Listening to Nine to Eternity

One of the things I love about contributing to anthologies is reading all the contributions by other authors. Unfortunately, sometimes life gets busy and by the time I receive a contributor copy, I don’t have the time to read the anthology right away and it ends up added to my to-read stack. That was what happened when Nine to Eternity came out in 2020 while I was hard at work on my novella Breaking the Code and Kitt Peak National Observatory was preparing to reopen for science. As it turns out, Nine to Eternity is one of the rare anthologies which has been published as an audiobook, so I was able to give it a listen during a recent commute to Kitt Peak.

Nine To Eternity: A Science Fiction Anthology began when the editor, M. Christian, reached out to the authors to invite them to submit “a personal favorite story: one that also, sadly, didn’t get the love they’d put into it.” The anthology is also a sequel of sorts to M. Christian’s anthology Five to the Future: All New Novelettes of Tomorrow and Beyond. Christian invited all the original authors back, and then asked each of them to invite a friend to submit a story for the new anthology. That’s how I became connected to the book.

The audio edition is read by Gordon MacCathay who has a wonderful, deep voice. He also has great vocal control and was able to give each character in each story a distinctive voice. I was able to follow the events without any difficulty.

The anthology opens with the story “Skin Deep” by Emily Devenport. It tells the story of a woman on the planet Moasai who enters her dog, Puke, in the Ugliest Pet in the Galaxy contest. But before she can win the contest, she must resolve a dispute over the dog’s ownership.This was a fun tale with a nice romantic sub-plot.

Next up is “Spitzkov Red” by Jody Scott. Raik is a young man nearing graduation from the military academy. For his final test, he must face the hologram of a famous ancestor and learn about his family’s true nature. It takes a thoughtful look at the nature of comradeship and service while also delivering a poignant twist ending.

In Ralph Greco Jr.’s “Bombastic Christ”, Jesus is cloned from DNA taken from the Shroud of Turin. Agents plan to capture the clone. However, the growth agent used by the university researchers behind the project goes wrong, creating a giant toddler Jesus who goes on a rampage through the university.

The story I knew best besides my own was Ernest Hogan’s “The Great Mars-a-Go-Go Mexican Standoff” because I was the first person to publish the story in Tales of the Talisman Magazine. What’s more, Ernest is the friend who recommended me to M. Christian for this anthology. This is a rollicking tale of a detective hired by a model’s head to find out who stole her body and is holding it for ransom.

From the introduction, I gather Arthur Byron Cover wrote “A Murder” to help process the loss of friends to murder. I can’t honestly say I “enjoyed” this tale because Cover is so effective at getting inside the head of both the misogynistic murderer and his terrified victim. Still, it’s well written and worth reading, if nothing else for its reflections on how casually writers of popular fiction often treat the subject of violent death.

Cynthia Ward gives us a breezy steampunk tale set in London’s East End. Lucy Harker is a woman who has gained great strength and skill through her life experiences and seeks to end a mass murderer’s career. Her efforts bring her to the attention of a certain consulting detective’s older brother who sits near the seat of British government.

My story about the discovery of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth comes next. In this case, it was fun to just sit back and hear how Gordon MacCathay interpreted Professors Jerry Auchincloss and Bethany Lange, along with Auchincloss’s assistant Roy Talbot. I enjoyed hearing the story read back to me and only caught a couple of places where I might have said something a little differently if I ever had another chance to edit the story.

The penultimate story in the anthology is “In the Canal Zone” by Jean Marie Stine. It imagines a sort-of inter-dimensional way station where people might flee dangers in their home dimension. In this case, a young girl befriends one such person and helps her elude pursuit. As with many tales in this book, it gives us a nice twist ending.

M. Christian closes the anthology with a whimsical story he wrote in his early days learning the craft of writing. He tells a tale of humans living in a near paradise where they have everything they need until a force is unleashed that causes the humans to begin disappearing, which then leads them to build the first skyscraper.

