Off The Wagon Reviews: The Martian

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A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Carl Sagan has a lot to answer for. In 1980, the famous astronomer and rationalist (Dawkins would have loved him) wrote the book and TV series Cosmos. The book kicked around my house until I was of an age to read it, and I found it a real treasure- a sprawling account of the universe and our relationship with it, told through science, myth, history and literature. No stone remained unturned- in a chapter on Mars, Sagan rightly devotes as much time on the impact writers such as H. G. Wells and Burroughs had on the public’s perception of the red planet as the 1970’s Viking missions.

Sagan grows particularly misty-eyed as he recalls the exploits of Burroughs’ hero John Carter of Mars. He recalls daring adventure, exotic locales and beautiful heroines. He recalls the best damn two-fisted adventures in the history of literature. All in all, he recalls too much.

It was many years later that I finally got my hands on a Burroughs book. It was A Princess of Mars, the first book Burroughs ever wrote (in 1912), and the first one that featured John Carter.

Carter is a good ‘ol boy from Virginia who, at the end of the Civil War, finds himself destitute, and with ‘his only means of livelihood, fighting, gone’ (Not to worry, John. There’ll be plenty of fighting where you’re going). While prospecting in Arizona, Carter gets trapped in a cave by some marauding Indians. Apropos of nothing, he suddenly looks up to the sky to the planet Mars, and announces that, actually, as a fighting man, he’s always had a fascination with the planet of the god of war, don’t you know. He finds his spirit somehow transported to Mars, while his body lies in the the cave on Earth.

On Mars, Carter encounters a version of the red planet that was very much in the public mind of the time- a dying world of dried-up seas, cris-crossed with canals as ancient civilizations carry out last-ditch efforts to make the planet habitable. He encounters the Tharks, eight-foot tall green men with four arms who live to fight. He fights alongside them and earns their trust and respect, and eventually goes on an expedition to rescue the beautiful (and notably more human) princess Dejah Thoris from the clutches of an enemy people.

As Sagan notes in Cosmos, the popular idea of an old, dying Mars was largely due to an American named Percival Lowell, who also influenced Wells. Lowell was an astronomer who believed he could see canals on Mars using his telescope, and produced remarkably consistent maps and globes of their positions over a period of many years in the late 19th century, even going so far as to name many of them. He was a respected astronomer and no crank, and whatever it was that he was chronicling is still something of a mystery today.

So that was the state of Mars in the public perception, circa 1912. What Burroughs brings to the table is that his Mars is a place of ADVENTURE! Unfortunately, what 'adventure' means to Burroughs is endless captures, escapes and fights. Carter faces pulpish creatures on almost every page- in cities, in deserts, in arenas- but he’s such a designated hero that none of it seems to matter. He’s such a hardass that we never believe he’s in the slightest danger. Couple this with a ‘heroic, manly’ attitude reminiscent of Sir Galahad, and Carter quickly becomes a bore.

I am not prone to sensitiveness, and the following of a sense of duty, wherever it may lead, has always been a sort of fetich (sic) throughout my life; which may account for the honours bestowed upon me by three republics and the decorations and friendships of several lesser kings, in whose service my sword has been red many a time.

Not a humble chap, our John. He’s almost like Flashman played straight, and while this uncynical view of manliness and heroism is often part of the charm of early 20th-century fiction, here it grates immensely. Carter never admits a weakness. He’s nothing but a tremendous Mary Sue- a stand-in for the author, only faster and stronger and more popular. His black-and-white world view is vindicated by all the characters he meets- Thoris is good because she is a beautiful woman who knows her place and falls in love with him immediately. Tars Tarkas the Thark is good because, though a barbarian, he has a sense of honour and duty similar to Carter’s own. And bad characters are similarly flat- jealous and conniving from the moment they are introduced. Character development is not one of Burroughs’ strong points.

