Fourth Planet from the Sun by Gordon Van Gelder (.ePUB)
File Size: 2.1 MB
Fourth Planet from the Sun: Tales of Mars from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (2005) Anthology (Jerry eBooks, 2021) by Gordon Van Gelder (ed.)
Requirements: ePUB reader, 2.1mb
Overview: From 1908 through the 1940s, Mars reflected dying empires back at us in the form of planetary romances—Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars stories and their ilk.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Ray Bradbury reflected Mars back at us like a vision of life in the Midwest United States.
In the mid-1960s, the tradition of planetary romances died out as explorations of inner space took precedence, typified by Philip K. Dick’s contribution to this volume.
Then in the later 1960s and in the ’70s, as the Mariner and Viking flybys brought new scientific information about Mars, our whole concept of the planet was reshaped, with stories of stranded astronauts (like John Varley’s “In the Hall of the Martian Kings”) becoming dominant.
Then in the 1990s, stories about Mars became even more reflective as they concentrated on terraforming Mars—on literally trying to make that planet look more like our own. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy is obviously the prime example of this trend.
And here in the new century, the stories seem to have shifted again to focus on celebrity and the media.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
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