IN 1950 RAY BRADBURY—ALONG WITH EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, the greatest literary cartographer of the planet Mars—published a story called “The Exiles.” It depicts the Sun’s fourth planet as an unlikely home to the ghosts, witches, ghouls, vampires, and were-creatures of literature, along with the shades of their creators; a world where Poe rules over the Emerald City and Dickens wassails endlessly with Marley’s ghost; all of them banished by a sterile, rationalist technocracy that sought to eradicate superstition and magic belief (even Santa Claus!) from the face of a future Earth. At the story’s conclusion, astronauts from Earth decide to celebrate their conquest of the Red Planet by burning the last of their homeworld’s forbidden tales of mystery and imagination. Thus, with a Halloween shriek, the world of romance dies away forever.
In fact, what came to pass, twenty-five years after “The Exiles,” was precisely converse to Bradbury’s tragicomic Martian fantasy. In 1975 a pair of probes, Vikings I and II, were launched from Earth, and soon after making planetfall began to transmit a dense stream of photographs and data. The detailed portrait that was subsequently built up of a world that, for millions of years, had been frigid, airless, waterless, barren, and altogether hellish, ought to have doomed, not Earth’s phantom exiles, but the literary denizens of Mars. Not in an impromptu bibliopyre but one dry scoop of soil, one bleak video snapshot, one radio pulse at a time, the invaders from Earth ought to have eradicated, once and for all, every last Martian, red or green, who was ever set down in black-and-white.
Nineteen seventy-five was the year I discovered, and fell in love with, Barsoom. First in the Science Fiction Book Club’s hardcover editions, each of which featured two of Burroughs’s early Mars novels wrapped in a spectacular Frank Frazetta jacket, next in the complete Ballantine paperback series with their more staid yet still lovely Gino d’Achille cover art, and finally in the pages of the Marvel Comics title whose first issues, more than three decades after their first appearance, you now hold in your hands, I undertook a series of ever more rapt and dreaming excursions across the fifty-million-mile gulf of solar space to the ultimate planet of Romance. In the years since then, unlike Bradbury’s earthly spooks, Barsoom (as the denizens of Burroughs’s Mars call their harsh and arid yet beautiful and far from lifeless home) has proven immune to the tools and inferences of rational science. Probes come and go; robot rovers roll, and the resolution of the images of wasteland grows ever higher. And yet they live on: John Carter, Tars Tarkas, and the (always thus) incomparable Dejah Thoris; the ruined cities and still-mighty canals; the beasts and monsters who haunt the shores of long-dry seas.
Because I fear that, in this instance at least, the great Mr. Bradbury—the writer who gave me my first everlasting lessons in literary style—missed, or chose to ignore, the true importance in the human imagination of the Ghost, the Witch, the Demon, the Monster, and all their shadowy brood. Like the Mars of planetary romance, such ideas in order to flourish do not require, nor do they necessarily find their most powerful expression in the service of literal belief. They exert their greatest power as metaphors—for guilt and regret, for uncontrollable sexuality, for psychological torment, for the violence of the natural world—and therefore they will endure and even thrive for as long as the chaos of nature and of human consciousness can be figured by them. Nature seems likely to hang on to her power to terrify humanity for a while yet, and as for the vaunted rational mind, the history of the modern era, from the Belgian Congo to Hiroshima, from Blake’s satanic mills to the Pacific Trash Vortex, affords ample proof of rationalism’s unbreakable connection to horror, destructiveness, torture, and all the novel monsters cooked up since 1750 or so by human genius; indeed, at its worst our civilization is itself rationalism’s most monstrous, uncontrollable spawn.
The “true” literary Mars invented by Burroughs, working from mistaken clues first provided by the astronomer Percival Lowell, is a figuring of mortality, a metaphor for the fragility of life, and of the beauty to be found and the thrill to be derived from the acute consciousness thereof. This sharp, focused awareness of life’s impermanence and fragility is a chief aim of wisdom, and it is the gaining of wisdom to which the true adventurer, often unintentionally, turns out to have dedicated himself, his wit, and his flashing blade. Mars, like us, lives to die. The magic space of adventure, as Paul Zweig notes in his marvelous study The Adventurer (1974), is a “strange distance,” a space of “abrupt intensity” where death may, as nowhere else, be confronted, challenged, seen for what it is. Adventure and its literature never afforded a space more magical, a world where the precious fragility of life was more stark and apparent from one moment to the next, than Barsoom. Nothing we will ever learn about the soil and atmosphere of the dead, red iron rock next door can ever diminish Barsoom’s savage charm.
In the post-Viking world of 1977, Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum and I knew that. It was a knowledge reflected, as well, in the famous setting, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” of a movie that premiered in the summer of that year, one which owed a considerable debt, in its spirit and particulars, to Burroughs’s novels of Barsoom. For in the end all the planets of adventure, from Mongo to Tatooine to Pandora, are Mars; anyone seeking adventure beyond the terrestrial limits finds him- or herself, somehow or other, inexorably, on the planet of Burroughs, facing death in that strange distance, thrilled and grateful, once again, to have made the trip.
I recently came upon a manila folder containing many of my own literary productions from this time. It is carefully labeled, in three colors of felt-tip marker, MIKE “BURROUGHS” CHABON. (2011)