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These
days we all know what Mars looks like and have a good idea
of what we might find should we be able to go there. But you
don't have to go very far back to when nobody knew these things,
and the mysterious "canals" made the planet look
as though an ancient civilization might have once lived there.
Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs penned exciting tales of
adventure on the Red Planet, and others followed suit until
we discovered more about Mars. This is a collection of stories
about "old Mars," the fantastic place people once
thought it might have been.
I love Martin's introduction, describing a more innocent time
of pulp fiction about bug eyed monsters and seductive princesses.
I was born too late to remember any of this, but I have always
enjoyed this type of fiction, so I settled in for a good read.
All the stories are new ones, written for this collection
in 2013, and contain many popular names such as Michael Moorcock,
Mike Resnick, S M Stirling, Mary Rosenblum, and more. Read
about colonists from Earth making a living on Mars, meeting,
fighting or excavating Martians. Some are set in the future,
some even in the past, and all feature their characters finding
trouble, hope, mystery or death far from home. There are cautionary
tales about what happens to those who are not green or destroy
what they don't understand, adventures, romance, detection
and excavation to name a few themes. Interestingly although
all are a neat blend of SF and fantasy, and most contain the
type of scenario you expect in a book like this -- none have
really been written in the same spirit. Pulp heroes weren't
introspective, politically correct, or green. They had adventures,
and that was mostly it; good escapist reading akin to a Western.
The wistful feeling pervading many of the modern tales was
absent, but they were other times, and what you have here
is a book of stories for a modern audience. Dig in and enjoy.
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