Poetry, Soft And Hard SF And The Sun

Some of us knew of "The Golden Apples of the Sun" by Ray Bradbury before we heard of "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by WB Yeats. The last line of Yeats' poem is the title of Bradbury's short story. It would be appropriate to bind both in a short volume with appropriate illustrations and some discussion of their content. A Lancaster comrade of Irish descent sings "Aengus" at parties.

If Heinlein, Anderson, Niven etc are hard sf writers, then who are soft? At least Bradbury, Simak and Lewis. Bradbury surely writes poetry in prose rather than speculative fiction? Instead of studying the Sun from a safe distance with a spectroscope, Bradbury's characters fly close enough to scoop some matter out of it. The captain uses a "...robot Glove..." (The Golden Apples Of The Sun, London, 1970, p. 167), really a waldo although not named as such, to control the giant hand that moves the Cup.

"'What time is it?' asked someone." (p. 165)

Wittgenstein discussed the time on the sun philosophically.

A soft sf writer can write about a Cup scooping solar matter but how do hard sf writers treat it? Alan Moore has Earth people colonizing Sun spots but this is just an out there idea. In The Mote In God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a spaceship protected by a force field flies into a star. In "Iron," Poul Anderson has kzinti in a refidgerated space tug called Sun Defier flying close to a red dwarf to scoop closely orbiting asteroids:

"'Damn near half the sky a boiling red glow...the cabin is a furnace you can barely endure...'" (The Man-Kzin Wars, pp. 148-149)

This is Anderson's hard sf equivalent of The Golden Apples...

Mars

Science fiction writers, including Poul Anderson, have written a lot about Mars and Martians. We recently referred to Mars here and here. Blog readers might notice that I am unfamiliar with some more recent versions, e.g., Moving Mars, the Mars Trilogy and The Martian. Comments and comparisons would be welcome.

Ray Bradbury's Mars stories divide into:

those included in The Martian Chronicles;
those not included;
one that has been in some editions but not in others (see Comments here).

However, it seems that all have now been gathered together. See here.

Science fiction is collaborative. It makes sense to compare Anderson's own versions of Mars and Martians, then to extend the discussion to cover all Martian fiction which is an extremely large subject.

For James Blish's Mars, see here.
For ERB's, see here.

The Three World Wars

We are familiar with World Wars One, Two - and Three. The first two were collective experiences and have become history whereas the third has been projected and imagined. We read about it not in history books but in science fiction novels, including "future histories."

Twentieth century science fiction had three kinds of scenarios:

(i) near future space travel and interplanetary colonization;

(ii) near future nuclear war destroying civilization;

(iii) combinations of aspects of (i) and (ii), e.g.:

civilization survives nuclear war as in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Maurai History, Twilight World, Shield and Vault Of The Ages;

some people got off Earth, e.g., onto Ray Bradbury's Mars, before the nuclear war;

space-based precautions against nuclear war - the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein's Future History or the Lunar Guard in Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

Anderson's many works of science fiction seem to present each possible answer to every speculative question about aliens, telepathy, immortality, FTL, AI, time travel etc. In accordance with this apparently systematic approach, several, though not all, of Anderson's fictitious futures include World War III as a historical event.

For some other fictional treatments of nuclear war, see here.

Fine-Tuning Mars Fiction

Recently, I divided science fiction about Mars into three periods:

Old or pre-Mariner;
New or post-Mariner;
retro -

- and stated that Poul Anderson's fictional versions of Mars were New. But the dates do not bear this out. However, I now think that Old Mars had two phases:

the earliest, ERBian, idea of a humanly habitable and inhabited Mars, usually the setting for sword fights although Ray Bradbury and CS Lewis changed that;

a later recognition that Mars is not humanly habitable combined with the idea that it may nevertheless be inhabited.

Anderson's Mars fiction is not New but Old, later phase. Post-Mariner versions of Mars are less likely to be inhabited although Larry Niven's Martians are concealed under the sand. James Blish's Welcome To Mars, published as Mariner IV approached Mars, correctly predicted craters and explained "canals" as impact marks radiating from the craters.

