Six Hundred Yards Of Mars

Over the weekend a spacecraft known as the Spirit landed on the Red Planet.  Considering the difficulty in reaching the planet and the number of probes lost, the Red planet is aptly named for the Roman God of War. There have been many successful trips, and many failures.

The Spirit is a rover, meaning it has wheels and is designed to travel around, poking and prodding and looking at things. In fact, this rover will travel faster and with a greater range than any other. Over a period of three months, the little hot rod will travel six hundred years and explore more territory than ever before.

I first became fascinated with Mars when I was a child. One of the very first Science Fiction stories that I read was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. What an awesome story and my sense of wonder and awe at the red planet was kindled.

The all time best Mars story was A Martian Odyssey, by an unhappy fellow named Stanley Weinbaum (this troubled young man only wrote a few stories, then took his own life when his mother died). This wonderful gem of a story is one of the first (to my knowledge) that portrayed aliens as alien instead of just humans in a different shape. Stanley wrote what is probably true - beings born and raised on another planet are not human, don't act like humans and certainly won't speak English and lust after human women.

And what Science Fiction library would be complete without a copy of Robert A. Heinlein's Strange in a Strange Land. This was actually the very first novel of any kind that I read from cover to cover, and it was eye opening and wondrous.

Unfortunately, those more innocent days when Mars seemed like it would be home to countless life forms are long gone. Scientists are now convinced that Mars is dead, and any life perished long ago. Sometimes I long for the days when we expected to find canals, buildings and whole civilizations. Dead rocks are interesting, but live aliens would be a lot more fun.

Background by

Claudia's Collection