Popular Mars literature and films that capture our imaginations

Martian fantasies

Popular culture quickly caught up with this science, notably through the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose novels by John Carter imagined that a time portal connected Earth and “Barsoom”, or Mars, allowing easy movement between the two. . When Carter went there in the second volume, “The Gods of Mars” (1914), he encountered this watery scene: “To my left the sea stretched as far as the eye could reach, before me only a line. vague and dark indicated its farthest, while to my right a mighty river, wide, placid and majestic, flowed between the scarlet shores to flow into the still sea in front of me. “

Burroughs’ Mars looked a lot like our Earth, with all of its struggles for power and wealth, and Burroughs had a good explanation for why the planet had no obvious water on the surface: its inhabitants had diverted it to underground waterways, to protect it from evaporation. and hide it from each other.

Rather, much of Barsoom, he wrote, was covered with moss growing in the Dead Sea bottoms that stretched across the planet. A few hidden valleys were home to forests and swamps, as well as warring kingdoms once rich in agricultural and mineral treasures that are stupid enough to harm each other – and kill their home planet in the market.

A home away from home

It’s the Mars that Mark Watney finds in Andy Weir’s brilliant 2011 “The Martian”. Besides the plants he cultivates – he is an accomplished botanist – he is the only life form on the Red Planet, having been lost in a howling sandstorm and abandoned by his fellow explorers. Eminently resourceful, he manages to keep himself alive, but not without a lot of beatings.

The odds are emphatically against him, he knows: “If the oxygenator fails, I’ll suffocate,” he says. “If the water collector fails I’ll be thirsty. If the Hab (the Mars Lander Habitat) makes a breach, I’ll kind of explode. If none of this happens, I’ll run out of power. food and starve. “

Even with such risks, there is more and more talk of the colonization of Mars, now a very real prospect that was once the realm of fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990’s “Mars Trilogy,” consisting of the novels “Red Mars,” “Green Mars,” and “Blue Mars,” postulates that soon – in 2026, to be exact – we will begin this colonization, bringing Mars back to life through terraforming and the creation of an oxygenated atmosphere.

The trilogy is also refreshingly utopian, unlike the usual grim stance of a lot of fiction about Mars, in that Robinson imagines how by remaking the planet we will become better and fairer people, welcoming strangers among us and founding a real Eden on high.

For his part, Elon Musk, the inventor and entrepreneur, has announced preliminary plans to fund a colony of at least 80,000 settlers, which puts us squarely in the territory of Ray Bradbury, the sci-fi writer whose the 1950 novel “The Martian Chronicles” envisions a sort of suburban Earth transposed to Mars.

The only problem is, the Martians are already here, and when the humans land on the Red Planet in the then distant year of 1999, it doesn’t take long for the Martians to track them down. The Terrans take revenge as Bradbury imagines a pandemic that wipes out the Martians, leaving the planet to a new breed of settlers who may well, according to Bradbury, have been a distant cousin of the fallen Martians.

Musk’s settlers will fly on one-way tickets, unlike Weir’s Mark Watney. And even if they had a round-trip fare, whether they would have a planet worth returning home is another matter. Bradbury’s book ends with the people back home drowning in oblivion as surely as the Barsoomians of Burroughs.

His is far from the only novel to imagine a ruined home planet, a trope that is becoming more and more common because, indeed, we are in the process of littering the nest we have now. As science fiction vehicles such as “Elysium” and “Blade Runner” have told us, Earth is a place we’ll be lucky to leave.