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While the tree-rat part of Arthur’s story would have worked as well on any incidental asteroid or small moon in the solar system–like Phobos, most little moons were probably asteroids to begin with–Arthur chose Phobos, and thereby invoked all the continuing hope and disappointment and continuing mystery of the planet Mars.
What an irony that Arthur should have concluded his original commentary on this volume with a lament for a lost Soviet Mars probe,
Phobos I
. The Soviet Union is history now, and in the year 2000 what’s gone missing most recently is a big chunk of NASA’s Mars program, two spacecraft in a row, with nothing but the ghost of a signal, vanishingly faint and possibly imaginary, reported from the Polar Lander. Mars seems determined to frustrate our curiosity.
Which only serves to excite us. Far from discouraging speculation, every bit of hard-won truth about Mars fuels more of it. If there are none of Percival Lowell’s irrigation canals criss-crossing the planet, if there are none of Carl Sagan’s “polar bears” wandering the Martian icecaps, there is good evidence for ancient seas (of a sort, incidentally, that nicely underpin the events of the final volume in the
Venus Prime
series). If there is no chance of lush Barsoomian romance, writers like Greg Bear and Bill Hartmann and Stan Robinson have come up with plenty of all-too-human stories set against red rock and dry ice. This is one of those.
I still treasure my childhood copy of Willy Ley’s
Conquest of Space
, with Chesley Bonestell’s painting of a straight blue waterway and its verdant irrigated fields stretching across the tangerine sands, yet
Viking’s
arid images came as no disappointment.* I grew up in the American Southwest before it became crowded with spas and pastelpine furniture stores, so red rock is no stranger to me; a cold dry Mars is romantic enough.
*Rocket pioneer Willy Ley, who fled the Nazis for the U.S. in 1935, never lost his thick German accent. When someone once asked him if his first name should be pronounced with a W or a V, he replied “Veelly or Veelly, it’s all the same to me.”
All double entendres about the Red Planet changed into non sequiturs overnight when the Soviet Union imploded, not long after this book was written. But little of what we know about the physical Mars has changed since then; some new knowledge has come from the
Pathfinder
lander, but most has come from the systematic study of images taken from orbit. Used as a textbook, science fiction is full of treachery, but the reader will not be completely misled by the description of the red planet (lower case) in these pages.
To add human dimension to the evidence, I drew upon memories of teenage wanderings in the mountains and deserts of New Mexico and Colorado, of later trips deep into the slickrock and sand dunes of Utah and California, the Navajo and Hopi country of Arizona, and such corners of Nevada as the spectacular sandstone formations of the Valley of Fire. Labyrinth City borrows from Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, the forever-unfinished concrete dream that hangs from the basalt rim of a mesa north of Phoenix; when I visited the visionary architect and his inspired followers in the 1970s, they spoke as colonizers of an alien planet might.
Some of these Southwestern memories have been much exaggerated by time, but no matter; imagining Mars, I had to exaggerate more. From Telescope Peak in the Panamints to the deepest part of Death Valley is a sheer 11,000-foot drop, but nothing like the Valles Marineris. The air in northern New Mexico is thin, and the wind is cold, but nothing like Mars. “Compared to Mars, Antarctica is Tahiti.”
The horizontal scale can be approximated, however. Helping a friend drive his fifteen-year-old Chevy from Wichita to Anchorage one summer with an overloaded trailer in tow–the yoke snapped 150 miles short of our destination–and, having gotten him there, hitchhiking all the way back, acquainted me with the taste of lonely distances.
The taste is dust. The endless dust of the Alaskan Highway–all gravel north of Dawson Creek in those days–was inspiration enough for a truck trip across the cold Martian desert.
Except for our own moon, extrapolation is the best we’ve got to describe alien worlds. It inevitably misleads us, but it also prepares us. The astronauts who stepped onto the moon did not sink into bottomless dustpits, but they were properly cautious at first of the lunar surface, whose mountains had been so evidently sanded smooth by an infinite rain of micrometeorites, just as gadfly astrophysicist Tommy Gold had suggested, even if his dire prediction of lunar quicksand was wrong.
Never mind the political arrangements of a future Mars–fantasies that, inevitably, will soon be unstrung by Earth’s own history–any credible extrapolation of the physical conditions of Mars will be fueled more by the surmises of unorthodox scientists like Gold than by science fiction writers, no matter how hard we try. It’s a dirty secret known to all of us in the science fiction community that science itself is far more intriguing (if less accessible) than anything any writer among us can make up.
Intimate acquaintance with Mars, and the surprises it will bring, will require more robotic expeditions and finally personal visits. It will require not only on-the-scene science, it will require the willingness to live in the place. Paraphrasing Roald Amundsen, who made it to the South Pole and back without loss of life, Freeman Dyson said of discovery that “tragedy is not our business.” Amundsen’s rival, R. F. Scott, died tragically in the losing race to the pole along with his colleagues, which is to say they died nobly if unnecessarily.
That’s where extrapolation can help. Fiction writers are better extrapolaters than most, certainly better than professional futurists. Engineers can plan; beyond planning, any optimist can imagine the joy of discovery, but fiction writers, adequately informed, imagine the grief, the misery, and the struggle, without losing sight of the joy. We do it the easy way, of course: we sit at our desks and daydream. But if we do that well, we prepare the ground of the future for those who will inhabit it for real.
Wells, Burroughs, Bradbury, Dick and dozens of writers before and after them imagined a Mars that might now seem silly, taken at face value. But it’s because they imagined Mars so provocatively that we are willing to spend the money to go there, I think. NASA and the Soviet space agency never set out to prove any of them wrong; every flight to Mars has been undertaken in the secret hope, rarely spoken aloud or leaked to the press, that what those writers had imagined would in some small part prove true.
The more Mars tries to hide from us, the more determined we are to seek it out. In many stories, Arthur C. Clarke has imagined Mars with more clarity than his predecessors and peers, and he’s never lost his fascination with the real place. The long journeys across the sands and through the skies of an imagined Mars–a realistic Mars, to the best of our knowledge–narrated in this volume of
Venus Prime
are my attempt to live up to Arthur’s standards of imagined truth.
Venus Prime:
Marstruck
Open terrain heavy transport tractor–overview; cut-away perspective; cab/tractor overview; wireframe overview cutaway; undercarriage components; turbines.
Architecture–glass weld integrity scan; wireframe overview; plan view; components–cast glass, carbon filament, ceramics.
Marsplane
Climate-driven geo-flex controlled long-range sailplane–canopy false color atmospheric display; cockpit module; perspective of cockpit; rato schematic, ratomount, geo-flex control; rocket assisted take-off; canopy display, cockpit overview, tail section.
Topographical section–surface approximation.
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