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Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, ed. John Joseph Adams. (Simon & Schuster, 978-1-4424-2029-8, $16.99, 368 pages.)

Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, ed. Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury.

The Best of Kage Baker, ed. William Schafer. (Subterranean Press, 978-1596064423, $40.00. 496 pages.) Cover art by J.K. Potter.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s best-known creation is undoubtedly Tarzan of the Apes, whose adventures long ago spread from the confines of books to infect movies, TV shows, animated features, radio, comic strips, comic books, stage plays, computer games, and practically any other media you can think of, including a million jokes, pastiches, TV comedy skits, and cartoons. Burroughs’s other major series, the Barsoom series, taking place on a richly invented and habitable Mars, is probably less well-known out of the SF genre among the public at large (although with the imminent release—as I type these words—of the John Carter movie, that may be about to change to some degree), but since Burroughs first transported his immortal swashbuckler, John Carter of Virginia, to Mars in “Under the Moons of Mars” in All-Story magazine in 1912 (the serial was later published as a novel, A Princess of Mars, in 1917), the Barsoom books have rarely been out of print for long, and have been influencing the genre’s vision of Mars, and the dreams and the work of other writers, for a hundred years now.

Burroughs is what I like to call a Window Of Opportunity writer. The perfect age to read him is when you’re about fourteen. If you read him at that age, particularly the Barsoom novels, you’re left with a freight of marvelous images that will last you forever. If you wait to start reading him until you’re an adult, when your critical faculties have had a chance to develop, chances are that you won’t be able to read him at all. This is because, as with H.P. Lovecraft, who I was discussing a couple of months back, Burroughs is actually a mediocre-at-best writer by modern standards line-by-line, with a florid, fustian, and adjective-heavy style (particularly in the Barsoom novels; the first few Tarzan novels were somewhat better crafted), who wrote to a strict formula, with a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, and whose plots were crammed with absurd coincidences and miraculous last-second rescues. Like Lovecraft, however, Burroughs if read early is also a Gateway Author, one who has inducted many a young reader into the genre, and transformed many a casual reader into a fan.

Unlike Lovecraft, Burroughs had no unique Cosmic Vision to offer as a palliative to his turgid prose—what Burroughs is selling, and very effectively too, is exoticism: color, romance, evocative alien vistas, swashbuckling action and swordplay. His Mars—itself heavily influenced by Percival Lowell’s vision of a dying, drying planet laced with life-giving canals—is chockablock with sword-wielding Red Martians, fourteen-foot-tall four-armed Green Martians, ferocious giant White Apes, beautiful egg-laying princesses, dastardly villains, bone-white ivory cities, Radium rifles, flying cars, sinister alien religions, and numerous Lost Cities and (nearly) Vanished Civilizations dotted across the endless dead sea bottoms like raisins in a pudding. When Donald Wollheim at Ace began bringing all of Burroughs’s books back into print in 1962, the Barsoom novels in particular graced with lush, gorgeous covers by some of the best fantasy artists in the business, I was at a properly receptive age and I gulped them down like salted peanuts; many of my later peers, colleagues, and collaborators, who left Burroughs until their post-college years, when their critical faculties were well-developed and sophisticated, could never read him at all and had no idea what all the fuss was about. (We’ve mainly been talking about fourteen-year-old boys here, that being what I was; it may be somewhat harder for fourteen-year old girls to get into Burroughs—although one way in which Burroughs was years ahead of other writers of the day, particularly in the Barsoom novels, was that many of his woman characters were fierce, fearless warriors, as deadly with the blade as any man, and I know several women who responded to that at a time when dangerous and capable fictional female role-models were difficult to find elsewhere.)

Which brings us to Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, edited by John Joseph Adams, in which modern writers get to play with Burroughs’s Mars and its characters and generate Barsoom stories of their own, much like the writers in the Lovecraft pastiche anthologies I was discussing here earlier got to create new Cthulhu Mythos stories. There is a noticeable split in approach to the material here. Some authors write straightforward John Carter adventures with lots of swordplay and mayhem, chases, captures, hairsbreadth cliffhangers, and daring escapes, much as Burroughs himself might have (although all of the authors in the book are much better writers line-by-line than Burroughs ever was). The best stories in this mode are probably “The Jarsoom Project,” by S.M. Stirling and “The Metal Men of Mars,” by Joe R. Lansdale. I’m usually not much of a fan of postmodernism, but I must admit that the best stories here are those that take the other approach, and add a dab of playful postmodernism to the mix. Peter S. Beagle transports Tarzan to Barsoom to meet (and clash in combat with) John Carter in “The Ape Man of Mars,” Garth Nix tells a story from the viewpoint of a reluctant sidekick who is not all impressed with John Carter’s quest for warlike glory in “Sidekick of Mars,” Theodora Goss tells a story from the viewpoint of John Carter’s “dog” (a fierce ten-legged creature the size of a Shetland pony) in “Woola’s Song,” and several writers strike into effective material by telling their stories from the viewpoint of the Tharks, the Green Men of Mars, who are often the villains in the Barsoom stories, notably “Coming of Age in Barsoom,” by Catherynne M. Valente, “A Tinker of Warhoon,” by Tobias S. Buckell, and “A Game of Mars,” by Genevieve Valentine.

