Does “best” of the worst count?
I nominate “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”
I just read The Sky So Big and Black by John Barnes and thoroughly enjoyed it.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
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The Martians in Double Star are like walking sea anemones with a hyper-Confucian obsession with manners and propriety – physically and culturally nothing like the three-legged Zen-mystic Martians of Red Planet, Stranger, Rolling Stones, and Podkayne.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
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.
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Zwei is German for “two” – and this is about Mars, not Venus?
“Zwei Planete” is “Two Planets” – in this case, Earth and Mars. No Venus is involved in the book.
Lasswitz’ book has only been translated into English once, and not completely, at that (and only published in English twice, to my knowledge, even in that form). Aside from two of his short stories (translated by his big fan, Willy Ley, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s), I don’t know of any of his other works to appear in English.
There’s a comic book series called THB by one Paul Pope that I think is really neat. The science is, well, it’s at an indefinite time in the future when Mars has long since been terraformed, and no explanation given (or needed).
Nobody has mention the Martian Manhunter, of Justice League fame? He’s what always comes to mind when I think of Mars.
Wikipedia article: Mars in fiction.
Of course, we all know what a Martian really looks like!
Important one I forgot:
Quatermass and the Pit (in the US Five Million Years to Earth, not to be confused with the Harryhausen film “Five Million Miles to Earth”, which concerns Venus. Got that?) - both the original serial and the film. Excellent and underappreciated science fiction from Nigel Kneale. We don’t get to see Mars, but we get Martians.
Some bad ones:
Angry Red Planet – its distinction is that it was filmed in heavily solarized film to make Mars look “Weird”. Mars has carnivorous plants, Rat-Bat-Spiders, Giant Amoebas, weird cities, and funny-looking Martians. Made by Moe Howard’s son-in-law ! (Who had been a comic book artist drawing the Three Stooges, and went on to direct the 1950s and 1960s movies with the Stiooges). Notable because the ending is surprisingly good science – REAL science fiction in an sf movie, for a change. Almost makes up for the rest of the film.
Red Planet Mars – God is on Mars! Starring Peter Graves, and written by the guy who rewrote Dracuyla for the stage, and wrote a bunch of classic Universal horror films.
Aelita – Russian silent SF film. If Mars were communist, it would look like this. The film has intolerably long, boring parts, but the set design and costumes of the Martians are a Hoot! And probably did more to inspre weird SF fashion than any other early movie.
The Wizard of Mars – The Wizard of Oz, set on Mars. I kid you not. I’ve never seen this one, but I want to:
My favorite bit a dialog from the movie Slither:
The mayor: “He’s a goddamn Martian?”
Nathan Fillion: “Martians is from Mars, Jack.”
The mayor: “Or, it’s a general term meaning ‘outer-space fucker’!”
Nathan Fillion: “No, it isn’t!”
The mayor: “Look it up!”
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Leigh Brackett’s Mars See The Best of Leigh Brackett, for a good start:
I don’t understand. There WAS such an article – I found it, and copied the URL as I always do. It certainly was not either of the ones BG links to.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
I don’t understand. There WAS such an article – I found it, and copied the URL as I always do. It certainly was not either of the ones BG links to.
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And there IS, but the closing bracket is incorrectly placed in your link.
How can that be, since I copied it, rather than retyping it?
You must be a Martian.
Incidentally, the word Martian predates any idea of inhabitants of Mars. The word originally meant someone who was warlike or supported war (although none of the online dictionaries contain this definition, and I don’t have an OED at hand). But it was readymade for when the need to express “inhabitant of Mars” came around.
It’s a bit like Condi Rice and that crowd calling themselves “Vulkans”
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
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.
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I’ll add yet another recommendation for In The Courts of the Crimson Kings, with its “alternate” Mars. Check out Stirling’s website for sample chapters–the Prologue is especially interesting for old farts who grew up on Heinlein, Clarke & Asimov. (I’m one, too.)
For the seething jungles of Venus, check out the previous book in the series, The Sky People. From the Acknowledgments:
Niven was mentioned earlier, so I ought to reference: At The Bottom Of The Hole, which explains what happened to the Mars outpost after How The Heroes Die; Protector, in which the Brennan-monster explains that he crashed a fucking great ice asteroid into the planet in order to visit genocide on the water-sensitive natives, as they’d already killed several humans already and hedidn’t want them posing even a remote threat to Earth; and The Ringworld Engineers, which has a giant life-size Map of Mars on the Ringworld.
Mars, the planet, was visited only in Out of the Silent Planet, and not the rest of the Space Trilogy, of course, but the oyarsa gets some lines in Perelandra and a walk-on part in That Hideous Strength. (Lewis’s grasp of science was generally indifferent from what he let drop here and there, and yet the whole body-of-different-movements thing translates very well to multi-dimensional theory.)
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon
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Seconded, with much praise. This story still haunts me, and I think it was the first of that rocket-ship stuff that made me realize that real writers were working in the genre.
And, because I am a Svetz fan, I want to mention Niven’s Rainbow Mars for serious goofiness.
A hearty second for A Miracle of Science, surprisingly good hard sci-fi for a webcomic.
And echoing the sentiments that Bradbury’s Mars is the one I envision most of the time.
The rest of the time, it’s definitely Marvin the Martian. 