Listening to this anthology felt like spending time with old friends. I’m fortunate to be acquainted with Ernest Hogan, Emily Devenport, and Cynthia Ward in real life. I’ve also had the pleasure of publishing one of Ralph Greco, Jr.’s stories in Tales of the Talisman. If you haven’t discovered this anthology, I encourage you to give it a read or a listen.

The Kindle edition is available at: https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Eternity-Science-Fiction-Anthology-ebook/dp/B08JHBGTJS/

The Audible edition is available at: https://www.audible.com/pd/Nine-to-Eternity-Audiobook/B08VNF8Q4Y

You can also find the audio book at iTunes and Amazon.

Daniel the Vampire Astronomer

The first vampire story I sold was “Vampire in the City of Crosses,” which appeared in a 2001 issue of The Vampire’s Crypt edited by Margaret L. Carter. One of the things that brought that story to life was the character of Daniel the vampire astronomer. In the story, Daniel tells us about his history in two paragraphs:

“One cold night in 1899 I was walking from the dome of the 24-inch telescope to my sleeping quarters when I heard a low growl. Wary, I thought I’d stumbled upon a mountain lion. Seemingly, my fears were confirmed when something pounced on me in the darkness. I felt the teeth tear into my jugular and my own blood leave my body for the last time. The body on me was not covered in fur as I expected and it was not a mountain lion. It was more like a man. I was euphoric as the creature’s blood passed to my body. I became a vampire there in the snow, on a clear winter’s night on a hill outside Flagstaff.

“The vampire that attacked me taught me how to feed and how to sleep during the day so that others would not find me. Coffins come in handy, but I really do prefer a soft bed. He taught me the basics and little more. I’ve met only a few other vampires. We have conversed some, but for the most part we leave each other alone. We seem to be creatures of solitude. Maybe it’s just me but there are times I long for a new master.”

I adapted the short story “Vampire in the City of Crosses” into a chapter of my novel Vampires of the Scarlet Order. In the years since the novel’s publication, people have cited the idea of a vampire astronomer as one of the aspects that made them pick up the book. When I revised the book for Hadrosaur Productions in 2020 and hired Chaz Kemp to do the cover, he asked if one of the characters could be black. I realized I never specified Daniel’s ethnicity, so we agreed Daniel should be black. I added language to the new edition to affirm that choice and I believe it added a new dimension to the character.

Two years later, I’m working on a new Scarlet Order novel where I spend more time getting to know the vampires even better. I began to think about those two paragraphs describing Daniel’s origin and wondered what impact his ethnicity might have had on that story. I decided to flesh out Daniel’s origin into a full short story of its own, which is titled “The Older Worlds of Space” and it has just appeared in the Samhain 2022 issue of The Hungur Chronicles Magazine. The story’s title is a reference to The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, a tribute to the fact that Daniel McKee and Percival Lowell were observing Mars at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Hungur Chronicles focuses on vampires in or from outer space as well as those encountered on Earth. Published twice a year, on Walpurgisnacht and Samhain, it features stories, articles, illustrations, and poetry by new voices as well as familiar ones. In addition to my story, the issue contains a novelette by Tyree Campbell along with short stories by such folks as Kelly A. Harmon, Joe Whitlow, and Gary Davis. There are feature articles by Tales of the Talisman alumni Robert E. Porter and Gary Davis plus poems by such folks as Sandy DeLuca, Guy Belleranti, and Juleigh Howard-Hobson. As of this writing, I’m still reading the issue, but so far, the poem “Vampire Visit” by Guy Belleranti, the article “Severed Heads and Omens of Death: The Horror Origins of Halloween” by Gary Davis, and the story “The Cure is in the Blood” by JR Blanes are particular standouts for me. If you’re a vampire fan and looking for some new stories, be sure to check out The Hungur Chronicles.

You can pick up a copy of the current issue of The Hungur Chronicles at: https://www.amazon.com/Hungur-Chronicles-Samhain-2022/dp/1088075428/

War of the Worlds: Infestation

While reading and enjoying Caliber’s Oz comics a few days ago, an ad for another comic series from Caliber caught my eye. This new comic book appeared to be inspired by the H.G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds. I was especially captivated by the cover, shown here, which depicted Martian tripods in the Mississippi, near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. A quick online search revealed this to be War of the Worlds: Infestation written by Randy Zimmerman, with art by Horus Odenthal. Given that Tucson’s Wild Wild West Con is fast approaching, and that War of the Worlds is one of my favorite Victorian-era science fiction novels, I thought this comic might be just the thing to help me get into the mindset for the event.