Oddly, one thing that comes across quite clearly in many of these stories is that the authors don’t really like John Carter much. I suppose that with his love of combat, war, and slaughter, liking nothing better than to be sword-to-sword with some (soon to be defeated) adversary, John Carter really isn’t a hero much in sympathy with the attitudes of the 21st Century.

For several years now, the science magazine Cosmos has been publishing the occasional science fiction story, both in the print magazine and on the magazine’s website. Last year, the science magazine MIT Technology Review did a special all-science fiction edition called TRSF, The Best New Science Fiction, Inspired by Today’s Emerging Technologies, meant to be the first in an annual series of such issues. Now the makers of New Scientist magazine have launched a similar project, Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins. Let’s hope that this is a trend, and that other science magazines will follow suit.

Described as “a new digital magazine about the future,” Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, edited by Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury, exists mainly as various downloadable formats for the Kindle, the iPad, iPhones, Windows PC and Mac computers, although they will send you a perfect-bound 152-page print version for $29.95. If you want to read this, Kindle or iPad are probably the way to go (the kindle edition costs $6.99), orderable either from Amazon or from www.newscientist.com/arc. Arc 1.1 is a mix of non-fiction essays and criticism by Adam Roberts, Simon Ings, China Mieville, Bruce Sterling, Paul Graham Raven, and others, and science fiction by Stephen Baxter, M. John Harrison, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Alastair Reynolds, with a novel extract by Margaret Atwood. There’s actually more non-fiction than fiction here, all of it thoughtful and interesting, dealing with such subjects as the intelligence of squids, the logistics of the shipping container business, museums, gaming, mass refugee populations, and social movements that have arisen in the expectation of the imminent collapse of Western Civilization, but all that’s beyond our purview here. Luckily for us, although there’s less fiction than non-fiction, the literary quality of the fiction is quite high, with a couple of the stories among the best to have appeared so far this year.

The stories in TRSF were pretty straightforwardly optimistic across the board, being concerned as they were with emerging technologies and sustainable futures, but the view of the future that comes across in Arc 1.1 is more complex, running the gauntlet from the relative optimism of Hannu Rajaniemi and Alastair Reynolds, where humanity is going through a rough patch but hanging on and even making progress, to what Brian Aldiss once called “bracing British gloom”—Simon Ings, for instance, when asked What’s Next? for society, glumly replies “Nothing good.” (I found Hannu Rajaniemi’s reply to the same question more interesting: “Things will appear just the same, unless you know how to look.”) The best story here is probably Alastair Reynold’s “The Water Thief,” which manages to find something hopeful and even uplifting to say about the human spirit even when its protagonist is living in a cardboard box in a refugee camp. Also excellent is Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Topsight,” a Coming-of-Age story set in a ecologically damaged but culturally diverse future Britain where people continuing dealing with their lives, and even find new opportunities, in spite of conditions that we today would find difficult. Stephen Baxter jumps us from the near-future to a more distant one in “A Journey to Amasia,” which takes us deep into the virtual subconscious of humanity in a future where a de facto war is going on between humans and superpowerful AIs—and where it turns out we have some unexpected enemies, and some unexpected allies. M. John Harrison’s “In Autotelia” is extremely well-crafted, unsurprisingly, but I must admit that I never entirely understood what was supposed to be going on here; as near as I can tell, a mythical Eastern European country seems to have intruded into the reality of modern-day England, with a sharp dividing line, and regular train service between the two worlds.

Nothing is said here about whether or not we can expect another issue of this digital magazine down the line, although the “Arc 1.1” makes me hopeful that there’ll be an “Arc 2.”

There’s no way I can be even remotely objective about the collection The Best of Kage Baker. Back when I was the editor of Asimov’s in 1997, I bought Kage Baker’s very first story, “Noble Mold,” and subsequently bought more than thirty-five other stories from her for the magazine, as well as reprinting lots of her stuff in my Best of the Year anthology series; even after I left Asimov’s, I continued to buy stories from her for anthologies such as Wizards and The Dragon Book. So it’s safe to say that I’m a Baker partisan, and you can discount my opinion here if you wish, but for me this is one of the best collections of the year to date, and will almost certainly end up in my top five. The selection is not the same as the one I would have made, and there are a few minor Baker stories here, but the overall quality is quite high, and even the minor stories are absorbing; perhaps the best natural storyteller to enter the field since Poul Anderson, Baker almost never wrote a story that wasn’t at the very least worth reading. For my money, the best stories here are the novellas—Baker was at her best at novella length—“Son, Observe the Time” and “Welcome to Olympos, Mr. Hearst,” but there are other good Baker stories here, such as the aforementioned “Noble Mold,” “Bad Machine,” “The Catch,” “Are You Afflicted With Dragons?,” “The Ruby Incomparable,” “Maelstrom,” and others. If you haven’t read Baker, you don’t know what you’re missing, and this is a good place to start.