Survival On Mars

In James Blish's Welcome To Mars (London, 1978), how do Dolph and Nanette manage to continue breathing, drinking and eating on Mars long after their imported supplies have run out? The Martian lichen, which grows all over the surface in the area where they have landed and which they manage to store in sufficient quantity during the long winter, provides oxygen, water and food. In fact, it is beneficial and invigorating. Would this single source suffice? And how plausible is it?

Writing in 1965, Blish tried not to contradict then known facts although new data were due from a Mariner probe and are noted in the Afterword. I think that such complex organisms were unlikely on Mars even then. Having got us to accept the lichen, Blish moves on to animals and even intelligence.

He wrote in the Foreword that Mars was:

 "...apparently the only other planet in the Solar System on which a brave man might just barely manage to stay alive, if he never stopped trying." (p. 10)

- but he gives his characters a lot of help and I do not think that his claim could be made of Mars now.

The Structure Of Welcome To Mars I

James Blish, Welcome To Mars (London,1978): three Parts, each with five chapters; chapters numbered 1 to 15.

Part One: On The Beach.
Chapter 1, The Tree House, ends as Dolph leaves Earth.
Chapter 2, The Sea of Streams, ends as Dolph approaches Mars.
Chapter 3, Down...and Out, ends with Dolph marooned on Mars.
Chapter 4, A Little Detection, Dolph's inventory; Nanette's deduction.
Chapter 5, Morning on Mars, first day on Mars.

Part Two: Friday.
Chapter 6, Evening on Mars, Nanette arrives.
Chapter 7, Children in the Sky, twenty-nine days after Dolph left.
Chapter 8, Wine and Storm, Nanette has just arrived but Dolph has been on Mars for weeks (p. 80)!

That is as far as I have reread. I am trying to resolve the chronology. There was a four-day weekend coming up. Dolph said he would go camping for at least one more day and he "...had accumulated the extra day off from school..." (p.23) "...at least one more day..." implies that he might be away for slightly longer than five days whereas "...extra day off from school..." implies an obligation to return after just five days. In any case, he should certainly not have been away for longer than a week.

"Nanette had noticed that the tree-house was missing, on the very morning of its departure." (p. 46)

Before following Dolph to Mars, she leaves a note for her and his parents, saying that he has not gone camping but has gone to Mars and that she has followed him. She must have left the note, before leaving Earth, shortly after realising that he had gone and within the five or so days when Dolph was believed to be camping.

The novel describes, in this order:

Dolph seeing Nanette's arrival on Mars (end of Chapter 6);
the "Children in the Sky" news story on Earth, ending twenty nine days after Dolph left Earth (Chapter 7);
Dolph rescuing the unconscious Nanette, with the auctorial comment, "For him, it was very clear, the case of the Children in the Sky was very far from over." (p. 77) (end of Chapter 7);
Nanette, the day after her arrival, finding "...the root of the irregularity in the pump cycle, which had been eluding him for weeks." (p. 80) (early in Chapter 8)

Has this chronology of fictitious events become inconsistent? I wish that I had read the text this closely while Blish was still alive.

Later: I did not address above the question of how long it takes Dolph and Nanette to travel to Mars. But the implication is that it is not long. Dolph intended to be away for about five days and:

"By the middle of his second day in space he was already slightly more than half-way there..." (p. 28)

Nanette should not have taken much longer and, in any case, could not have survived for weeks in space.

Welcome To Mars II

James Blish's Welcome To Mars (London, 1978) is a very unusual novel because it contains no conversations until almost exactly its midpoint. The novel ends on p. 154 and the conversation starts on p. 78 which would be nearly the midpoint except that the text of the novel starts on p. 13.

There are fifteen chapters but there is no conversation in the first seven. That is because the central character, Dolph Haertel, works alone and in secret as he discovers anti-gravity and flies a tree hut to Mars, where he is marooned. We are informed about his parents and a girl friend only by a narrative summary, not by any dialogue involving these characters.

