[X] My Assistant

[Stu]

... on this rather excellent blog...

http://booksonmars.blogspot.com

How many have you got?

[imipak]

They're not books* about Mars, but Alan Moore's "Watchmen" comic (film awaited later this year... with extreme trepidation by some of us!) includes a chapter (issue) set partly on Mars. A character with godlike superhuman powers gives a human character a tour of some of the more spectacular surface features. This plays out as a stunning backdrop to the foreground drama. I just have to quote a little; this is the South Pole:

"...giant steps, ninety feet high, scoured by dust and wind into a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide"; and later: "Those jumbled box canyons below, where volcanoes boiled the permafrost into scalding geysers; once they could have been fountains of life. The ground crumbled when the subterranean ice melted, releasing torrents of water to form vast rivers, now long dry.. it's called chaotic terrain."

Then there's a great shot approaching Olympus Mons, which captures the scale superbly; then Valles Marineris, ending up on Argyre Planitia in the "smile" crater. (The yellow "smiley face" image is a visual motif throughout the book, I expect it'll be pretty ubiquitous once the film's released.) Not bad, for the mid 80s!

The second volume of Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (atrocious film, avoid at all costs) opens on Mars and features guest appearances by many Mars-related characters from the late 19th and early 20th century fictions mentioned above, before the action switches to Earth and H.G. Wells Martians with cylinders, heat rays and so forth.