”Fourth Planet from the Sun”
Sep. 15th, 2010 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sergebroomI recently finished Gordon Van Gelder’s 2005 anthology ”Fourth Planet from the Sun”. Not long ago, while doing some weeding of my bookshelves, I came across the above and decided to give a try to these tales of Mars taken from the magazine F&SF’s long history.
There were stories by various luminaries of the field such as Bradbury and Brackett but both of them had done better elsewhere – and even the editor admits to that about Brackett.
On the other hand, it gave me the chance to finally read Zelazny’s ”A Rose for Ecclesiastes” although the decades since I first heard about it probably gave it a legendary stature and expectations that the actual story couldn’t meet in my own mind. Still, it was a nice homage to the Mars of Burroughs, Bradbury and Brackett that the year 1963 had exposed as impossible.
Varley’s ”In the Hall of the Martian Kings” is another legendary SF story that this anthology allowed me to read, but it left me quite dissastisfied overall. The writing at the beginning was rather clunky, for example telling us in two consecutive short paragraphs who the Mars lander’s pilot had been, and revealing more than once that people can lay down.(1). What really bothered me is that what could have been a story of human ingenuity overcoming its being stranded on a harsh planet turned into something that should have been titled ”In the DayCare Center of the Martian Kings”. Oh well.
It was quite interesting to compare Philip K Dick’s clunky We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” to its movie adaptation ”Total Recall”. At least, Dick’s story didn’t have a Scharzenneger’s inflating-then-deflating-without-damage eyeballs. By the way, I have come to the conclusion that any adaptation of Dick truly faithful to the author would come across as a low-budget amateur film in look and in feel.
In the end, the only story that left me completely satisfied was Robert F Young’s ”The First Mars Mission”, in which three kids decide to build a spaceship in their backyard with the intention of going to Mars. And it works. Or does it?
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(1) Yes, even in 1977 people were making that mistake. Just remember. You lie down. You lay something down. Grumblegrumblegrumble…
There were stories by various luminaries of the field such as Bradbury and Brackett but both of them had done better elsewhere – and even the editor admits to that about Brackett.
On the other hand, it gave me the chance to finally read Zelazny’s ”A Rose for Ecclesiastes” although the decades since I first heard about it probably gave it a legendary stature and expectations that the actual story couldn’t meet in my own mind. Still, it was a nice homage to the Mars of Burroughs, Bradbury and Brackett that the year 1963 had exposed as impossible.
Varley’s ”In the Hall of the Martian Kings” is another legendary SF story that this anthology allowed me to read, but it left me quite dissastisfied overall. The writing at the beginning was rather clunky, for example telling us in two consecutive short paragraphs who the Mars lander’s pilot had been, and revealing more than once that people can lay down.(1). What really bothered me is that what could have been a story of human ingenuity overcoming its being stranded on a harsh planet turned into something that should have been titled ”In the DayCare Center of the Martian Kings”. Oh well.
It was quite interesting to compare Philip K Dick’s clunky We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” to its movie adaptation ”Total Recall”. At least, Dick’s story didn’t have a Scharzenneger’s inflating-then-deflating-without-damage eyeballs. By the way, I have come to the conclusion that any adaptation of Dick truly faithful to the author would come across as a low-budget amateur film in look and in feel.
In the end, the only story that left me completely satisfied was Robert F Young’s ”The First Mars Mission”, in which three kids decide to build a spaceship in their backyard with the intention of going to Mars. And it works. Or does it?
-----------
(1) Yes, even in 1977 people were making that mistake. Just remember. You lie down. You lay something down. Grumblegrumblegrumble…