When the girl friend, Nanette, deduces where Dolph has gone, follows him and is also marooned, she too has worked alone and in secret, without engaging in any conversations that are recounted to the reader. When the two sets of parents realize that Nanette's farewell note saying that they have gone to Mars is nothing less than the unvarnished truth, and try to arouse official and public interest in rescuing the stranded teenagers, we read a summary account of a news story and a publicity campaign but are not told any of the conversations that would have been involved.

Thus, the very first conversation in the novel is between Dolph and Nanette on Mars. I am reminded of the Prisoner episode, "Many Happy Returns," in which No 6, waking in a deserted Village, builds a raft, leaves the island, reaches an as yet unidentified mainland and first speaks to another character about midway between the two commercial breaks.

This Mars is not lifeless; there is vegetation. I am not sure of the chronology - Nanette seems to leave Earth soon after Dolph but to reach Mars much later - but I will have to reread to check.

Wells, Lewis And Blish

As mentioned two posts ago, Haertel's "...breadboard rig..." (James Blish, Welcome To Mars, London, 1978, p. 19) works like Cavor's sphere: first, insulate the vessel against Terrestrial gravity; then, let it fall towards either the Moon or Mars. The two novels have similar titles: First Men In The Moon and Welcome To Mars.

As Haertel approaches Mars, he considers explanations of the "canals," including that they were "...made by intelligent life..." (p. 14). This Wellsian explanation is the one that Blish presents elsewhere - in his first Cities In Flight novel, his second Jack Loftus novel and the short story, "No Jokes On Mars," which, in every other respect, is consistent with Welcome To Mars.

I compared and contrasted Lewis and Blish in a much earlier post (here) so will merely summarize salient points here:

HG Wells was unique;
Olaf Stapledon was Wellsian and more;
CS Lewis was anti-Wellsian and anti-Stapledonian;
James Blish was Wellsian and post-Lewis;
Philip Pullman is anti-Lewis;
Lewis, Blish and Pullman in different ways refer to John Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic Classical in form but Biblical in content.

Lewis' character, Ransom, en route to Mars, directly experiences an invigorating influence from solar radiation, and the physicist Weston confirms the scientific basis of such an experience, whereas Haertel, on the same journey, is all too conscious of the deadly cosmic radiation surrounding his vessel;

later, Ransom travels to Venus in an angelically propelled coffin, Garrard experiences sensory deprivation and "psuedo-death" in a Haertel overdrive spaceship en route to Alpha Centauri and electromagnetic "Angels" enter and propel the Nernst generators of Haertel spaceships;

both Lewis' and Blish's characters encounter supernatural fallen angels, demons.

Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy overlaps by one and a half volumes with (what I call) his curious "post-Lewis trilogy." In the successive volumes of Lewis' Interplanetary or Ransom Trilogy:

Ransom visits Mars;
Ransom visits a sinless planet;
demons manifest on Earth -

- and in the "post-Lewis trilogy" formed by Welcome To Mars, A Case Of Conscience and Black Easter:

Haertel visits Mars;
Haertel's successors visit a sinless planet;
demons manifest on Earth.

Of course, the dissimilarities outweigh the parallels. For a start, Lewis, basing his science fiction on Biblical and Classical mythology, identified his sinless planet with Venus whereas Blish, basing his sf on science, located his sinless planet, Lithia, forty light years away. Further, Blish's sinless aliens are Godless and his demons win: two scenarios that were impossible for Lewis.

The Ransom series, which becomes a tetralogy if we include the unfinished and posthumously published "The Dark Tower," systematically addresses the four basic Wellsian themes of space travel, time travel, interplanetary invasion and future society, which Blish addresses in Welcome To Mars, "The City That Was The World," VOR and, for social change, a few other novels.

Three Diptychs

Of the three diptychs identified in the previous post - Haertel, Loftus and "Dirac":

each presents a different hostile interstellar empire - Central Empire, Heart Stars and Green Exarchy;

Haertel encounters Martians whereas they are long extinct for Loftus and not mentioned by "Dirac";

the Martian "canals" are natural for Haertel but artificial for Loftus;

Haertel appears in the first diptych and is mentioned in the other two;

his space drive is anti-gravitic in the Haertel diptych but powered by a hydrogen-fuelled Nernst generator in the Loftus diptych.

