Adventure classics -- Far green hills of Mars?

The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury

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“I would go out to (my grandparents’) lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, ‘Take me home!’” Ray Bradbury wrote, explaining his debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories in an essay The New Yorker prophetically titled “Take Me Home,” published the day before his death.

“I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities. . . I know that ‘The Martian Chronicles’ would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life. . . .”

Like the Mars of Burroughs’ hero John Carter, Bradbury’s Mars was a land still unknown enough to harbor adventures. There‘s more than a touch of fear for the future and nostalgia for a simpler time somewhere in the past lurking in the pages of both writers. A nostalgia, in the case of The Martian Chronicles that Bradbury pinpoints in the remembered green American Midwest of his childhood in the 1920’s.

He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and spent much of his childhood there. In The Martian Chronicles, the Waukegan of Bradbury’s childhood would resurface under the name “Green Bluff,” reconstructed by telepathic Martians for a rocket crew from Earth, in the chapter “The Third Expedition.”

“This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me,” Captain John Black of the ill-fated expedition explains to his men (Bradbury taking for granted in his 1950 story, that space crews would be all-male). Black, like Bradbury, knew you can’t really go back home again.

Ultimately, the defeat of the Martians occurred not through armaments or atomics, but with the scourge of a childhood disease as lethal as terrestrial bacteria had been to the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. And finally, the invaders from Earth would live to see their own civilization destroyed by the atomic weapons the world had learned to fear by the date of Bradbury’s writing.

That the Mars of Bradbury bore little resemblance to the planet, pictures of whose dusty pink skies and barren landscapes he saw transmitted from robotic rovers long before his death, bothered him not at all. He even resisted being labeled a science fiction writer. “Martian Chronicles is not science fiction -- it’s fantasy,” he insisted. “That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time -- because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.”

Even a scientist could agree with that assessment. “Mars,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, “has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”

For more about Bradbury, who died June 5 at the age of 91, see his official site,
www.raybradbury.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- an all-Martian month at Adventure classics concludes with one of Phillip K. Dick’s greatest works, Martian Time-Slip.)

Wordcraft -- Carrying the torch for space opera

I confess -- I’m an opera fan. Sure, the music is to die for, but there’s all the other stuff to love -- romance and riches, a sword fight or three, murder and revenge. And wonderful as opera’s drama is on Planet Earth, it’s even better in outer space!

So on a rainy day during the ConDFW convention last weekend, I drew sustenance from the panel discussion “Soaring Ships and Swashbuckling Sentients: Trends in Space Opera.”

The questions moderator William Ledbetter posed to panelists Ethan Nahte, Mark Finn and Lee Martindale were, did space opera disappear in the last few years? And can it make a comeback? The answer to the last, it seemed, is that space opera is poised for a comeback with the release of next month’s movie about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ interplanetary hero, John Carter of Mars.

But to say the swashbuckling-in-space genre has disappeared is an overstatement. “For the last fifteen or twenty years,” Finn said, “(space opera) hid in other genres. I think there’s a lot of space opera in steampunk. . .and in military science fiction.”

But exactly what is space opera, an audience member asked. Isn’t all action-oriented science fiction space opera? Does it always require swords?

According to Martindale, “if you don’t use nine hundred pages explaining it, it’s space opera. If you’re more interested in story and plot than science, it’s space opera.”

A helping of romance -- in the original sense of the term -- is also essential, Finn insisted. “There should be an emotional throughline in the story.” A throughline he hopes will hold good in the upcoming John Carter movie.

“It can’t be worse than Traci Lords’ version,” Nahte said, referring to the 2009 direct to video film featuring the former porn star as Carter’s Martian love interest.

Finn admitted bad movies have hurt the genre’s credibility. Last year’s Conan movie, for instance, “took a piece of my soul.. . .That said, I’m looking forward to the new movie. (It) had me at the thirty-five foot jump” in the trailers.

(Burroughs’ story called for Carter to retain the muscles strengthened by Earth’s higher gravitation. And no, the original book in the Carter series, A Princess of Mars, didn’t spend a single page explaining how to transport a nineteenth century Civil War hero to another planet.)

But even if the new movie doesn’t live up to his expectations, Finn raised a rallying cry for what he termed the growing power of secret (and not so secret) space opera fans.

“We don’t have to watch anything substandard and bad. It’s okay, if a bad science fiction movie comes out, to say, it’s bad and I won’t support it. . . There’s still a lot of good novels that haven’t been made into movies yet. We have to support the good stuff.”

(For more about the panelists, see http://marktheageinghipster.blogspot.com/, for Mark Finn; www.williamledbetter.com/; and www.HarpHaven.net/ , for Lee Martindale. Ethan Nahte’s latest story, “Ripping Jack,” appears in Pulp! Winter/Spring 2012, available at http://www.amazon.com/.)

Mark Finn on space opera

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And for more on the subject of Mars, see National Space Society of North Texas’ poetry contest about Mars, The Next Frontier: Exploration and Settlement of Space. Complete information is at www.nssofnt.org/activities/poetry-contest-2/poetry-contest-2012/. Entries must be received by July 31. The society will announce winners at September’s FenCon convention in Dallas.

FenCon also sponsors its own short story contest and is accepting members for its annual writing workshop. See www.fencon.org/ for details.

Adventure classics -- An ape and a gentleman

Is there a more perfect modern myth than Tarzan of the Apes?  Modern, at least, as in ninety-nine years old this year – Edgar Rice Burroughs’s masterwork was first published in magazine format in 1912.  The writer was born in 1875 and after enduring health problems and a series of low-paying jobs, tried his hand at fiction without having any illusions about his skill as an author.  He recalled later that “although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read. . . .”

My sister and I devoured Tarzan books during what would now be termed our years as middle grade readers.  All I remembered was the adventure, so that when I started to read one to my then middle grade daughter, I was shocked by how awful the writing was.  Not only were the books filled with the overwhelming bigotry and racism of their era, but Burroughs also seemed to have fallen under the spell of the deliberately archaic language that “good bad writer” Rudyard Kipling used in writing about children, indigenous people and animals.  Fortunately, excellence in writing isn’t needed for the art of myth making.

“The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art – the art of myth-making, is a species of the literary art,” C.S. Lewis wrote as editor of nineteenth-century fantasy writer George MacDonald’s works.  “. . . myth does not essentially exist in words at all (and) can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words.”

Perhaps it was because he only aimed to tell an entertaining tale, without worrying about literary excellence or burdening himself with excessive knowledge of his equatorial African setting that Burroughs attained such purity as a transmitter of myth.  The myth of the lost child who grew up to be Lord Greystoke but, still more wonderfully, king of the apes.  In that mythic realm, Burroughs has few rivals.

(The copyright of Tarzan of the Apes has expired in the United States, so I hope not to go to jail for reproducing its dust-jacket illustration here.  Does anybody dare share memories of books they once loved that they have to bowlderize now for family reading?)