So is the novel saved by the exotic locales and fantastic events? For the most part, Burroughs neglects to describe the scenery and architecture of this I’m-sure-it-would-be-fascinating-if-I-could-see-it world. In fact, his most poetic prose appears instead on those rare occasions where he lets us know what the narrator is feeling- when he is scared, or anxious, or lonely. Of course, Carter is such a manly man that he doesn’t allow this to happen too often.

There are few ideas here beyond a straightforward adventure story. Attempts to flesh out the details of the Tharks alien society do add some depth and interest, but once we discover that these underachieving ‘barbarians’ are in fact merely squatting in the ruins of great cities built by a lost utopian race, who were of course wise, noble and very white, the charm does fizzle somewhat. As Carter is looking at the frescoes of one of the most beautiful buildings-

They were of people like myself, and of a much lighter colour than Dejah Thoris. They were clad in graceful, flowing robes, highly ornamented with metal and jewels, and their luxuriant hair was that of a beautiful golden and reddish bronze. The men were beardless and only a few wore arms. The scenes depicted for the most part, a fair-skinned, fair-haired people at play.

This is such a common trope amongst fiction of the period that it quickly becomes tiresome. Did anybody of the time, even just once, posit a utopian society that did not have elitist, racist undertones? Finding it in this novel, mentioned briefly and with no relevance to the plot, is quite disheartening. It’s like Burroughs interrupts the narrative to shout ‘hey kids, I know it’s not really relevant, but I thought I’d remind you that only white people can be civilized- even in fantasy!’

Perhaps it's unfair to ask such things of a rock-em sock-em pulp adventure. But the truth of the matter is that other authors have done this kind of thing, before and after Burroughs, far better. According to Sagan, there’s a lot more books where this one came from, but don’t be expecting a review of them to pop up here anytime soon.

Rebels of Total Recall

Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles Fontenay- a review

It's pulp time again, so we should all know what to expect. I picked up this volume many years ago, in a now-defunct bookshop in Enniscorthy, Wexford, and it's one of my old favourites. It really shows that there is a difference between good and bad pulp fiction.

Trashy novels (back in the day, at least) sold based on what fantastic and sensational thrills the cover depicted. This cover shows a 'futuristic' city (complete with monorail, natch) and a forest of hands raised as if pledging their allegiance to some grand revolutionary cause. One of them appears to be holding a passport. Will any of this be relevant to the story within? Read on (surely with barely concealed anticipation).

In this tale, Mars is a newly-colonised world under the grip of the tyrannical Marscorp. They control all supplies from Earth, and in particular they control the supply of air to the people of Mars. Of course, a rebellion is brewing, under the control of an organisation called the Phoenix (sound familiar? More on that later). Spies and counter-spies ply their trade across the scattered cities. Amid all this political strife, a man returns to Mars City. He is Dark Kensington (!), former leader of the Phoenix, a man thought to have perished twenty years earlier. Where has he been? What is his connection to the mad and strangely-named scientist Goat Hennessy (maybe he's from the old country!) And what role will the misunderstood, dying race of Martians play in the proceedings? The stage is truly set for some pulp nonsense of the highest order.

The proceedings begin, uncharacteristically, with a fine piece of purple prose. See for yourself-

It is a sea, though they call it sand.
They call it sand because it is still and red and dense with grains. They call it sand because the thin wind whips and whirls its dusty skim away to the tight horizons of Mars.
But only a sea could so brood with the memory of aeons.
Only a sea, lying so silent beneath the high skies, could hint the mystery of life still behind its barren veil.

Now I don't know my Heaney from my Hemmingway, but that's fairly poetic stuff coming from a novel about ray-guns and space monsters. Doesn't it conjure the endless majesty and loneliness and barrenness of the Martian desert? Fantastic stuff. Tellingly, there's nothing else in the bok as good as it. Fontenay soon drops this kind of style and gets down to the business of telling a nice two-fisted adventure story. More power to him.

Anyway, Dark Kensington (Dark Kensington!) hooks up with his old intelligence buddies, and it turns out that the rebel base on Mars City is located in... a barber college. The book is truly chock full of strange details like this. Yep, up front it's a fully functional barber college, while out back there's secret rooms full of rebels being taught how to lift sticks of chalk and pour buckets of lambs blood using only their minds. You see, they aim to become independent from Marscorp by transporting all supplies using ESP. From Earth.

