I think it's awesome that it's actual Mars. We know what the fantasies look like. The real thing is (flat, red, it doesn't matter: it's not a controlled environment) unpredictable.
Well, yes, it is awesome.
I suppose that as much as anything else I find it amusing that, despite having known about the real Mars (or at least the then-current understanding of the same) since before I knew any of the fantastic versions, I still wish, on some level, for one of the fantastic versions, or at least something like,* a place with languages I could learn and artefacts I could analyse.
(That said, you could totally write about a rover reaching fantastic Mars.)
Good point!
I don't seem to be any good at writing anything but sappy romance, silly comedy, and the combination of the two, but it could be worth trying, sometime.**
*I'm very fond of Alexander Jablokov's 24th Century Mars (seen peripherally in Carve the Sky (1991) and directly in River of Dust (1997)), which has had underground colonies for a few hundred years. You could do archaeology there, and not only chasing possible traces of the Acherusians (might-or-might-not-be-real million-years-absent aliens). The (thoroughly human) Martians are people who eat vanilla-flavoured porridge for breakfast, who learn swordplay as soon as they can walk, and whose emergency rations are brutally over-spiced. They'd be overwhelming to live amongst, but I wish I could meet a few. **Of course, it has been done. My favourite (and I hope I'm not bringing up someone who's been rude to you or to any friend of yours) is probably the S.M. Stirling version from In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (2008) where the Viking probe ends up being hauled aboard a landship and taken away to the nearest university, whose scholars pay the ship's crew a small fortune for it.
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Well, yes, it is awesome.
I suppose that as much as anything else I find it amusing that, despite having known about the real Mars (or at least the then-current understanding of the same) since before I knew any of the fantastic versions, I still wish, on some level, for one of the fantastic versions, or at least something like,* a place with languages I could learn and artefacts I could analyse.
(That said, you could totally write about a rover reaching fantastic Mars.)
Good point!
I don't seem to be any good at writing anything but sappy romance, silly comedy, and the combination of the two, but it could be worth trying, sometime.**
*I'm very fond of Alexander Jablokov's 24th Century Mars (seen peripherally in Carve the Sky (1991) and directly in River of Dust (1997)), which has had underground colonies for a few hundred years. You could do archaeology there, and not only chasing possible traces of the Acherusians (might-or-might-not-be-real million-years-absent aliens). The (thoroughly human) Martians are people who eat vanilla-flavoured porridge for breakfast, who learn swordplay as soon as they can walk, and whose emergency rations are brutally over-spiced. They'd be overwhelming to live amongst, but I wish I could meet a few.
**Of course, it has been done. My favourite (and I hope I'm not bringing up someone who's been rude to you or to any friend of yours) is probably the S.M. Stirling version from In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (2008) where the Viking probe ends up being hauled aboard a landship and taken away to the nearest university, whose scholars pay the ship's crew a small fortune for it.