Well, somebody failed to properly brief me. I’m not naming names.
“Eye of an Octopus” and “How the Heroes Die”, by Larry Niven. Collected in Three Books of Known Space, Del Rey, 1996.
It appears to be set in the same universe as Heinlein’s 1949 juvenile, Red Planet, wherein we do see something of Mars and the Martians. Likewise the 1952 The Rolling Stones and the 1963 Podkayne of Mars.
I can’t believe I forgot the Martian Chronicles & Poddy, but I did put Stranger in a Strange Land third on my list in the Op. It had parts about Mars, his rescue from Mar, Grokking of course and the Martian Old Ones. Actually it is my favorite book on the list, but I don’t think of it first when I think of Mars.
Damn, I have 3 copies of Podkayne of Mars around the house.
There’s also Stephen Baxter’s “Voyage” (Instead of developing the space shuttle, the Apollo program continues with the goal of a voyage to Mars).
Both.
I won’t fault Robinson for the planetary science since he was going by then current understanding and a lot has changed in ten years but for a book that seemed to be shooting for hard SF the physics were atrocious. A notable example from the first book is the use of windmills to try to increase the surface temperature of Mars which is a pretty blatant disregarding of thermodynamics.
But the real problem is the writing. For a group of top of their field professionals the Martian exploration team acts like they’re all twelve years old right from the beginning. Calling the characters two dimensional is giving them too much credit. And despite the books taking place on a scale of centuries these people are the only ones on the planet who are ever allowed to do anything. The population goes from their two hundred to millions but no one outside of their tiny group and relations is of any importance.
In later books Robinson clearly lost track of the scale that he was working with. He started treating Martian years as Earth years despite the fact that the Martian year is almost exactly twice as long. That isn’t much of a surprise considering how little emotional maturity is demonstrated by the people from earth but it gets annoying when all of the sixty year olds act like they’re twenty year olds just finding their way in life.
And then there’s the prose. I hope you like lots of space filling descriptions of landscapes because over a third of the books are just that. I swear it felt like Robinson was just trying to see how many geological terms he could fit into one novel.
And I haven’t even started on the horrifically awful sociology and economics were (they set up a socialist system that would require control on a scale that Stalin could only dream of to function but it doesn’t really have any impact on their lives other than let them occasionally break out in multipage rants about how evil capitalist societies at the end of the twentieth century were). And then there’s the villains who do thinks like make very public assassination attempts on very popular people and no one seems to notice. Everything exists and continues due to authorial fiat and things that should bring on dramatic cultural changes and reactions don’t.
Gullivar of Mars by Edwin Lester Linden Arnold is on the Project Gutenberg site. It was originally titled Lieut. Gulliver Jones. I just ran across it in the last two days and almost read it. It’s on my list of reading material.
1 : Mars of the webcomic A Miracle of Science, which is both the planet and a superhuman group-mind entity called “Mars” ( and for once, a benevolent one ). With really cool technology that tends to look like abstract art.
2 : Heinlein Mars.
3 : War of the Worlds Mars.
4 : Moving Mars Mars.
5 : Total Recall Mars.
6 : Robinson Crusoe on Mars, an old B-movie.
7 : Martian Chronicles Mars.
Don’t forget ‘Double Star’, which has more detail about Mars than either the Rolling Stones or Podkayne of Mars. It also won a Hugo, so I’d recommend it.
And although all these books seem to be in roughly the same universe (they have the Martian ‘old ones’, etc), Heinlein purists will tell you that there are differences between them which make them somewhat incompatible with the ‘future history’ and each other.
The problem with Mars books - especially the ones written pre-1976 when Viking landed there, is that they presume a Mars so different from what we know of it now that you almost have to treat the books as fantasy, or at least set in an alternate universe where Mars was very different. The same goes for the books which show Venus as a primordial jungle planet.
Dark they were, and golden-eyed, Ray Bradbury
That is true, but it was easy enough to do. Honestly, Heinlein was aware when he was writing these books that Mars and Venus were not as described. He was a fan of Verne, Wells and especially Burroughs from what I recall. I think he did count on a general lower knowledge of our two closest neighbors by his main audience of 8-14 years old of the 50s but I also think he just liked the idea of Life on Mars and Venus too much to give it up.
Heinlein, like most science fiction writers, were more interested in a good story. If they had to ignore the science, they would, and even when Heinlein was writing about Mars and Venue, he knew his portrayal of them went against what was known in his time.
Besides the above (and forgive me if I duplicate someone’s entry) There’s:
Leigh Brackett’s Mars See The Best of Leigh Brackett, for a good start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_(Leigh_Brackett)
Otis Adelbert Kline’s Mars – second-rate Vurroughs, but I encounterede it first
Kurd Lasswitz’s Mars – Although virtually unknown in the US, Kurd Lasswitz was a major figure in European science fiction. His novel Zwei Planete came out the same time as Wells’ “War of the Worlds”, and features Martians more humanoid and infinitely more sophisticated, It’s like reading an episode of Star Trek Next Generation – the Martians have diagnostic beds in their sick bays. They conquer the Earth, but it’s a benevlent dictatorship. This work was a BIG influence on Fritz Lang, and on the whole German Rocket Society and Peenemunde bunch (Von Braun, Willy ley, etc.), who named parts of their rockets after things in this book.
“The Hole Man” is my favorite of Niven’s Martian stories.
I’d also like to recommend Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor’s Boundary.
Has anyone read Ian Douglas’ Heritage Trilogy which starts with Semper Mars? They are military science fiction or, as the writer puts it, “Marines on Mars” but they are recent (Semper Mars was copyrighted in 1998) and he does try to keep his descriptions of Mars current with what we know about it.
I like Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”.
And Lt. Gullivar made an appearance in part 2 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
I was just reminded. One thoroughly charming Mars short fiction piece is Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Windwagon Smith and the Martians.” Not precisely hard SF, but fun.
After DC comics started doing a lot of Burroughs’ characters in the early 1970s, including John Carter of Mars, Marvel retaliated with a Gulliver of Mars series, based sorta on Arnold’s book. One story featured a creature called Phra, which had to be based on another Arnold book, Phra the Phoenician (mentioned as another possible source for Burroughs’ John Carter in Richard Lupoff’s intro to the book “Gulliver of Mars”). All of this hifalutin’ literary background probably went well over the heads of the kids reading this stuff, although I suspect a young Alan Moore was heavily influenced.
I would just like to add Arthur C Clarke’s The Sands of Mars.
Also I second “Robinson Crusoe on Mars.” It is a pretty good survival story where a planet surface is actually hostile to humans, at least the first half of the movie.