And of course since this is the future-as-imagined-from-the-sixties, everyone smokes. Big black cigars. In a confined colony on an airless world. (This bizarre cultural oversight, once commonplace, can still be noted as late at 1997, in Event Horizon. Watch for the scene where they all spark up. In space).

There's a memorable scene near enough to the beginning of the book where the college is raided by the authorities, and the rebel boss escapes in a helicopter(!) that punctures the dome of Mars City. Immediately, shutters close on all buildings to contain the atmosphere. This scene functions to establish early on the theme of the inhospitibility of Mars (sound familiar?) and the importance and scarcity of good quality O2 (except when you need a good smoke, of course).

There are several more great (and strange) scenes scattered throughout the book, including Goat Hennessy's disturbing attempts to create a human that will survive the martian atmosphere and a seductive spy's bungled attempt to arrest Kensington at a Martian holiday resort. The whole shebang climaxes with a showdown at a hydroponic plant, by which point Fontenay has amassed a rogues gallery of bizarre heroes and villains. Essentially, it's a silly tale well told.

I'd imagine that this book is fairly obscure. Pick it up if you see it in a charity shop (you are unlikely to see it anywhere else). Now, how likely do you think it is that this book graced the desk of someone in Hollywood during the late 80s? I mean, who reads this kind of stuff anyway? And yet, the similarities to Total Recall are numerous and unavoidable. If you don't know Total Recall, you've sure come to the wrong place (think Red Faction, another take on the same idea).

Both feature a rebellion on a frontier-like Mars. Both have shadowy rag-tag revolutionary organisations fighting against The Man. Both feature rebels with ESP powers. And in both cases, Mars is not an arbitrary setting, it is almost a central character. Both deal, as an ongoing theme as well as a climactic plot-device, with the problem of breathing on Mars, though they approach it from completely different angles. Many of these aspects are absent from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the story that Total Recall is based on. Strange.

There's something about Mars. It occupies a special place in our myths, our hopes and fears. Percival Lowell, H.G. Wells and John Carter have helped created a mystique about the place. Because of this, there's a certain responsibility to setting a story on Mars. It isn't interchangeable with any other planetary location. It must feel like Mars. Both Rebels of the Red Planet and Total Recall achieve this admirably.

The History of Mars Attacks

In 1996 Warner Brothers released Mars Attacks. It featured more big-name stars than it knew what to do with, so it killed most of them off- none of the top-billed actors lived to see the end credits. This aside, it was very much a Tim Burton movie- the photo-realistic (at the time, anyway) rendering of a completely ludicrous B-movie situation was oddly creepy, and had the familiar Burton mix of merriment and the macabre (Jack Nicholson’s death scene is particularly memorable). The eerie, skeletal Martians and their array of cheesy but terrifying weapons and vehicles were ludicrous and straight out of a cold-war era 1950’s communism-parable invasion movie. However, the characters within the movie accepted this situation with po-faced seriousness, and as the script was unafraid to serve up horrible deaths to them, the audience was forced to take it seriously too. A quick scan of the net shows that this movie traumatised quite a few youngsters during its original run.

The inspiration behind the film came from an unusual and far more disturbing source- it may in fact be the only movie ever made based on a set of trading cards. In 1962, the company Topps, who specialised in baseball cards and bubblegum, released Mars Attacks, a series of cards that featured science fiction scenes. Topps had previously scored big with a civil war series of cards popular with the kids due to their high gore content. The idea of the Mars Attacks cards was to up the gore while presenting a loose retelling of a ‘War of the Worlds’ type invasion story, updated with 50’s sci-fi staples like flying saucers, ray-guns, marauding robots and giant insects.

The art was by Norm Saunders, a man known for many a lurid cover during the pulp-magazine era. These covers hinted (usually inaccurately) at the wonders within- scantily clad broads writhed in the grip of hideous monsters and unscrupulous Nazis, and square-jawed heroes and detectives shouldered open doors to come to their rescue. Saunders brought to the Mars Attacks cards a kind of hideous and gritty comic-book realism.

