Boldly going where lots of science fiction has gone before

Alyssa Rosenberg says there’s no reason so many of our science fiction movies should be set on Mars. It’s just a blank slate for an alien planet – any alien planet - and too few of the films and novels that use it only do so as a prop rather than as a real place. John Carter is only set there because the original Edgar Rice Burroughs books were – and it would be odd to have John Carter of Mars play out anywhere else. By contrast, she writes: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy works because there are very specific reasons for the characters to be going to Mars—an international consortium has decided it can viably made habitable (as a way to make it potentially mineable and a population escape hatch for Earth)—and a great deal of the novel’s plot is drawn from Mars-specific forces. The amount of radiation the characters are getting both drives them close together in protected habitats and encourages the experimentation that leads to a treatment to reverse aging. The religion that develops on Mars, the areophany, is specific to the planet. The political and philosophical debates are directly tied to how people feel about Mars’ geography and geological history. It’s really a shame that we can get an infinite number of failed and hugely spectacles set on Mars, but we can’t make a series or a television show out of a fully-realized, very smart Martian adventure that (other than some special effects work to show the Martian gravity) could be made pretty darn cheap. Another novel that uses Mars very effectively is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. In that book, Mars is colonized by Earth outside of the frozen-time bubble that our planet has been placed under. And so, over the course of just months of Earth time, an entire civilization grows up on Mars, and the people of that planet evolve into other beings entirely – not quite human, and not quite alien. It’s one of the most intriguing Mars colonization stories I’ve read. But I think the real reason so much science fiction, both in film and literature, takes a crack at Mars is because the red planet is on the horizon. The reason speculative fiction writers often write about the not-so-distant future is the same reason they write about the not-so-distant planets. There’s possibility there. The potential of perpetuating our manifest destiny into space exists on Mars in ways it can’t exist elsewhere. Behind every science fiction author there’s that chance that something they predicted or hoped for would come true. Ray Bradbury has been very vocal in his desire to see humanity set foot on Mars soil. Fantasy may be about other worlds that mirror our own, but science fiction is about other worlds that our world could become. Mars may be a convention that’s outworn its welcome, but it still represents the closest extraterrestrial sphere of human potential. And besides, Mars is similar enough to Earth that some scientists say it could be terraformed. So there’s a little bit of science backing up the science fiction. Maybe we champion Mars over and over again because it represents hope. As Bradbury himself once said, “What’s the use of looking at Mars through a telescope, sitting on panels, writing books, if it isn’t to guarantee, not just the survival of mankind, but mankind surviving forever!”