Looking up the comic online, I discovered the Infestation comic is intended to be something of a sequel to the original version of The War of the Worlds. The Martians returned for a second invasion in 1997. The comic opens five years after that in 2003. At this point, the Martians have made great strides toward world conquest. The action is set primarily in Kansas City, Missouri and a small Kansas town called Haven, which is between Hutchison and Witchita. Given that my daughter lives in Kansas City and my wife’s aunt lives in Hutchison, I felt like this was an interesting setting and I was further intrigued to check out the comic, even though it eschewed the Victorian setting of the original.

War of the Worlds: Infestation only lasted for five issues and the issues are all collected in a single graphic novel, which is available both in print and digitally. Because the story starts very much in media res, we don’t get much background about the new invasion. Presumably the Martians found a way to fight off Earth bacteria and have slowly and steadily begun to march across the world. Most of the Martians use the familiar tripod war machines. A nice, original idea is that the Martians can combine damaged war machines to make a even larger, more formidable six-legged varieties. The comic shows a good familiarity with the novel. Not only do the Martians drive their tripod machines and fire heat rays, but they lay down thick, deadly clouds of gas, go through conquered cities and harvest humans for food, and all the while, the strange red Martian weed is growing.

The comic opens with a woman driving from Kansas City to Haven. Quite sick, she drives through a patch of the red weed, but is able to continue on until she reaches Haven, where she passes out at an outlying watch station. The woman in charge of the watch station goes into town to get help. Unfortunately, the van the woman drove picked up spores from the red weed and it begins to devour the watch station and threaten the watch station manager’s daughter. Fortunately, the watch station manager returns and is able to rescue her daughter. Along the way, the station manager realizes the van may hold some clues about how to stop the new Martian invasion. Meanwhile, we also see the story of some resistance fighters who are trying to hold the line in Kansas City after the Martian machines destroyed St. Louis, as depicted on the graphic novel’s cover.

Overall, the comic told an enjoyable story and had some good characters and thrilling action. I appreciated a cast that featured women and people of color in several prominent roles. I did feel the comic could have done with a little stronger script editing. There were some confusing lines and moments I think were meant to be humorous that felt either weird or just fell flat for me. Like Caliber’s Oz series, all the art is black and white, which again suits the grim tone. Horus did a great job visualizing the Martian machines and even imagines a truly surreal Martian structure in Kansas City. I felt like the digital edition of the graphic novel purchased through Amazon was a fair value and provided an enjoyable read, which reminded me of several compelling aspects of the original Wells novel.

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Revisiting a Classic

It! The Terror from Beyond Space is a 1958 science fiction film with a screenplay written by one of my favorite authors, Jerome Bixby. I’ve heard that the film inspired Dan O’Bannon when he wrote the screenplay for Alien. The overall premise is much the same. Aboard a spaceship, the crew is locked in a life-or-death struggle with a formidable alien creature. Bixby himself is probably best known as the creator of Star Trek’s mirror universe and also the author of the short story “It’s a Good Life” which was the basis of a Twilight Zone episode of the same title starring Bill Mumy. I met Jerome Bixby briefly while standing in line to watch Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan in 1982.

I recently came across a 2010 comic book adaptation of It! The Terror from Beyond Space published by IDW comics, who currently publish Star Trek and Doctor Who comics in the United States. The comic is written by Dara Naraghi with art by Mark Dos Santos. I liked the idea of retelling the story of a classic film as a comic book so I picked up the short run series, then rewatched the original film.

