IS THERE LIFE ON
MARS?
Mars has long been a
planet that has tickled our imagination. For a long time “Martian”
was a synonym for space alien. And still in the 1950´s and early
1960´s UFO occupants could tell that they came from Mars. (Venus was
never so popular.)
Martian canals
as observed by Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell were
all the rage in late 1800´s and inspired
H. G. Wells when he wrote The War of the Worlds,
one of the first alien invasion stories.
These channel ”sightings” also inspired
the view of Mars as an old, dry planet which became a cliché in the
SF literature.
Before William S.
Burroughs there was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Like many other kids, I
read and enjoyed Tarzan books. But John Carter was something special.
Maybe he was easier to relate, I can´t say. But there was something
more magical in him. Tarzan just had adventures in the jungle and in
the long run it was a bit boring although there were intelligent
apes, lost Roman colonies and German baddies. John Carter, on the
other hand, was on a another planet. And I still think the beginning
of the first Mars book (The Princess of Mars) is one of the greatest
beginnings of literature: “I am a very old man; how old I do not
know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell
because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any
childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man
of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago,
and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I
shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do
not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still
alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never
died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am
so convinced of my mortality.”
When I was thirteen,
the greatest book in the world was The Martian Chronicles by Ray
Bradbury. I don´t know why, I guess that Bradbury was the first
writer who made me realise that you don´t necessarily need a clever
and complicated plot but the language and the atmosphere can also
make the story.
Then
there was Leigh Brackett, today best known
as a scriptwriter of The Empire Strikes Back, she wrote great sf
stories in the 40`s and 50´s. Her Mars was a wonderful,
exotic place, as much fantasy as science fiction
(planetary romace they´re called, I think). And when they´re
going to have a new printing of her Fantasy Masterworks volume? I want that.
Tom Morton-Smith is
young British playwright whose play Oppenheimer has gotten great
reviews (and it´s brilliant!). However, his earlier play Everyday
Maps for Everyday Use is what interests me more because planet Mars
is all over the work. The play happens in Woking
where the Wells´ Martian invasion began. One
of the characters is a (bit disturbed) teen girl who thinks that
there´s some alien craft buried beneath the
local field. While dancing there she meets a young man whose hobby is
drawing maps of Mars. One other character is an actor who starred in an
early eighties (fictional) sf tv-series
based on the John Carter of Mars books. And finally, one of the
characters is named John Jones – just like the DC Comics superhero
Martian Manhunter. Coincidence? I don´t
think so.
On
the occult side, rather well-known is the case of Hélène
Smith, a French medium in the late nineteenth century. In trance she
would have visions of Mars and wrote down messages on Martian
language that she would later translate to French. She wrote a book
based on her trance experiences, called Des Indes à la Planete Mars
(From India to the Planet Mars) which documented her many
incarnations.
In the
late 70´s there was a literary movement called Martian poets. They
were called so after a wonderful poem by Craig Raine:
MARTIAN SENDS A POSTCARD HOME
MARTIAN SENDS A POSTCARD HOME
Caxtons are
mechanical birds with many wings
and some are
treasured for their markings--
they cause the eyes
to melt
or the body to
shriek without pain.
I have never seen
one fly, but
sometimes they perch
on the hand.
Mist is when the sky
is tired of flight
and rests its soft
machine on the ground:
then the world is
dim and bookish
like engravings
under tissue paper.
Rain is when the
earth is television.
It has the
properites of making colours darker.
Model T is a room
with the lock inside --
a key is turned to
free the world
for movement, so
quick there is a film
to watch for
anything missed.
But time is tied to
the wrist
or kept in a box,
ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted
apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you
pick it up.
If the ghost cries,
they carry it
to their lips and
soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And
yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by
tickling with a finger.
Only the young are
allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to
a punishment room
with water but
nothing to eat.
They lock the door
and suffer the noises
alone. No one is
exempt
and everyone's pain
has a different smell.
At night, when all
the colours die,
they
hide in pairs
