Mars in Science Fiction: Where ICARUS Fits Among the Great Mars Novels
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People have been writing novels about Mars for more than a century. Each generation has used the Red Planet for something different: a threat, a mirror, a frontier, an engineering puzzle. Here is a short map of the best-known Mars science fiction books, and where ICARUS, the first book of the Mítosz series, fits among them.
Mars as the alien world
H. G. Wells opened the genre with The War of the Worlds (1898). His Martians are not explored, they arrive: an older, colder civilization invading Earth. A few years later Edgar Rice Burroughs went the other way. In A Princess of Mars (1912) John Carter wakes up on Barsoom, a dying Mars of swords, airships and ancient cities. For half a century, Mars in fiction meant other beings.
Mars as a mirror
After the Second World War the Martians faded and the settlers arrived. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950) is less about Mars than about the people who go there and bring Earth's habits with them. Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars (1951) follows a writer visiting an early colony. Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip (1964) shows a colony that is shabby, bureaucratic and very human. Mars became a place to look at ourselves.
Mars as an engineering problem
From the 1990s the science caught up. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996), follows the colonization and terraforming of the planet over two centuries, in great scientific and political detail. Ben Bova's Mars (1992) imagines the first human expedition. Then Andy Weir's The Martian (2011) made survival on Mars a bestseller: one stranded astronaut, real physics and a lot of problem solving.
Mars with borders and politics
In James S. A. Corey's Expanse series, beginning with Leviathan Wakes (2011), Mars is already a military power in its own right, at odds with Earth. Here Mars is not a frontier but a nation.
Where ICARUS fits
ICARUS sits between these traditions. It is hard science fiction: the dust, the radiation, the launch windows and the distances are real, and the settlements stand at real places on the map of Mars. But it is not the story of a first landing or a lone survivor. It is set in Mars Year 73, in the 2090s, when four settlements already exist and have been left largely on their own by the powers that built them: the Russian Vostok, the Chinese TianYuan, the American corporate Minos and the European Asteria.
The question is not whether humans can survive on Mars. It is whether they can survive each other. On Earth the four powers are rivals, and cooperation on Mars is forbidden. When a dust storm nearly destroys Vostok, help has to come from another settlement, or it does not come at all, because Earth is reachable only once every 26 months.
ICARUS also adds something most Mars novels leave out: artificial minds as part of daily life. The Twin Robots work alongside the settlers, and one of them tells the story.
If you like the engineering of The Martian and the politics of Robinson's trilogy or The Expanse, ICARUS was written for the space between them: a near-future Mars where the hardest problems are human ones.
A note on the name
The series was first published as The Mars Chronicles. It has nothing to do with Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and today it is called Mítosz. More about that: What The Mars Chronicles is and isn't.
Start reading: the Prologue.
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