[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Enceladus75_*]

Mars by Ben Bova and his sequel Return to Mars are both excellent books. They depict the probable way in which we will carry out the first manned missions to the Red Planet, with a good mix of politics, human intrigue and science without the need to invent stupid and far-fetched ideas like "evil whirlwinds" and aliens in the "face on mars" plots.

Directors of future Hollywood Mars films please take note...

[helvick]

On the non-fiction side I'd add in Oliver Morton's Mapping Mars. If I recall correctly I initially found UMSF (or to be more precise rlproject.com) via Oliver's blog way back in the mists of time.

[Mongo]

I count ten of them that I've read (or watched):

Moving Mars by Greg Bear
Mars by Ben Bova
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Red Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Total Recall DVD ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Bill

[nprev]

Well, how about everyone's personal fav? Mine hands-down: Heinlein's Red Planet.

[mcaplinger]

"Green Mars" (the novella, not the second book of the Mars trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson, collected in THE MARTIANS.

"The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?"

[ElkGroveDan]

Hands down the best of them all. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

[Stu]

Well, how about everyone's personal fav? Mine hands-down: Heinlein's Red Planet.

I can honestly say reading RED MARS changed my life in as big a way as seeing that V2 Nat Geo special issue did when I was at school. I remember being almost in shock after reading it, because "my" Mars, the Mars I had seen in my head for so long, had actually been put down in print. And it made me realise that I didn't have some kind of mental disorder being so passionate about it, because someone else felt the same way too. The planet was just never the same for me again.

[nprev]

Ironically, I didn't discover Red Planet until after Mariner 9, but before the Vikings. I still held onto a slim hope of a precious few way-out organisms being spotted by VL1...not a rich ecology as depicted in the novel, of course, but maybe just a little something weird & wonderful.

Lack of critters notwithstanding, Mars has always delivered on weird & wonderful...more so with every mission!

[SteveM]

I've always enjoyed the collection of essays by Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, Walter Sullivan, and Arthur C. Clarke entitled Mars and the Mind of Man. Their comments on the early data from Mariner 9 are as varied and as interesting as the discussions here.

Steve M

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Here's, how & where our fascination with the red planet began, some 115 years ago:

[OWW]

Speaking of Mars Hill:

The Internet Archive has (among other things) the texts of
Percival Lowell's:

- Mars
- Mars and its Canals
- Mars As the Abode of Life

'Science' and 'science fiction' at the same time. Enjoy.

EDIT:
They also have Alfred Russel Wallace's attack on Lowell: "Is Mars Habitable?"

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[spiderfrommars]

Here's a few Martian titles that seem to have fallen through the lines...
SF:
Frontera - Lewis Shiner
Red Dust - Paul McAuley
Mars Underground - William K. Hartmann (yeah, the very same)
Desolation Road - Ian MacDonald
Fantasy:
the Kane series by Michael Moorcock
the Stark adventures by Leigh Brackett

On the science front:
Mariner IV to Mars - Willy Ley
Mars - Robert Richardson & (the great) Chesley Bonestell
Beagle - Colin Pillinger
Destination Mars - Martin Caidin
plus books by Kargel, Boyce, Hartmann, et al.
One of these days I must get my martian library organised... It includes books in english, french, italian, spanish and portuguese.

And I leave you with a fine piece of martian poetry, by Richard L. Poss:
For years I wandered
the Martian landscape.
The infinite varieties
of silence
kept me company.

[RoverDriver]

Hands down the best of them all. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

That is my favourite as well. And it was my first encounter with Mars, some 30 years ago I think. Never in a million years I would have guessed that I would have eraned a living on Mars. For some reason now SF has a weird taste ;-)

Paolo

[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.