Under the Moons of Mars.

I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars

As I was making my way home through Gastown on Friday night, I passed a poster promoting the new Walt Disney film John Carter, which will apparently descend upon an unwitting public on March 9th. Early previews have not given me huge confidence in this swashbuckling adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, but they do make me wonder if the general populace has the least idea of what it's all about.

In other words, who is John Carter?

Old school fans like myself recognize the name immediately, although I suspect that we all append "Of Mars" at the end. John Carter - Virginian gentleman, Civil War veteran, Indian fighter, apparently immortal warrior, and eventual Warlord of Mars* - was the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who is far better known for his ape-man hero Tarzan of the Apes. John Carter's core story is laid out in the three-book series A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars, but his Martian adventures ended up spanning 11 books (the last of which was finished by Burroughs' son and published posthumously) dealing with every possible form of derring-do on the surface of Mars, or Barsoom as its inhabitants call it.

Although John Carter is initially introduced as an immortal who has no knowledge of his long-forgotten origins, the first book places him in post-Civil War Virginia, from whence a penniless ex-Captain Carter of the Confederate Army heads West to make his fortune. After his mining partner has a fatal encounter with Apaches, Carter takes a wrong turn while trying to escape the same fate, and ends up in a mysterious cave at the top of a mountain. From there, he is transported to Mars by a means which is never fully explained, and which, frankly, is completely irrelevant once Burroughs has gotten his character to where he really wants him to be: the arid sands of Barsoom, a dying planet where every man - or Martian - is in a perpetual state of warfare for the dwindling resources that remain.

Burroughs' Barsoom is an astonishingly rich creation, if not necessarily a plausible one. Starting with the six-limbed tusked green Martians who initially discover Carter upon his arrival, Burroughs fills Barsoom with multi-legged riding thoats, the lion-like banthas, savage fanged calots that serve as watchdogs, giant white apes, flying warships, ruined cities, vast wastelands, deadly swamps, and a veritable rainbow of Martian races:  green, red, white, black and yellow. However, all of this is merely background for the romance between John Carter and the incomparable Dejah Thoris, the titular princess of the first book, daughter of the Jed (or king) of the city-state of Helium.**

There's no claim of novelistic brilliance to be made for the Mars books in terms of plot and depth. The stories are unambiguous to the point of cliché: the heroes are uniformly brave, noble, and honourable, and the villains are unreservedly evil and cowardly. That being said, Burroughs wasn't trying to write War and Peace, he wanted to write tales of thrilling adventure, and his success is complete.

That complete success in defining a Mars of excitement, adventure and romance influenced an entire generation of writers, including Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury, and gave birth to a genre of interplanetary adventure fiction that was best represented by the pulp magazine Planet Stories, published from 1939 to 1955. Burroughs' work has continued to be an inspiration to innumerable authors and filmmakers over the years. George Lucas acknowledges his debt to Burroughs for Star Wars, as does James Cameron in the creation of Avatar, and the list of science fiction authors who pay tribute to Barsoom in one form or another is endless.

However, the task of visual adaptation has always evaded complete success in spite of frequent attempts. The six-limbed green Martians are described as ranging from ten to fifteen feet in height, and as such there are practical issues involved in having a six foot tall human interact with characters almost three times his height, and interpretations of the characters, architecture, weaponry and clothing have met with mixed responses.

A Princess of Mars first saw publication in 1912 as a six-part series in All Story Magazine, starting in the February issue, so in a way you could consider the current Disney attempt to be a celebration of the character's centennial - a point which has gone completely unremarked upon in promo for the movie. In fact, I'm a bit worried about the manner in which this historic landmark in the genre of science fiction is being marketed. Why has the Walt Disney company removed the movie so far from its iconic origins? Logic would suggest that if you've got the rights to a series with a massive historical geek following, you'd want to chase that leverage as much as possible.

Instead, it's as if Walt Disney has made a deliberate effort to divorce the movie from its origins by choosing to just use John Carter as the title, and I have to wonder if it indicates lack of confidence in their treatment of the source material.  Would you rush out to see Heathcliff Earnshaw?  Perhaps not - but if I told you that Wuthering Heights was coming to the big screen, I'd probably have a better chance of getting your attention, purely and simply due to the reputation attached to that title. It has to be a bad sign if Disney isn't willing to use the same approach with John Carter and A Princess of Mars.

- Sid

* Well, not all of Mars, to be really honest about it, mostly the city-state of Helium and its allies, plus the Thark tribe of the green Martians - for example, I'm pretty sure that the guys in Dusar never get on board - but let's not pick nits.  After all, a hero is a bit lost without some villains to fight.

** One feels a bit for Dejah Thoris after a while - she seems to spend the entire series being kidnapped, held captive, menaced, threatened, imprisoned, chained, and otherwise abused.  It's surprising that she and John Carter find the time to raise a family.