The plot wasn’t much to write home about- Mars is about to self-combust due to a build-up of internal pressure, so the big-brained Martians send thousands of warships to clear some new real estate for themselves on Earth. This they achieve with a violence that is genuinely astonishing. Flying saucers with mysterious heat-rays deal death onto army bases, topple skyscrapers, burn entire herds of cattle, leave Washington and New York in flames, slice passenger planes in two and make human torches of individual civilians. The scenes of death and destruction feature gory close-ups of humans with pained and agonised expressions that are occasionally quite unsettling. The Empire State building tumbles, trapping thousands of workers in a hellish blaze while hundreds more kill each other in the panic to leave the city by car. The cockpit of a fighter plane becomes a ‘’flaming coffin’ for a valiant pilot foolish enough to try to intercept a saucer.

Throughout the story, the sense of hopelessness is palpable. People hide out in basements until forced by hunger to leave their homes and walk streets where marauding bands of Martians exterminate humans on sight. Any brave attempt to resist or fight back is rewarded only with instant and horrible death. Martians capture beautiful girls to perform sadistic experiments on (there is a card depicting a dying mans’ removed heart being shown to him by his grotesque surgeon) in order to learn how to more effectively dispose of us, something at which they are extraordinarily creative. Saucers with giant shovels clear the streets of people and crush them against walls, Martians shrink humans to nothing or make frozen statues of them, and gargantuan robots walk the streets crushing humans beneath their spiked heels. Any prisoners captured by the Martians are no use to them due to the language difference, so they are strapped to the exhaust ports of their enormous machinery to be blown to oblivion. The diabolical scientists of the Red Planet have also devised a way to enlarge insects, and soon the world is overrun with a new horror. The US army is overwhelmed by a horde of homicidal spiders and the Eiffel Tower is consumed by a monstrous caterpillar- all in lurid comic-book Technicolor. And all the while the masters of the invasion watch and laugh from Mars.

Finally, the combined military of the ‘world’ (though only WASP American soldiers are shown) gets its act together and sends rockets to Mars to counterattack. This part of the story is gloriously ludicrous- because of a forcefield around the planet that prevents orbital bombing, soldiers wearing military helmets under their glass spacesuit helmets (why?) parachute to the surface and enter the Martians domed cities to deal out some vengeance. And yes, the cities have monorails (all ‘futuristic’ domed cities from the 60’s have monorails). The soldiers use their weapons to rip open the Martians huge, exposed brains. Nice. Actual earth tanks with US symbols on them (!) roll across the sands of Mars and smash their civilization into the ground. Eventually, the stars and stripes is hoisted on Mars and the soldiers leave just before geological forces tear the planet apart. All in all, it’s an enjoyably silly and unapologetic end to an otherwise harrowing tale.

Unsurprisingly, the cards were pulled from shops due to parental complaints. They are extremely rare nowadays, and a full set is worth around 2,500 US$. Scans of the cards are easily found on the Internet, and many of the images still have the power to shock. Due to the cult nature of Mars Attacks, in the 80’s a similar series was released called Dinosaurs Attack, which similarly featured a fanciful sci-fi premise, ridiculous amounts of gore, and scant regard for scientific or paleontological facts. Perhaps the most disturbing descendant of Mars Attacks is Don’t Let it Happen Here, a‘patriotically’ themed set of cards with artwork depicting scenes of hideous torture, terrorism and human rights abuses in countries other than the US. Scenes include an Iraqi man having his tongue cut off for speaking on television against Saddam Hussein, the Tokyo underground nerve gas killings, and young women in Bangladesh being scarred with sulphuric acid for rejecting suitors, a crime which, according to the card, is endorsed by their government. Presumably the reader is expected to think ‘thank God I live in America where nothing bad ever happens!’

Trading cards are not a phenomenon that ever really caught on outside the States. Just don’t get me started on Premier League Stickers…