Alternative possibilities are explored systematically. Today, I will be away from a computer but will finish rereading the Haertel novel, Welcome To Mars.

Welcome To Mars

We can perceive any one book very differently. Some - the Bible, the Koran, The Origin of Species - are so influential that we acknowledge their significance and have some idea of their content, or message, even if we have never read them.

Of the books that we have read, it makes a difference whether we have merely read them once or twice in the past, have reread them recently or have studied them. Certain works by James Blish are almost designed to re-arrange themselves in our heads if they are reread or studied closely:

both Welcome To Mars and Galactic Cluster feature Adolph Haertel;

both The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars feature Jack Loftus;

The Quincunx Of Time and Midsummer Century are linked by a "Dirac message";

of the four works mentioned here that do not feature Haertel, three nevertheless do refer to him, as does A Case Of Conscience;

thus, these seven volumes are closely interconnected without forming a linear sequence.

I am currently rereading Welcome To Mars (London, 1978). Having already introduced Haertel as an adult and a future equivalent of Einstein, Blish now tells us about Haertel's parents and his teenage years, when he is known as "Dolph." Mission To The Heart Stars describes Milne and Dingle as intermediate between Einstein and Haertel and Welcome To Mars shows us Haertel studying these intermediaries.

Milne died in 1950. This was "...nearly twenty years before Dolph's birth..." (p. 18). Let us call that eighteen or nineteen years. So Dolph is born in 1968 or '69.

"At the age of seventeen, Dolph Haertel had discovered anti-gravity." (p. 14)

- so that was in 1985 or '86. Blish's Foreword and Afterword are dated 1965 and the text of the novel assumes no Moon landing yet, not even by '85 or '86. Dolph, flying his tree hut to Mars, will be the first man on another planet.

Dolph discovers that gravity "...has polarity..." (pp. 18, 27) and therefore "...could be manipulated..." (p. 18). Although Haertel does not mention the Blacket-Dirac equations, gravitational polarity does sound like the graviton polarity generators, nicknamed "spindizzies," of Blish's Okies or Cities In Flight series and, in fact, Dolph's "...breadboard rig..." (p. 19) does indeed function like a mini-spindizzy by lifting the Haertel's garage an inch from the Earth, thus confirming that it is able to lift a smaller object into space.

There were plans to film two of Blish's juvenile works, this Haertel novel and the second Okie novel. If this had been done, might the two films have become a series with the Haertel overdrive and the Dillon-Waggoner graviton polarity generator merging into a single Haertel graviton polarity generator?

Finally, for this post, Haertel's device functions like Cavorite: Dolph leaves Earth by shutting out terrestrial gravity, then approaches Mars by letting in Martian gravity. Never forget Wells.

Chronology Of The Beep

1955: John Martels born.
1985: an accident in a radio telescope.
20-?:  Adolph Haertel revolutionizes physics.
2060: Thor Wald born.
2090: final test of Wald's Dirac communicator, using a Haertel overdrive ship.
2091: Earth Security Service begins to extract messages from the Dirac "beep."
209?: discovery of Fortean tunnels to solar and alternate-solar planets.
2---?: Service defeats an armada from the Black Horse nebula.
2973: in NGC 2287, the Service protects a cub who will take over from them when he grows up.
3022: coded Dirac message describing a mass evacuation.
3480: the President of the Milky Way announces federation with the Magellanic Clouds.
6000: High Earth and Traitors' Guild.
8704: destination of a world-line cruiser on Hathshepa, NGC 4725, 11 million light years away.
88-?: Dirac distress call from the world-line cruiser.
8873: departure point of the world-line cruiser.
          Rebirth II civilization destroyed by worldwide glaciation. 
          Rebirth III, a tightly organized, high-energy, low population culture.
          Rebirth IV tribesmen in a tropical phase.
25,000: Martels time-projected from 1985.
25,100: Rebirth V civilization begins.

Sources: The Quincunx Of Time; Midsummer Century.