SF Signal a posé la question à plusieurs auteurs sur les raisons qui font que Mars attire les auteurs de SF et de fantasy. Parmi les réponses, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian McDonald, Neal Asher ou encore Alastair Reynolds :
| Alastair Reynolds a écrit: |
| Mars is red; it is the planet of war; it is easily visible from Earth; it is the only other planet in the solar system which is remotely similar to our own. It is reachable. It was natural for writers to turn to Mars for the settings of their stories. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of the aeroplane and sophisticated cartography led to the gradual elimination of any large tracts of unknown territory on the Earth. Writers who strove for a certain kind of panoramic adventure, replete with armies and empires – who might once have found enough imaginative latitude in tales of “darkest Africa” or the “mysterious orient”, were obliged to translate their stories to entirely imaginary realms or onto the surfaces of other worlds. Venus and Mars, being our near neighbours (and at the time presumed to be sympathetic to life) were obvious candidates for the latter. Only with the realisation in the middle decades of the century, that neither planet was in fact hospitable, led to the abandonment of the solar system as a venue for such stories. Unlike Venus, however, Mars has retained a hold on our imaginations. The Mars as revealed to us by science may not have been the Mars of our dreams but with each new probe, each new rover, it becomes less some distant dot in the sky and more a richly textured world, with weather, sunsets, seasons and scenery. The more we learn about Mars the more we want to learn. We have opened a door to another world and there is no closing that door. |
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