Martian dreams

Landscape on planet Mars, rocket landing on the red planet

(Image credit: Getty Images)

My favorite book about Mars really isn't about Mars at all. A series of loosely linked short stories, Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" (1950) tells of the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet by humans who are fleeing a dying and war-ravaged Earth. It is not what genre obsessives call "hard sci-fi," with yawn-inducing disquisitions on the technicalities of space flight and the scientific challenges of terraforming an inhospitable landscape. Instead, the Mars that Bradbury's colonists discover is a dreamlike planet with blue skies and water, a breathable if thin atmosphere, and noble but doomed indigenous inhabitants. It's the kind of Mars imagined by Edwardian skygazers like Percival Lowell, who was certain that Mars was lined with canals, dug by a hardworking people (so unlike those loafers on Earth) to tap the polar ice caps as the planet dried out. Bradbury uses this fantastical tableau to explore some very human issues: our intolerance and self-destructive nature, but also our capacity for love and wonder.

Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a "self-sustaining civilization" of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity's extinction. Yet I can't help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars' red vistas. The planet is bombarded with so much cosmic radiation that it may never be habitable. Yet to Musk and co., the fourth rock from the sun represents a blank slate, a drawing board on which they can create their dream society. It's one where frustrating Earth-based problems have no gravitational pull, and where the mega-wealthy can achieve true greatness, free of pesky regulators, taxes, unions, and journalists. Just like the best science fiction, it's a fantasy that reveals more about our present than our future.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.