One of the prototypical science fiction novels is H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which invaders from the Red Planet successfully conquer the Earth, only to succumb in the end, not to humanity’s feeble efforts, but to the attacks of Earth’s microbes, against which they have no defense.
Wells may have been the first SF writer to write about Mars, but he certainly wasn’t the last; Mars has held a special face in SF writing ever since, with authors as diverse as Robert Heinlein, Ben Bova and Kim Stanley Robinson setting novels (and in some cases, whole trilogies) there.
One of the most recent SF novels set on Mars is Geoffrey A. Landis‘s Mars Crossing. It’s a very good book which I highly recommend (and you don’t have to take my word for it–it was on the final ballot this year for a Nebula Award, SF literature’s version of an Oscar), but what makes it particularly interesting is that the author, while he may not have been to Mars himself, has done the next best thing: he’s a NASA scientist who has sent experiments to Mars.
Landis was the science guest of honour at this year’s Con-Version, the annual science fiction convention in Calgary that I visit almost every August. Of course, he wasn’t the only guest; the overall guest of honour was bestselling novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, the toastmaster was Robert J. Sawyer, whom the Ottawa Citizen has dubbed “the dean of Canadian Science Fiction,” the artist guest of honour was Lar deSouza, and the Canadian guest of honour was writer James Alan Gardner. Also on hand were authors Michael Bishop, Allen Steele and Peter Watts, because running concurrent with Con-Version this year was the convention for writers known as ConSpec, put on by On Spec, Canada’s leading magazine of short SF. (And just to round out the event, Con-Version was also this year’s Canadian National Science Fiction Convention, at which the Aurora Awards for the best Canadian SF writing of the year were presented.)
And, yes, there were lots of people running around in SF and fantasy-inspired costumes, many of them quite fabulous–Calgary is home to some top-notch costumers–and there was a dealer’s room where you could buy everything from classic SF books to not-so-classic SF “B” movies–but as I’ve said year after year, you need to look beyond the costumes and the toy ray-guns in the dealers’ room to find the heart of a general SF convention like Con-Version (quite a different animal from a Star Trek or Babylon 5 or Star Wars convention, I assure you)–you need to look at the many panel discussions and special presentations.
Their focus ranged from pure writing topics–“The Dreaded ReWrite,” “What Every Beginning Writer Should Know,” “The Business of Writing: A Canadian Perspective,” “Novel vs. Short Fiction,” to anime and comics, to science topics such as “Glow-in-the-Dark Mice” (focusing on genetic engineering), “Space Travel in Fiction and in Fact,” “Neolithic Man,” and Landis’s presentation, “Invading the Red Planet.”
I made a particular point of attending that one, which focused on Mars exploration past and future. He began with the point I made at the start of this column: Mars has a long history in SF. It’s the most Earth-like planet in the solar system; even through telescopes, you can see that it has ice caps that wax and wane with the seasons. Early telescopic observers thought they saw channels, or canals, criss-crossing its surface, and even drew elaborate maps of those canals–but alas, al the first close-up pictures provided by the Mariner spacecraft in the 1960s showed no canals at all: instead, Mars looked like the Moon, rocky, cratered, and dead.
But our view of Mars changed again with the Viking missions of the 1970s, which placed two landers on the surface and two orbiters above it. The photos from the orbiters revealed features that looked like they had been carved by water, suggesting the planet was once much wetter and warmer, with a much thicker atmosphere, than now…and if it once had water, it might once also have had life.
Better yet, if that water is still there, it might still have life, because everywhere on Earth where we find liquid water, no matter how inhospitable it might seem at first glance, we find life of some sort.
The possibility of life on Mars is one reason why it continues to be the focus of so many of the interplanetary exploration missions launched from Earth–that, and the fact that if we are going to take our first baby steps into the universe at large, the next logical step after the moon is Mars, and before we send astronauts there, we need to know as much about it as possible.
One of the most successful missions so far to Mars was the Mars Pathfinder mission of a few years ago. This included a small roving robot, Sojourner, which rolled down from the lander and poked around at rocks in the vicinity. Dr. Landis, who works at the NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, had an experiment on Sojourner, designed to measure how much dust would collect on solar arrays used on Mars–important to know, because solar arrays obviously become less and less effective at producing power as they get covered with dust. (The experiment showed that solar panels are covered with dust at a rate of just under a third of a percent per day, in case you’re wondering.)
Remember how so many of the rocks were named after cartoon characters? That was probably Dr. Landis’s fault; while anyone on the science team was free to name the rocks seen in Pathfinder’s photos, he was the first to use a cartoon character name, naming one rock, which looked vaguely like the profile of a bear, Yogi. A plethora of cartoonish names followed, from Scooby-Doo to Casper.
Dr. Landis is now part of the team working on the Mars 2003 Exploration Rover mission. Two rovers, each twice as large in every dimension as the Sojourner robot, will be launched next June, and arrive at Mars early in 2004. That same year, the British are sending their own little lander, called the Beagle 2, aboard the larger European Space Agency’s Mars Express space probe. NASA, meanwhile, is planning another Mars orbiter for 2005, then in 2007 a Mars Scout mission. That one isn’t yet finalized, but possibilities include a tiny airplane that would fly over the surface of Mars, taking photos and measurements; a balloon; and even a self-refueling rocket-powered hopper. Another proposal is for Cryobot, a lander that would set down on Mars’s polar ice cap and melt through it to get at the rocks underneath. About the same time the French are planning to send a mission to Mars, then in 2009, NASA is looking at sending a really big rover–picture something a couple of times as tall as a man–and after that, conducting a sample return mission, that will actually bring pieces of Mars back to Earth.
The ultimate goal for many scientists–and probably all science fiction fans–is to send people to Mars. We can do it, Dr. Landis said; technology would need to be developed, but we know what is needed and we know we can develop that technology. It’s more a question of political will and, of course, money.
That will, alas, seems to be lacking at the moment, but as more and more data comes back from Mars, and especially if we find life on Mars, that could change.
For the many people who attended Con-Version and, like me, love, read and write science fiction, it can’t change soon enough.