The comic series essentially follows the plot of the film. A spaceship goes to Mars to rescue a crashed exploratory mission. When they arrive, they find only one survivor, the captain of the original mission. All the evidence suggests that the first mission’s captain killed his crew so that he’d have sufficient resources to survive until the rescue party arrived. All the while, the captain maintains his innocence, saying a monster killed the crew. The captain is taken prisoner, but as the rescue ship prepares to leave, they dump some waste overboard, leaving the door open. This provides a path for the Martian to get aboard.

I suspect largely for budget reasons, the movie rushes through the early part of the story on Mars. We hear some narration over a lovely panorama showing us the wreckage of the exploratory ship and the rescue ship getting ready to leave. Then we cut to a press conference where an official on Earth tells a room full of reporters what happened. Soon after that, in the movie, the monster begins making trouble.

The comic spends most of the first issue on this early part of the story. This allows us a little more time to get to know the crew and wonder about the captain of the first mission. We also get to know more about the relationships of the rescue ship’s crew. In the movie, it’s hinted that the captain and the chief scientist had a romance. In the comic, that’s a bigger element of the plot. One of the things I love about the movie is that it actually had women in the crew, unlike Forbidden Planet, where the C-57D had a distinctly all-male crew. It was refreshing to see some black characters among the crew in the updated version as well.

I was initially disappointed to see that the first issue of the comic only really acknowledged the movie with a fine-print copyright notice on the inside front cover. However, in the second issue, we learn that a member of the rescue party takes orders from a shadowy group called the Bixby Wing, which was a fun nod to Jerome Bixby.

Overall, the comic maintains the feel of the 1950s film while updating some elements. The monster feels like one that would have been envisioned in that era, if they’d had more effects money. They maintained the overall look of the tall, cigar-shaped rocket ship, including the iconic thick hatches between decks. I’m sorry to say that the three-issue comic series is out of print and hard to find. The comics were part of IDW’s “Midnite Movie” series, which they don’t seem to have released digitally. Still, I do recommend the comics if you can find copies and the movie always makes a fun way to spend an evening.

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If you enjoy my posts, please take a moment to learn about my novels at http://www.davidleesummers.com or consider supporting me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/davidleesummers so that I can maintain an ad-free experience here at the Web Journal.

Perseverance on Mars

It was exciting to see the successful landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover in Mars’s Jezero Crater this past week. Although I don’t study Mars as part of my work at Kitt Peak National Observatory, the red planet has long fascinated me. I love the journey of discovery we’ve taken in learning about the planet from the nineteenth century through the present day, from early observers who noted linear artifacts on the planet’s surface and thought they were canals to modern day engineers who are sending robots to explore the red planet. I have been asked why we need another rover to drive around a crater rather than going to a more exciting place like Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system or Valles Marineris a canyon that dwarfs Earth’s Grand Canyon. The simple fact is that the primary mission of Perseverance is to look for evidence that life existed on Mars. No mission has looked for direct signs of life since the Viking landers in the mid 1970s, a mission I followed with keen interest as a kid!

Close up of a river delta in Jezero crater Perseverance scientists hope to explore. Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU-Berlin

Perseverance’s landing site was Jezero Crater, which shows evidence of once having held water. There are inflow and outflow channels, plus a river delta. This makes it a great site to look for evidence of either existing or fossilized microbial life. Not only is the landing site interesting, but the rover is not just a copy of previous successful rovers. It also includes the ability to gather samples, save them, and put them on a rocket which can be blasted into orbit, where a future mission can bring them back to Earth. This is a truly exciting aspect of this mission. When I heard geologist and astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmidt speak at Bubonicon a couple of years ago, he emphasized how valuable samples in an Earth-based laboratory can be. He pointed out that geologists are still making discoveries from the lunar rocks he brought back in the 1960s. Getting some Martian rock samples back on Earth would be a real treasure.

Perseverance also includes some cool features. My personal favorite is the Ingenuity helicopter. As I understand, this little helicopter is currently stowed in Perseverance’s belly. When it’s deployed, it’ll give engineers the opportunity to test powered flight on Mars. If this works, this might allow us to send more sophisticated flying craft to Mars in the future that could go farther and learn more than the wheeled rovers we’ve been sending. Another cool instrument on Perseverance is a microphone. Believe it or not, for as many times as we’ve been to Mars, we don’t know what it sounds like to be on the surface. As a writer, I look forward to that extra layer of sensory experience.

