazny and such. Heinlein’s Martians are inscrutable, superior, ruthless, and humankind’s opposites in almost every way.
Post-Mariner 4: We’re the Martians!
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996), is generally regarded as the seminal work of Martian fiction in the post-native-Martians era. It shares a theme with dozens of other works of post-Mariner 4 Martian fiction: something’s going to have to change, pretty drastically, if Mars is to become hospitable to life. The expansive trilogy touches the engineering aspects of terraformation, but also the social and political dynamics at play in deciding whether and to what extent to make Mars more like us.
The British have colonized Mars in the alternate history of the novella “The Empress of Mars” (2003) by Kage Baker, expanded into a novel of the same name in 2009. But the company that spearheaded the terraformation and colonization is having second thoughts, leaving a lot of pioneers and landowners cut loose to fend for themsleves. This reintroduces a bleak, hardscrabble frontier narrative that’s somewhat more difficult to attain when Dejah Thoris is running around nearby.
It’s not Mars that changes, but rather us, in Frederick Pohl’s seminal Man Plus (1976). To survive on Mars we have to “upgrade” and become monsters, something barely recognizable as human, because as Mariner 4 and its progeny established, Mars is utterly inhospitable to life as we know it. The big and obvious question: how Martian can we get and still be human?
D.G. Compton appreciated the inhospitable nature of Mars early, in Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (1966). Convicts are exiled to a penal colony on the red planet, where they have essentially been sentenced to life in utter isolation. Character-rich and light on action, Compton’s novel is among the first to really look inward from the vantage point of an utterly alien fourth planet.
Geoffrey A. Landis sets the standard for what cf. Robinson you might call “Dead Mars” with his Mars Crossing (2000). The third expedition to Mars lands safely–doing better in that respect than the first two missions–but can’t get back home unless it treks some four thousand miles across barren Mars to a homebound ship that will only seat two or three of them. The ordeal is a drastic departure from pre-Mariner 4, hospitable-Mars fiction, and it stands out in part because Landis worked with NASA on Mars lander missions.
Finally, both chronologically and thematically, we have The Martian (2011) by Andy Weir. Weir’s “Dead Mars” does Landis one better and strands a single astronaut on the planet with no immediate prospect for return. Mark Watney endeavors to “science the shit out of” his problem, and at length succeeds: it used to be white American values that led to success on Mars, now it’s our ever-growing body of knowledge about the world. This one and that one both.
That’s my suggested canon. I wanted to talk about books like The Sirens of Titan and Martian Time-Slip and the Martians (they’re us!) in Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin series and even the really well done YA Red Rising trilogy, but they didn’t seem canonical enough. Maybe I’m totally wrong. Let me know!
My entry in the Martian fiction subgenre comes was released October 24. See it here: http://abbrv.link/Mars. It’s a sequel to this book, http://abbrv.link/Moon, so maybe read that one first?
Jack McDonald Burnett got through to the Dr. Demento show as a kid and got on the air by doing a cheesy Martian voice and requesting “The Martian Hop” by the Ran-Dells. Now Jack is an attorney living in the Atlanta metro area, with his wife and daughters, and has a website at http://www.scifijack.com. His short fiction has been published in the anthologies Defiant, She Advanced: Legends of Future Resistance and Imagining Liberty: Volume 1, both available from the Kindle Store. His nonfiction work has been published in a range of venues, from Economic Opportunity Report to American Builders Quarterly to Puck Daddy. His novels Girl on the Moon, http://abbrv.link/Moon, and Pauper, http://abbrv.link/Pauper, are published by Amazon’s Kindle Press imprint and are available in the Kindle Store. The sequel to Girl on the Moon, Girl on Mars, http://abbrv.link/Mars, comes out Tuesday, October 24.
