Perspectives

Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us John Carter who was a Captain in the Army of the Confederate States of America, then a chieftain of Thark, a prince of Helium and Warlord of Mars. We are told that there are some malcontents in the empire of Helium but we know little about them, except that such characters are always dishonest and cowardly...

SM Stirling gives us John Rolfe VI, Captain in the US Army and descendant of Confederates. Is Rolfe an all round admirable character like Carter? Stirling gives us different perspectives. Our other hero Tom calls Rolfe ruthless and the sympathetic character, physicist Ralph Barnes, not only refuses to help Rolfe conquer other universes but also calls him a fascist to his face - a misuse of the term "fascist" but it helps to identify Barnes' social milieu. Despite this defiance, Barnes is allowed to flourish in New Virginia although not, of course, to leave it, and even becomes a friend and adviser of Rolfe's rebellious granddaughter.

Stirling shows us social and psychological complexities that were beyond ERB's horizons.

Human Martians

Most fictional Martians are not human beings. Indeed, how could they be? In fact, there are three exceptions. Poul Anderson's six or more Martian races are of course all aliens but Anderson's sf was preceded by, among others, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first Martians encountered by ERB's John Carter - green, twelve foot, hairless, tusked, six limbed and egg-laying - sound more like giant insects. However, in any ERBian universe, the hero has to marry a Martian princess. Therefore, without any explanation or rationale, Carter soon encounters humanoid Martians. He not only marries the Princess of Helium but even gets her pregnant even though her metabolism is so different that, instead of giving live birth, she lays a large egg that will hatch their son. ERB's Mars, with its canals and thin but breathable atmosphere, was based on contemporary astronomical observations but his ideas about Martian life were off the wall.

Michael Moorcock pastiched ERB and rationalized human beings on Mars. His hero, Michael Kane, accessed Mars not by ERBian astral projection but by time travel into the far past. Thus, his Mars still had oceans, an atmosphere and a human race that had not yet migrated to Earth.

Thirdly, in SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings (New York, 2008), mysterious beings with a higher technology have terraformed Mars and seeded (?) it with humanity originating on Earth. Thus, these tall, thin, dry humanoids are not products of extraterrestrial evolution but are related to us. I have started Chapter Two. So far, I am finding the text less accessible than that of the previous volume, The Sky People, because several passages are presented from the point of view of an unsympathetic Martian character whose historical and political context have not yet been fully explained.

A book on imagining extraterrestrials made the point that we have to imagine an organism that has originated and evolved elsewhere. Thus, a tall, thin, large-chested humanoid is not a Martian but a Terrestrial adapted to Mars. However, that is precisely what Stirling describes:

"...Highlanders even more eerily elongated than the standard Martians and barrel-chested..." (p. 53).

Visions Of Mars

"The Structure Of A Series: John Carter" on www.sfappreciation.blogspot.co.uk is my attempt at a succinct summary of Edgar Rice Burroughs' four interconnected interplanetary series which are mostly Martian:

eleven volumes for Mars, with excursions to a Martian moon and Jupiter;
four for Venus;
one each for the Moon and an extrasolar planet.

(ERB's three Moon stories are two volumes in paperback and one in hardback so here I count them as one volume.)

In fact, I probably make these series sound better than they are. ERB's plots and characterisation do not fulfill the promise of his colourful, imaginative, exotic settings. In any case, his Mars is literary, not scientific. It has canals and is not only inhabited but humanly habitable. In the real universe, hard work will be needed to make Mars habitable.

Several chapters of Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars describe a colonised, though not yet terraformed, Mars, like a more realistic counterpart of Frank Herbert's Dune. We see the economic, political and cultural life of the colonists and even something that is more common in an ERBian universe, military conflict.

Anderson's "Martians" perform midsummer rites around the Dreamers' Craters and three "Dreamers" are named: Wells, Weinbaum and Heinlein. (I usually say that the three main British writers about Martians are Wells, Stapledon and Lewis and the three main Americans are Burroughs, Heinlein and Bradbury but, of course, there are many others and which are the main ones is debatable.) Would Anderson's Martians have included Burroughs among their "Dreamers"? Maybe, but, judging from the names mentioned, they seem to prefer a harder sf list.