You can follow Perseverance’s progress on NASA’s website. This map shows where Perseverance is and will chart it’s progress as it begins it journey of discovery: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/where-is-the-rover/

You can learn more about the rover and its mission objectives at: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/overview/

Although this mission doesn’t take us to some of Mars’s more dramatic sites, it does pave the way for future journeys to those places. I really want to see those places and I imagine a visit to both Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris in my novel The Solar Sea, which is available until March 4 as part of the Expansive Futures StoryBundle. In that bundle, you get eighteen excellent science fiction books for one low price. Learn more at: https://storybundle.com/scifi

Mars at Opposition

On October 13, 2020, the planet Mars reached a position in its orbit called “opposition” with respect to the Earth. What this means is that the Sun, Earth, and Mars are all lined up so that the Sun illuminates Mars from directly behind us. It actually wasn’t Mars’s closest approach, that happened about a week earlier on October 6. I decided to take advantage of Mars’s opposition to get some photographs.

I used the 8-inch Celestron telescope I received as a high school graduation present in the 1980s. My camera is an Orion Starshoot Eyepiece Camera that takes video. I use free software called Registax 6 to grab frames from the video and combine them into a single, finished image.

The first set of photos I tried were on the night of October 11, just before opposition. It was the most beautiful, clear night I had seen in Las Cruces in a long time. Unfortunately it had been windy during the day, making the atmosphere fairly turbulent. As a result, the images weren’t as clear as I could have hoped. Still, I took two images about an hour apart and was excited to notice that I could see that the planet had rotated from one frame to the next. Note, in the caption below, I use “Universal Time” or “UT” which is based on Greenwich Mean Time. Here in the Southwestern United States, around this time of year, midnight UT happens about an hour before sunset. It can be a convenient way for astronomers to measure time

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Left: Mars at 3:53 UT on October 12. Longitude about 250 degrees. Right: Mars at 5:00UT on October 12. Longitude about 265 degrees.

While preparing for this blog post, I discovered that the website for Sky and Telescope Magazine has a very nice tool that lets you determine the longitude of Mars facing us at a given time of the night. You can find the tool at: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/interactive-sky-watching-tools/mars-which-side-is-visible/#

With the longitudes in hand, I went back to my handy copy of A Photographic History of Mars: 1905-1961 by E.C. Slipher of Lowell Observatory and found photos of Mars that are similar to the longitudes I show in my photos above. It was gratifying to see my images with an 8-inch telescope compare somewhat favorably with images attained by the Lowell Observatory 24-inch telescope in 1941.

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Mars at longitudes 208 and 259 degrees from October 1941.

I went back out on the night of October 17, which proved to be a much more stable night. Unfortunately, there were some high clouds, but in my experience, those sometimes stabilize the atmosphere. I took a longer sequence of images and obtained a truly beautiful image of Mars. Just for comparison sake, Sky and Telescope’s calculator says it would be centered on longitude 200 degrees, which is close to the left image above.

Mars at 3:43UT on October 18.

I was very pleased with this last image about five days after opposition. It compares very well with images that were taken at Lowell Observatory on photographic plates. I also noticed that I captured a very small hint of the north polar cap in my photograph.

For fun, I also took images of Saturn and Jupiter both nights. The ones from October 11 aren’t very good, but here are my images from October 17.

Saturn

When I took my image of Jupiter, I wanted a “family portrait” showing the planet with the four Galilean moons that are easily visible in my 8-inch telescope. As it turns out, the human eye has better dynamic range than my Orion Starshoot camera. To photograph the moons, I had to overexpose the planet. So the image below is a little bit of photographic trickery. I took an image to capture the moons, then I took a second image to capture details on the planet. As the two images were taken back to back at the same orientation, I just overlaid one image over the other to get my family portrait. The moons, from left to right are Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa.

A Jovian family portrait.

