Sunday, May 15, 2011

Visions of Mars: New academic collection of essays & articles on the Red Planet in fiction and science

I just purchased Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science (2011), an academic volume examining the way Mars has been depicted in literature, film and popular culture that was published by McFarland earlier this spring.


Edited by Howard V. Hendrix, George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, this volume is a collection of essays and articles that are mostly derived from the 2008 J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Conference, which was subtitled "Chronicling Mars" and was held at the University of California, Riverside.

The table of contents, which is posted on McFarland's website, includes the following:
  • "Savagery on Mars: Representations of the Primitive in Brackett and Burroughs" by Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont
  • "Re-Presenting Mars: Bradbury’s Martian Stories in Media Adaptation" by Phil Nichols
  • "Robert A. Heinlein and the Red Planet" by David Clayton
  • "Business as Usual: Philip K. Dick’s Mars" by Jorge Martins Rosa
Author, reviewer and longtime SF&F fan Don D’Ammassa recently reviewed Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science. The review is short but insightful, noting, “I found most of the discussions to be quite intelligent and even enlightening although I think the attempt to link Brackett and Burroughs to neo-colonialism went a bit overboard.”


Also, it's worth mentioning that Visions of Mars: Essays in the Red Planet in Fiction and Science mentions The Mammoth e-Book of Mindblowing Mars SF, an anthology which I edited back in August 2009. Check out the preface above!

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