George Martin: 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.

Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s , as well as to markets such as Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , and Science Fiction Age . In 1990, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay , which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County, Space ; Lunar Descent ; Labyrinth of Night ; The Weight ; The Tranquility Alternative ; A King of Infinite Space ; OceanSpace ; ChronoSpace ; Coyote ; Coyote Rising ; Coyote Frontier ; Spindrift ; Galaxy Blues ; Coyote Horizon ; and Coyote Destiny . His short work has been gathered in five collections, Rude Astronauts, All-American Alien Boy, Sex and Violence in Zero-G, American Beauty , and The Last Science Fiction Writer . His most recent books are a new novel in the Coyote sequence, Hex , and a YA novel, Apollo’s Outcasts . He won the Robert A. Heinlein Award in 2013, as well as three Hugo Awards, in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future,” in 1998 for his novella “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” and, most recently, in 2011 for his novelette “The Emperor of Mars.” Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Whately, Massachusetts, with his wife, Linda.

Here he takes us to a Mars very different from the Mars of his Hugo-winning novelette, the Old Mars of ancient dreams, and deep into the Martian Badlands, on a mission that could plunge two races, and two worlds, into all-out war.

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN ON MARS WAS OMAR AL-BAZ, AND the first time I saw him, he was throwing up at the Rio Zephyria spaceport.

This happens more frequently than you might think. People coming here for the first time often don’t realize just how thin the air really is. The cold surprises them, too, but I’m told the atmospheric pressure is about the same as you’d find in the Himalayas. So they come trooping down the ramp of the shuttle that transported them from Deimos Station, and if the ride down didn’t make them puke, then the shortness of breath, headaches, and nausea that comes with altitude sickness will.

I didn’t know for sure that the middle-aged gent who’d doubled over and vomited was Dr. al-Baz, but I suspected that he was; I hadn’t seen any other Middle Eastern men on his flight. There was nothing I could do for him, though, so I waited patiently on the other side of the chain-link security fence while one of the flight attendants came down the ramp to help him. Dr. al-Baz waved her away; he didn’t need any assistance, thank you. He straightened up, pulled a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket, and wiped his mouth, then picked up the handle of the rolling bag he’d dropped when his stomach revolted. Nice to know that he wasn’t entirely helpless.

He was one of the last passengers to step through the gate. He paused on the other side of the fence, looked around, and spotted the cardboard sign I was holding. A brief smile of relief, then he walked over to me.

“I’m Omar al-Baz,” he said, holding out his hand. “You must be Mr. Ramsey.”

“Yes, I’m your guide. Call me Jim.” Not wanting to shake a hand that just wiped a mouth, which had just spilled yuck all over nice clean concrete, I reached forward to relieve him of his bag.

“I can carry this myself, thank you,” he said, not letting me take his bag from him. “But if you could help me with the rest of my luggage, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure. No problem.” He hadn’t hired me to be his porter, and if he’d been the jerk variety of tourist some of my former clients had been, I would’ve made him carry his own stuff. But I was already beginning to like the guy: early fifties, skinny but with the beginnings of a potbelly, coarse black hair going grey at the temples. He wore round spectacles and had a bushy mustache beneath a hooked, aquiline nose, and looked a little like an Arab Groucho Marx. Omar al-Baz couldn’t have been anything but what he was, an Egyptian-American professor from the University of Arizona.