As I write this, preparations are underway to reopen Kitt Peak National Observatory after it was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Once I get back to work, I’ll be working with much larger telescopes and much more sophisticated instrumentation than my 36-year old Celestron and its little video camera. Even so, there’s nothing like sitting out on a dark night, looking across the gulf of space and dreaming of what it would be like to visit the planets in person.

Perseverance in Space

Last Thursday, I woke up early to watch as NASA’s Mars 2020 mission was launched. The mission includes the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone. The mission’s main goal is to look for signs of ancient life on Mars and collect rock samples which may be returned to Earth.

The launch of the Mars 2020 Mission

The rocket launch itself couldn’t have been more perfect. The weather at the Florida launch site was beautiful and the rocket lifted off the pad, flying straight and true. In fact, it lifted off so quickly, I couldn’t snap the screenshot from my computer before it left the pad! The rover is scheduled to arrive at Mars early next year. It incorporates many design elements from the highly successful Curiosity rover. It also incorporates autonomous driving technology, so NASA engineers can give it a course and let it avoid obstacles using onboard computers. In fact, that’s part of the reason for the helicopter drone. The drone can fly over the surface and help Perseverance map its course over the Martian landscape.

The primary mission objective is to look for evidence that life existed at one time on Mars. There are on-board instruments for achieving this, including the SHERLOC spectrometer which can accomplish microscopic imaging and help search for organic compounds. Perseverance will also collect samples which could be returned to Earth by a future Mars mission. As emphasized when I met Dr. Harrison Schmidt last year, nothing allows for detailed analysis like having actual physical samples in a lab. One of the reasons we would like to know whether life ever existed on Mars is that it would give us a better sense for how easy it would be to find life elsewhere. What’s more, there are some theories that life on Earth actually started on Mars and that it came to Earth as the result of an asteroid collision. So, we could gain insight into our own origins.

I watched the launch as part of an event hosted by The Planetary Society and Space For Humanity. The Planetary Society’s CEO, Bill Nye spoke after the launch. One question I see raised when discussing space exploration is, “wouldn’t it be better to spend that money on problems here on Earth?” This seems especially prescient in the middle of a global pandemic. Of course, you physically can’t invest all the funds on Earth into one problem. That would utterly destroy the economy and leave people hungry and destitute. Nye noted, “All the money we spend on space, is spent on Earth.” Investing in space is paying the salaries of the engineers, scientists, and technicians who make this happen. It’s investing in the companies that build the parts for these craft and that money gets reinvested into the economy. What’s more we receive dividends in these investments such as new technologies that do make the world a better place to live. Those technologies may even help to develop and deliver vaccines.

David the Space Cowboy wants to know when it’s time to board!

Space for Humanity is a group who has a vision of giving as diverse a group of people the chance to experience traveling to space. I believe that’s a worthy goal. After all, we need the experience of many people from many backgrounds if we’re going to reach for the stars. One of the places where we may succeed in getting to space in the near future is from Space Port America, just north of where I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico. One of the people who spoke after the launch was George Whitesides, Chief Space Officer for Virgin Galactic, who said their next goal is to accomplish manned flight from the New Mexico spaceport. In the photo above, I’m being a space cowboy, hanging out with one of the Virgin Galactic craft that may actually travel into space from this area. Time to saddle up and move out!

Back to Barsoom

Today, I’m taking a look at a couple of older science fiction novels from the book collection I share with my wife. These are two of the later volumes in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous John Carter of Mars series. The series had its start in 1912 when Percival Lowell still argued there were canals built by intelligent beings on the surface of Mars. John Carter himself was a former Confederate soldier prospecting in Arizona when his human body died in a cave and he found himself resurrected on Mars, known to its inhabitants as “Barsoom.” What’s interesting about this back story is how much it resembles the fate of Camille Flammarion’s heroes from his 1890 novel, Urania.

