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

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