With no offense to any of the Canadian ladies in my life.

The Doctor: Amy, this is - well - she's my TARDIS - except she's a woman. She's a woman, and she's my TARDIS.
Amy: She's the TARDIS?
The Doctor: And she's a woman. She's a woman and she's the TARDIS.
Amy: Did you wish really hard?
The Doctor: Shut up - not like that.
Idris/TARDIS: Hello…I'm…Sexy.
The Doctor: Ooooo - still shut up.

The Doctor's Wife, Doctor Who

(For those of you who don't know what a TARDIS is - yes, hello, Laurie, how are things -  please visit Wikipedia.   Actually, if you don't already know what a TARDIS is, just skip this post.)
 
Well, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I've found the perfect woman. The bad news is that she lives in Germany, and I have no faith in long distance relationships.

If you'd like a more complete explanation as to why I fell in love with this chicken-loving German schoolteacher, please visit the following YouTube link:

I built a TARDIS

- Sid

"My father's car was science fiction."

Yesterday I attended an entertaining and illuminating evening with science fiction author William Gibson, arranged by the Vancouver Public Library as part of Gibson's promotional tour for his new collection of non-fiction work, Distrust That Particular Flavor.  Gibson's articles and commentaries are a fascinating present-day application of the same brilliant methodology and unique style that he more often uses to create the future.

The event was standing room only, or would have been if the organizers hadn't started setting up more chairs.  I had the good fortune to be Number 24 through the door*, which continues to support my philosophy that if you show up early, you get good seats.

The demographic was an interesting mix that ranged from twenty-year-olds to people who looked to have a decade or two over and above my fifty, suggesting that Gibson's popularity as a writer has maintained itself well over the intervening years since the 1984 publication of his landmark cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. 

Gibson is a little more lined, a little more lean, and what used to be almost trademark unruly mid-length hair has changed to a receding crewcut, but the round wire-framed glasses remain the same as in the pictures of Gibson from the 80s.  He retains a kind of laconic southern drawl from his youth in Virginia which combines well with his flat delivery, although that deadpan sense of humour can make it hard to realize that he's made a joke.

Over the course of the evening, Gibson covered a wide range of topics.  He discussed his early interest in science fiction as almost a given for someone growing up in the United States in the 50s, when everything had a sort of post-war futurism in its design. To illustrate, he pointed out that:

My father's car was science fiction. It was far-out science fiction, it had rocket fins and chrome plates on it.

He went on to discuss the question of science fiction as a predictive medium as he approaches it in his work:

People can and do attempt to predict the future in works of science fiction. Someone like Arthur C. Clarke does today look rather prescient - unusually so by the standards of science fiction. When I began to write science fiction, I convinced myself through my own reading of science fiction and whatever cursory study of comparative  literary critical methodology I was able to apply, it seemed to me that the science fiction fiction of the past could most meaningfully be read as a product of the moment in which it was created. 

When I was a kid, there was a lot of 1940s science fiction around, which I was reading in the late 50's and early 60's, and I actually had to reverse engineer the history of the world as i read it in order to figure out why some things were so wrong.  Because when you finish writing a piece of fiction imagining the future, when you dot the last "i" and put the last period on it, it begins to obsolesce - it begins to acquire a patina of quaintness which ultimately will probably be its greatest charm for readers of the future, in the way that when we read 19th century science fiction today, what we find charming is what they got wrong.  So that always happens.  Nothing dates more quickly than an imagined future.

I tried...knowing that I did my best, when I was starting to write, to try to produce work that would resist that and have some longevity, simply because that was more of a challenge. So I was careful never to have year dates in my early work. 

In fact what happens is that even though people do read it, it's all still in print, people do read that stuff, when they read it now, they think, okay, I know that the central mystery of this book is going to be what happened to all the cell phones.  You may be able to anticipate or at least name cyberspace, but it doesn't mean you can anticipate the advent of ubiquitous cellular telephony, and indeed if anyone had been able to anticipate that in a SF novel of the early 1980s,  what a weird book that would have been!  Imagine a world in which no one is ever truly alone. 

Gibson is resigned to the inevitability of piracy in the digital age.  When asked about his position regarding this problem during the question and answer period, he replied with the following philosophical position:

Everything I've ever written is available as a single BitTorrent download that you can find on hundreds of sites around the world...if that weren't true, you'd have to consider me a failure.

All in all, a good evening.  And it was free, which is an awfully good recommendation for something like this.  

I declined the opportunity to stand in line and obtain Gibson's signature on a newly purchased copy of Distrust That Particular Flavor, although, when you think about it, that's going to be one of the most difficult things to adapt to e-books - and a pretty good justification for not downloading the pirate version of Gibson's collected works. 

- Sid

*  No, my OCD hasn't reached the point where I've started counting people in front of me in event lineups, the organizers were good enough to provide me with a non-winning door prize ticket.