Each of the Burroughs’ Mars novels opens as one of the characters on Mars, usually John Carter returning to his human body, comes home to tell humans a story of recent events on the red planet. I picked up the Mars books where I left off, on volume 7, A Fighting Man of Mars. In this book, the Martians develop Tesla-like long-distance radio to communicate with Earth and the story is told that way. In this novel, John Carter is relegated to the role of minor supporting character. The protagonist is Tan Hadron, a warrior infatuated with one of Barsoom’s noblewomen, Sanoma Tora. The plot moves into full swing when raiders capture Sanoma Tora and Hadron volunteers to rescue her. It’s good fun action and adventure that makes a lot of twists and turns. Along the way, Hadron meets a slave girl named Tavia who proves to be a capable and competent fighter. It’s a set up that could easily have become cliche or fallen into tropes of romantic adventure fiction that were tired even then. At worst Burroughs teeters on the edge of those tropes before giving us a rousing conclusion.

I had so much fun with this book that I continued into the next book in the series, Swords of Mars. This one is focused on John Carter, who returns to Earth to narrate his story to an old friend. In this tale, Carter travels to the Martian city of Zodanga to break up an assassination ring. While in Zodanga, Carter learns that two scientists are racing to build rockets to travel to the moons of Mars. When the assassins learn Carter is on their tail, they use one of the space vessels to travel to Carter’s home of Helium and kidnap his wife, Dejah Thoris. They then take her to Mars’s moon called Thuria with plans of holding her for ransom. Carter takes the other space vessel and goes in pursuit.

These two novels were published in 1930 and 1936 respectively. At this time, there were still questions about whether or not Mars could support life. Although these novels first appeared when my parents were young children and they do fall into “damsel in distress” plots, Burroughs does make a point of showing women as capable and competent, which felt refreshing after Voyage of the Space Beagle with its all-male crew.

Can one still find relevance in pulp fiction written nearly a century ago, set on a planet we know has no ancient cities linked by canals? I think the answer is yes. In both books, John Carter has a motto: “I still live.” The idea is that while Carter still lives, he has a chance of finding his way out of even the most difficult situations. In these challenging times, I take comfort in Carter’s motto. I also appreciate how the heroes in these novels stand up for the oppressed despite terrible odds. Percival Lowell may have imagined a Mars with canals and ancient life, but Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined a Mars that I would, at the very least, want to visit and explore.

Mars Globes

One of the places my family and I visited during our July travels was Lowell Observatory on Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona. This was where Percival Lowell, a former US ambassador to Korea, set up shop in the late nineteenth century to observe the planet Mars and search for the elusive Planet X. One thing that captivated Lowell about Mars were the linear features crisscrossing the planet. The more he observed them, the more he became convinced they were canals built by intelligent beings. Over the years, Lowell would make many maps of Mars and publish essays detailing how the red planet must be an abode of life. Lowell also made globes.

Martian globe on display at Lowell Observatory

As it turns out, Lowell’s canals do not exist. They seem to be the result of some optical phenomena going on within the telescope itself enhanced by wishful thinking. It’s easy to imagine Lowell gazing up at Mars from his chair in Flagstaff, imagining a dying desert world with intelligent Martians hanging on through their ingenuity, digging canals to bring water from the polar caps to arable farm land in the equatorial regions. These ideas would go on to inspire writers like H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Ray Bradbury. Even if Lowell’s observations did not prove correct, he succeeded in making Mars a place in people’s imagination that we could visit.

As a young reader, I fell in love with the canal-lined Mars of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. When visiting Lowell Observatory, I always thought a Martian canal globe would be a cool souvenir. Unfortunately, they don’t sell them in the gift shop. What’s more, they don’t sell them much of anywhere. Most Mars globes available today show the Mars we’ve mapped via orbiting probes. These are great globes and I’d love one of those, too, but they don’t capture the imagination that stirred me in my earliest days of reading science fiction. I did see that a master globe maker recreated a canal globe a while back and made them available for sale, but I also saw that he charged far more than I could afford. What’s more, when I looked again after visiting Lowell, I couldn’t find them anymore.