The two retro-Mars volumes that I know are In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings by SM Stirling and Old Mars edited by GRR Martin and Gardner Dozois although another possible candidate for retro status is Michael Moorcock's Mars trilogy which uses time travel to place its hero on an ERB-inspired Mars.

Martian Series

Innumerable works of science fiction feature Mars, Martians or both but how many Martian series are there? If a series comprises a minimum of two installments, then Poul Anderson has a Martian series. See here.

I ask this question because I had wrongly described Old Mars as presenting fifteen original versions of Mars. In fact:

SM Stirling's "Swords of Zar-tu-Kan" is a prequel to the same author's Mars novel;

Matthew Hughes' "The Ugly Duckling" is a sequel to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which is itself a series;

there might be similar surprises in store in the remaining contents of the anthology.

Edwin Arnold's Lieut. Gulliver Jones, a possible source for ERB's A Princess Of Mars, ends, like Wells' The First Men In The Moon, in a way that rules out a sequel. The magic rug returns Jones to Earth, then disappears forever. However, A Princess... became a series that inspired further, imitative, series by both Otis Adelbert Kline and Michael Moorcock.

So we have identified Martian series by Anderson, Stirling, Bradbury, Burroughs, Kline and Moorcock. There are other such series on the periphery of my awareness. Poul Anderson is much better known for his many other kinds of writing but it is good to see that, with just two short stories, he does make it onto the list of authors of Martian series.

The Martian Canals

The Martian canals were bound to appear in sf. As ever, when I start to compile a list, I remember other items for it in the process and also know that page viewers might draw attention to some that I have missed.

Gulliver Jones sails on a Martian river but before that had mentioned "...a labyrinth of canals..."
-Edwin L Arnold, Gulliver Of Mars (New York, undated), p. 27.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and SM Stirling all have canals on Mars. Both Heinlein and Stirling even have a Grand Canal.

On CS Lewis' Malacandra/Mars, large inhabited river valleys appear as canali to Terrestrial astronomers. Lewis wrote that he probably knew, when writing Out Of The Silent Planet, that the "canals" were not real but included them as part of the mythology.

In James Blish's works, the canals are variously:

impact marks radiating from craters;
the work of extinct Canal Masons;
a Diagram of Power;
an after-effect of the force used by the Martians to destroy the asteroidal planet.

Why do I list works by seven other authors on Poul Anderson Appreciation? Because I wonder whether "canals" are referenced in any of Anderson's fictional versions of Mars? Although many of the names mentioned above are better known than Anderson's, his several works dealing with Mars or Martians are major contributions to the fiction of Mars.

Let's Go To Venus

Venus gets less fictional coverage than Mars but more than any other planet. The fiction of Venus is probably adequately covered or summarized in Farewell, Fantastic Venus.

(i) Venus and Mars are the nearest planets apart from the Moon.

(ii) Mythologically, Venus and Mars are linked as opposites: goddess of love; god of war.

(iii) CS Lewis wrote a Mars-Venus-Earth Trilogy whereas SM Stirling wrote a Venus-Mars diptych.

(iv) HG Wells' Martians attacked Venus after Earth but Wells does not show us events on the Venerian surface.

(v) Olaf Stapledon's Terrestrials colonized Venus, exterminated the Venerians (after being attacked by them), adapted to Venus and became Venerians.

(vi) Otis Adelbert Kline competed with ERB's Mars books by writing both Mars and Venus books so ERB retaliated with Venus books.

(vii) Ray Bradbury, famous for his Mars, has a rainy Venus in one story in The Illustrated Man.

(viii) Robert Heinlein has a swampy Venus with frog-like natives both in a Future History short story and in a Scribner juvenile novel.

(ix) Poul Anderson has a desert Venus in a Psychotechnic History story, an oceanic Venus in an independent story and an incompletely terraformed Venus off-stage in his Technic History.

(x) Larry Niven's Known Space future history opens with short stories about exploration of Solar planets, including Venus.

