... on this rather excellent blog...

http://booksonmars.blogspot.com

How many have you got?

Oh, just 6 of the 23...

Two. And I only really like one of them.

At Least eight (My memory is not that good) and seen Total recall on film
I'm rereading Roving Mars (sci-fa not sci-fi)

Also Santa knows the stuff I like and I've been very good.

Roy F

I own 9:

Moving Mars
The Martian Chronicles
A Princess Of Mars (sort of : Gutenberg)
Sands of Mars
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars (still haven't read it. must reread red en green first)
War of the Worlds
Total Recall

I have none, but would like to recommend this book "The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery" - it contains some interesting classical stories on early exploration of Mars
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/mars/contents.htm

The science fiction section in a big bookstore really would be hell on Earth for you, wouldn't it?

I scored 15.

You can check my MARS books here:
http://mars-literature.skynetblogs.be/


My favorite = http://klabs.org/richcontent/Reports/mars/...oad_to_mars.pdf

1. The Martian Chronicles. I enjoy them despite my deep disdain for most things SciFi.



Now THOSE are some good books. I have quite a few of them, and virtually have (on indefinite loan from the library) several more.

My very first MARS-related book:

My favorite is great little-known story "Ananke" by Stanislaw Lem (a story in "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot").
Excellent description of the disaster while landing manned ship on the Mars and investigation after disaster. Really hard SF.
You can read excerpts of story, unfortunately, the number of pages that you can view is limited (about 40 pages) :
http://www.amazon.com/More-Tales-Pirx-Pilo...t/dp/0156621436 (pages 162-220)

I have two books not itemized on your list. It's not that simple, your collection is very impressive.
1. "Mars: The story of the Red Planet" by Peter Cattermole. Chapman & Hall 1992
2. "Water on Mars" by Michael H. Carr. Oxford University Press 1996
Especially interesting is the Carr's work.

Thanks for pointing those out Peter…
For those UMSF readers who want a good book about the “mysteries” of the red wanderer, I can recommend MARS BECKONS (1990) by John Wilford (ISBN 0-394-58359-0)
It has good chapters on Lowell’s Mars, HG Wells, Julian Huxley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Soviet & US early probes, Moons of Mars, Viking, Phobos lander, TPS and becoming Martians… A good mix of fact & fiction!

I will second the Mars Beckons recommendation.

I've read quite a few of them.....but I most enjoyed Mars by Ben Bova. I read it soon after it was published. It seemed feasible - realistic and was a gripping adventure. Even after all this time I still vividly remember what happened as they descended the giant cliffs of Valley Marineris....but I won't spoil it for anyone who wants to read it.

Didn't know he did sequels, so I might catch up on them one day. Perhaps next Christmas!

But I have to say it is 'best' when intelligences far greater than ours pay us a visit!!!

Mars by Ben Bova and his sequel Return to Mars are both excellent books. They depict the probable way in which we will carry out the first manned missions to the Red Planet, with a good mix of politics, human intrigue and science without the need to invent stupid and far-fetched ideas like "evil whirlwinds" and aliens in the "face on mars" plots.

Directors of future Hollywood Mars films please take note...

On the non-fiction side I'd add in Oliver Morton's Mapping Mars. If I recall correctly I initially found UMSF (or to be more precise rlproject.com) via Oliver's blog way back in the mists of time.

I count ten of them that I've read (or watched):

Moving Mars by Greg Bear
Mars by Ben Bova
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Red Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Total Recall DVD ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Bill

Well, how about everyone's personal fav? Mine hands-down: Heinlein's Red Planet.

"Green Mars" (the novella, not the second book of the Mars trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson, collected in THE MARTIANS.

"The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?"

Hands down the best of them all. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

I can honestly say reading RED MARS changed my life in as big a way as seeing that V2 Nat Geo special issue did when I was at school. I remember being almost in shock after reading it, because "my" Mars, the Mars I had seen in my head for so long, had actually been put down in print. And it made me realise that I didn't have some kind of mental disorder being so passionate about it, because someone else felt the same way too. The planet was just never the same for me again.

Ironically, I didn't discover Red Planet until after Mariner 9, but before the Vikings. I still held onto a slim hope of a precious few way-out organisms being spotted by VL1...not a rich ecology as depicted in the novel, of course, but maybe just a little something weird & wonderful.

Lack of critters notwithstanding, Mars has always delivered on weird & wonderful...more so with every mission!

I've always enjoyed the collection of essays by Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, Walter Sullivan, and Arthur C. Clarke entitled Mars and the Mind of Man. Their comments on the early data from Mariner 9 are as varied and as interesting as the discussions here.

Steve M

Here's, how & where our fascination with the red planet began, some 115 years ago:

Speaking of Mars Hill:

The Internet Archive has (among other things) the texts of
Percival Lowell's:

- Mars
- Mars and its Canals
- Mars As the Abode of Life

'Science' and 'science fiction' at the same time. Enjoy.

EDIT:
They also have Alfred Russel Wallace's attack on Lowell: "Is Mars Habitable?"

Here's a few Martian titles that seem to have fallen through the lines...
SF:
Frontera - Lewis Shiner
Red Dust - Paul McAuley
Mars Underground - William K. Hartmann (yeah, the very same)
Desolation Road - Ian MacDonald
Fantasy:
the Kane series by Michael Moorcock
the Stark adventures by Leigh Brackett

On the science front:
Mariner IV to Mars - Willy Ley
Mars - Robert Richardson & (the great) Chesley Bonestell
Beagle - Colin Pillinger
Destination Mars - Martin Caidin
plus books by Kargel, Boyce, Hartmann, et al.
One of these days I must get my martian library organised... It includes books in english, french, italian, spanish and portuguese.

And I leave you with a fine piece of martian poetry, by Richard L. Poss:
For years I wandered
the Martian landscape.
The infinite varieties
of silence
kept me company.

That is my favourite as well. And it was my first encounter with Mars, some 30 years ago I think. Never in a million years I would have guessed that I would have eraned a living on Mars. For some reason now SF has a weird taste ;-)

Paolo

They're not books* about Mars, but Alan Moore's "Watchmen" comic (film awaited later this year... with extreme trepidation by some of us!) includes a chapter (issue) set partly on Mars. A character with godlike superhuman powers gives a human character a tour of some of the more spectacular surface features. This plays out as a stunning backdrop to the foreground drama. I just have to quote a little; this is the South Pole:



Then there's a great shot approaching Olympus Mons, which captures the scale superbly; then Valles Marineris, ending up on Argyre Planitia in the "smile" crater. (The yellow "smiley face" image is a visual motif throughout the book, I expect it'll be pretty ubiquitous once the film's released.) Not bad, for the mid 80s!

The second volume of Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (atrocious film, avoid at all costs) opens on Mars and features guest appearances by many Mars-related characters from the late 19th and early 20th century fictions mentioned above, before the action switches to Earth and H.G. Wells Martians with cylinders, heat rays and so forth.