Of course, I’m not only a science fiction fan and a professional scientist, I’m a steampunk. If there’s one thing a steampunk knows it’s that when something isn’t available, you just have to go out and make it. My wife and I discussed approaches and I did some searching on the web. I already knew that several images of Lowell’s maps were available online. I found software that would convert rectangular maps to “map gores,” the strips used to make globes. With the power of Adobe Photoshop, I could resize those gores to any ball I wanted. So, I set out to make my own globe. Since this was the first time I’d ever tried something like this, I decided to make a prototype before making a nice one.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

The prototype wasn’t perfect. Despite measuring the ball I used for a form, I sized the gores just a little too small. This could have been a little bit of rounding error from several sources. Also, it took some tries to figure out how to get the gores on smoothly. I mostly figured it out, and I think some better tools would help. Despite that, I think the prototype globe turned out much better than I had any right to expect. In fact, the flaws actually add to the antique look of the globe.

At this point, I’m working on acquiring some better tools and a nice stand for the final globe. Who knows exactly what I’ll do with my new globe-making skills. If a steampunk event shows interest, I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned. Given that the globes aren’t generally available, I might consider making a few for sale, as long as I confirm that I’m not violating any rights by using the old maps and I feel my skills are up to the task.

What I do know is that the globes I make for myself will serve as an inspiration. I look at the globe and dream of Mars as it could have been. When astronauts visit Mars in my novel The Solar Sea, they wax poetic about the old visions of Mars even as they see its real wonders. Of course, Lowell’s crypt next to the dome where he observed Mars was an inspiration for my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt. A part of me would like to think of Lowell’s spirit walking a canal-laced Mars, much as scientists who died did in Camille Flammarion’s novel Urania. As I look around the globe, I see that Lowell named one of the canals, Draco, a name shared with the leader of my Scarlet Order vampires. Maybe there’s a story out there about the Scarlet Order paying a visit to Mars.

• Learn more about The Solar Sea
• Learn more about The Astronomer’s Crypt
• Learn more about Vampires of the Scarlet Order

One Small Step

I was just a little too young to remember watching Neil Armstrong’s famous first step on the moon and his famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” However, watching later Apollo landings on television were among my earliest memories. From a young age, I was proud to be part of a species that had flown beyond the Earth and explored another world. Star Trek was on TV and I saw a direction humans might pursue. The space program was important in my house. My dad worked on the railroad but he understood how technology developed by NASA had far-reaching benefits. One of his friends worked at Goldstone Radar Tracking Station in Barstow, California and put together this display of Apollo patches for my dad. It hung in our living room when I was a kid and it hangs in my living room to this day.

In graduate school, I worked on a project automating a telescope to hunt for supernovae and dwarf novae. The computer we used was a Prime 300. The CPU cabinet was about the size of a refrigerator and it had four hard drives the size of small washing machines. I was smug in those days. I had a whole gigabyte of hard drive space to work with! In the same room as the supernova search computer were a bank of Apollo computers which had been purchased to record seismological data. In the 1980s, my Prime 300 was a primitive machine and the old Apollo machines looked like dinosaurs. I was amazed we had sent people to the moon using those ancient computers. It was a testament to how brilliant the people were who sent the first people to the moon.

In 2006, my wife and I had the opportunity to volunteer at the Ansari X-Prize Competition. What’s more, my daughter’s school class had a chance to spend the day watching the events. We saw demonstrations of updated lunar landing vehicles. We even got to see one of them lift off, fly a short distance, and land again. We met people working on space elevator technology. The highlight of the day was getting to hear Buzz Aldrin speak. My daughter’s class got to sit right up front. My daughter is the kid in the red baseball cap in the photo. Aldrin recounted his experiences training for the lunar mission and actually landing on the moon.

Today, on this 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, I find myself reflecting on these experiences. I want to see humans continue the exploration of space. We’re doing great things with unmanned probes, but there’s so much more we could do if we had humans out in the solar system learning about our corner of the universe. We did great things fifty years ago and our technology is improving. We should continue to do great things. For those who suggest we have too many problems on Earth to spend time exploring space, I say we have an Earth with over seven billion people. Many of them are brilliant, strong, and brave. We can and should work on more than one problem at once. Our real enemies in this endeavor are greed and fear. If we defeat them, we’ve earned the stars.