Old Mars

Overall, though, the number of science-fiction stories set on Mars and its sister planets declined sharply after Mariner, for understandable reasons. The real Mars was simply not as interesting as its pulp predecessor. Airless, lifeless, dead, the planet the Mariner probes showed us could not plausibly support either the swashbuckling interplanetary romances of Burroughs, Brackett, and Moore, nor the evocative, elegiac fables of Bradbury and Zelazny. Post-Mariner, when we talked about the possibility of life on Mars, we were talking about microbes or maybe lichen (though even lichen seemed to be pushing it), not sandmice and thoats. And while the discovery of Martian life would no doubt be electrifying to biologists and space scientists around the world, there’s never been a microbe with the appeal of Dejah Thoris.

And so the lichens triumphed. Dejah Thoris and all her fellow Martians were banished to the outer darkness and the backlist, never to be seen again … not even in the movies. When Steven Spielberg filmed his adaptation of The War of the Worlds in 2004, the invaders were no longer Martians, as they had been in the Wells novel and the Orson Welles radio broadcast and the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1953 George Pal film, but rather aliens of undetermined origin. Spielberg’s invaders came to Earth in lightning bolts (!), rather than cylinders fired across the gulfs of space by intelligences vast and cool and unsympathetic. I was not the only one who missed the Martians …

Which brings us, at long last, to Old Mars, the anthology you hold in your hands, a collection of fifteen brand-new stories about Old Mars, lost Mars, the Mars of the canals and the dead cities and the Martians. With a few very notable exceptions, the contributors to this volume began their careers after Mariner. Like me, they grew up reading about Old Mars but never had the chance to write about it. That Mars was a lost world, gone forever.

Or maybe not.

Yes, the Mars of Percival Lowell and Norman Bean and Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore and Ray Bradbury does not exist, but why should that mean we cannot write about it? Science fiction is and always has been part of a great romantic tradition in literature, and romance has never been about realism.

Western writers still write stories about an Old West that never actually existed in the way it is depicted; “realistic Westerns” that focus on farmers instead of gunslingers don’t sell nearly as well. Mystery writers continue to write tales of private eyes solving murders and catching serial killers, whereas real-life PIs spend most of their time investigating bogus insurance claims and photographing adulterers in sleazy motels for the benefit of divorce lawyers. Historical novelists produce stories set in ancient realms that no longer exist, about which we often know little and less, and fantasy writers publish stories set in lands that never did exist at all. And as no less an SF luminary than John W. Campbell Jr. himself observed, in the final analysis, science fiction is actually a subset of fantasy.

Purists and fans of “hard SF” and other people with sticks up their butts may howl that these stories are not “real science fiction.” So be it. Call them “space opera,” or “space fantasy,” or “retro-sf,” or “skiffy,” any term you like. Me, I call them “stories,” and like all stories, they are rooted in the imagination. When you come right down to it, I don’t think “real” matters nearly as much as “cool.”

Mariner could not find Old Mars. But you can.

Just turn the page.

—George R. R. Martin August 2012