Introduction to The Gods of Mars
I suppose I could begin by telling you that the authors of this story have been friends of mine for almost twenty years. I could go on to say that I like their work. A lot. I’ve read them closely and am not ashamed to admit that I’ve stolen learned from each of them.
But we’re here to discuss “The Gods of Mars.” Before we begin, I should warn you that this is a story that has bothered me since I first read it in Omni magazine in 1985. This is, I will argue, one measure of the authors’ success. Because I can’t explain exactly how this story got under my skin without interrogating its central mystery, I urge you to read it now, if you have not already done so, before we continue.
All right? Cool story, no?
It is the nature of our genre that stories often engage in dialog with other stories—sometimes as homage, sometimes as critique. This story chats up the work of the first “Killer B’s:” Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The allusions to Burroughs are explicit and begin with the title. Burroughs published a novel called The Gods Of Mars in 1913; it was his second in the Barsoom sequence. Gardner has revealed that neither of his collaborators had read Burroughs’s Martian novels at the time they wrote this story and that all of the Barsoomian references are his alone. Like Michael and Jack, I have never visited Burroughs’s Mars (although I spent a lot of my childhood in the jungle with Tarzan) and while I recognize these grace notes, they strike no deep resonance with my inner twelve-year-old. But while the physical landscape our astronauts discover is all Burroughs, the psychic landscape is clearly Bradbury-esque. Ray Bradbury created a thoroughly romanticized Mars, the dream-like home of a ghost civilization that haunts its human explorers—and this reader. It is a world where the improbable is commonplace.
What is significant about these literary influences is that both of them inhabit the edges of science fiction. For instance, John Carter needed magic to get to Barsoom. Although Burroughs’ imaginary world is certainly resplendent, one may question its consistency. And while Bradbury launches his expeditions to Mars in rockets, he is interested not at all in space technology or planetary science. In fact, the Mariner 9 mission to Mars stripped The Martian Chronicles of all claims to be taken seriously as science fiction; since 1971 the only way to read Bradbury’s wonderful tales is as fantasy.
And how are we to read “The Gods of Mars”? In the mystery genre, there is a kind of story referred to as the “police procedural.” The “Gods of Mars” begins as “space procedural.” Four astronauts in orbit around Red Planet prepare to launch the lender, which will carry three of them to the surface. Humans are about to step onto Mars for the first time when a storm whips up, obscuring the entire planet. As they wait it out, they become increasingly apprehensive. “. . . the inexorable clock of celestial mechanics was ticking relentlessly away . . . soon the optimal launch window for the return journey to Earth would open . . .” The first third of the story displays a robust scientific rigor that would not have been out of place in the pages of Analog.
When the storm clears, however, the astronauts gaze down upon a strange new planet. Gone are the craters, Olympus Mons, the Valles Marineris; in their place are Percival Lowell’s canals. The crew is unnerved; one of them offers the panicky speculation that the Martians must have changed everything. “They’re out there right now, the flying saucer people!” But level-headed Commander Redenbaugh has checked the ships instrumentation and discovered that the Mars they expected is indeed still there; they must be suffering from some kind of mass hallucination. Although this is not a particularly satisfactory explanation, the crew accepts it as a working hypothesis and votes to continue with the landing. At this point, the story is still within the precincts of science fiction. The plot turns on the problem of the dual perceptions of Mars, but still seems to anticipate a rational solution. Perhaps there is “. . . some kind of intense electromagnetic field out there that we haven’t detected that’s disrupting the electrical pathways of our nervous systems . . .”
Except the story bifurcates here. Up until they make the decision to land, we have seen the action through the point of view of Thomas, who is to command the landing party. Thomas is a well-crafted character, which leads us to assume that he inhabits more or less the same reality as we do, albeit sometime in the future. But immediately after Thomas casts the deciding vote to go for the landing, we are thrust briefly into the point of view of Commander Redenbaugh, who will stay behind in the ship where reason holds its tenuous sway. He is the keeper of our reality, while Thomas and the landing crew step into a fantasy of passing strangeness.
And this is what still bothers me after all these years. I can’t wrap my mind around the notion that even though Commander Redenbaugh sees the fantasy which is Lowell’s Mars, he chooses to believe the instruments, which keep him safe inside the science fiction story. Meanwhile, Thomas can hear Commander Redenbaugh and watch the ship leave orbit, even after he has stepped out of the science fiction story into the fantasy. It’s maddening! The door between these mutually exclusive realities never shuts all the way. I’ve run thought experiments on “The Gods of Mars.” For example, what if there were a way for Commander Redenbaugh to land? Would he see three bodies or his crew skinning the hyena-leopard? What if he chose not to look but merely dispatched a robot to fetch the corpses? Would it be able to retrieve them? If it did, and they were, in fact, as lifeless as the instruments reported, what would happen to the crew paddling down the river? And what will happen to the lost crew and the canals and the lights of the distant city when the next expedition arrives on Mars?
The narrative is silent on these questions. The authors obviously saw no profit in over-defining a choose-your-own-reality story. Reluctantly, I have come to agree with this artistic decision. The unresolved puzzles continue to surprise and intrigue me to this day.
For this reader, however, the phenomenological paradox, while intellectually engaging, isn’t necessarily the deepest aspect of “The Gods of Mars.” I believe that the story poses a more personal question of each of us:
If you could choose, which way would you go? With Redenbaugh or with Thomas?
Me, I honestly don’t know.
James Patrick Kelly