(xi) Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr juvenile novels are set on successive Solar planets, including Venus.

(xii) Dan Dare's first interplanetary voyage was to Venus where he encountered his recurring enemy, the Mekon.

Marses II

We might as well discuss fictional versions of Mars and Martians in general but that is an enormous topic. This blog has already, in diverse posts, addressed Poul Anderson's several Martian races which seem to be sui generis, except that Anderson borrowed Wells' title with just a slight variation. See here.

I think that the main writers about fictional Martians are:

British
Wells
Stapledon
Lewis

American
Burroughs
Heinlein
Bradbury

The Brits form a perfect triad:

Wells writes separately both a future history and a novel about a Martian invasion of Earth;

Stapledon describes Martian invasions of Earth among many other events in a future history text book;

Lewis, disagreeing with Wellsian and Stapledonian visions of the future, locates evil only on Earth and tells us that Wells' Martians are very unlike the real Martians!

However, there are many other writers about Mars:

relevant to Burroughs
Edwin Arnold
Otis Adelbert Kline
Michael Moorcock

authors of composite Marses
Larry Niven
Alan Moore

James Blish incorporated Mars into his Haertel histories by putting the seminal character, Adolph Haertel, on Mars. Professor Quatermass thought that one group of alien invaders had come from Mars and Quatermass' successor on British television, Doctor Who, has his version of Martians, the Ice Warriors.

And that is as comprehensive as I feel like getting at present.

Martian Crystal

"What does he know of England who only England knows?"

To appreciate Poul Anderson fully, we must also appreciate his contemporary sf writers. Personally, I prefer Anderson's hard sf to Ray Bradbury's soft sf. However, Bradbury is highly regarded, including by many hard sf writers. Further, I found considerably more in The Martian Chronicles when I reread it later in life. (Schoolboy opinions are not always trustworthy.)

"February

"1999

"YLLA

"They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars, by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind."
-Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (London, 1977), p. 14.

This chapter heading and opening sentence display at least four interesting features.

(i) With its action beginning in 1999 (and continuing until 2026), The Martian Chronicles parallels SM Stirling's In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings, set on Mars in 2000 AD. However, ...Chronicles, copyright 1951, presents a future history whereas ...Crimson Kings, copyright 2008, presents an alternative history.

(ii) Bradbury consciously adopts an earlier narrative style that begins not with Mrs K's point of view but with an omniscient narrator directly informing the reader that the events of the story occur on the planet Mars.

(iii) Empty seas, dead sea bottoms, are familiar fictional Martian terrain.

(iv) Crystal is a Martian building material:

In "The U.S. Consulate...Robert Holmegard and his wife Dolores...gave a dinner for the explorers on a balcony of clear crystal supported by two curving braces of the same material shaped like slender snakes, a structure that seemed nerve-wrackingly fragile if you didn't know the strength of the stuff." (...Crimson Kings, p. 61)

That passage in ...Crimson Kings reminded me of Bradbury's opening sentence and thus initiated this post.

The Martian Atmosphere

A fictional Mars has a breathable atmosphere if:

(i) the story was written so long ago that such an atmosphere was still considered possible (Edgar Rice Burroughs);

(ii) the story was written in an intermediate period when scientific knowledge had advanced but the literary convention of breathable atmospheres on Solar planets persisted (some short stories in The Early Asimov);

(iii) the author was unconcerned about scientific accuracy (Ray Bradbury, CS Lewis);

(iv) the story is set in a remote past before Mars lost its atmosphere (Michael Moorcock);

(v) the story is set in a future when colonists from Earth have made a breathable atmosphere (Kim Stanley Robinson, also Poul Anderson in "The Corkscrew of Space," which I am currently reading).

(This is another of those lists that grew in the writing.)

(ii) and (iii) overlap. Lewis commented that, when he wrote Out Of The Silent Planet, he probably knew that the Martian "canals" were not real but included them as part of the mythology.

This post is occasioned by reading the Anderson story which will have to be discussed in a subsequent post and, since today is my granddaughter's twenty first birthday, that next post might be delayed for a while.