Opinion Mars in our dreams

In most stories,Mars guards its secrets well,unyielding in its hostility towards the frail human body. But it embodies,too,the wild,desperate hope of a species faced with extinction — a species praying for escape onto a planet it has not yet had a chance to ruin. Like Asia in post-Renaissance British literature,Mars is rejuvenation. The Romantics often veered towards the Orient in their literary pursuits: Samuel T. Coleridge’s famous “Kubla Khan” is perhaps too obvious an example,but William Blake’s tiger is hardly an animal found roaming the English countryside. Percy B. Shelley’s “Alastor” describes a journey into the depths of the lines separating Europe from Asia,uncovering “strange truths in undiscovered lands”. Shelley’s exploration of the recesses of the “ethereal” Caucasus mountains could just as well describe Columbia Hills or Olympus Mons.

Mars lacks the splendour and sensuality of plenty that marks most Romantic imaginings of the Orient; instead,it is alluring because,in its pristine landscape,it promises the luxury of a new beginning. In this,Mars is the fulcrum of modern anxieties about resource exhaustion or climate change,though as in the past,this journey also ends in colonisation. And,like other things so deeply coveted,the voyage and process of transforming the remote climes of the red rock into a welcoming abode for an entire planet is an exercise fraught with “disease and danger,wrapped in darkness and silence” (One character’s pithily eloquent description of space in Star Trek XI). Humanity’s Mars fixation is twinned with its attraction for deus ex machina,whereby planetary engineering is depicted as a more desirable alternative to our excesses than behavioural change.

That the planet has a more sinister face is not lost on our storytellers and myth-makers,any more than the Orient’s sundry moral and ethical “shortcomings” were. If the Orient in William Beckford’s fantastic vision was a place where passions were unbound by rules and opulence matched by grotesquerie,the civilisation found by stranded astronaut Kit Draper on Mars in the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars is just as cruel and almost as alien. Even where Mars is an outpost for an advanced human civilisation that managed to not destroy its home planet as in 2005’s Doom,it is misadventure incarnate; home to unspeakable and unnatural horrors that humankind is damned to unearth because of its insatiable curiosity.

Even more explicit apprehensions about indigenous Martians and their intentions play out in films like War of the Worlds and Independence Day (though the home planet for the latter’s aliens is never identified). Our stories suggest that the Martian method of initiating first contact would be to simply bomb us into extinction,or worse,cooperation. Total annihilation of the species,as envisaged in all versions of War of the Worlds,is tied up in the uniqueness of Earth,and in some ways alludes to retribution for all our sins,an indictment of British imperialism as well as punishment for crimes against nature. In its most terrifying interpretation,the invasion of Earth is occasioned by no more than a whiff of imperialist fancy. It is also,of course,a mirror to our marauding forays to Mars — just as the movies portray our interest in it to be driven by the depletion of Earth’s life-force,the Martians,too,are motivated by their desire to find a new home,or at

least a new source of life-sustaining minerals.

The good news is that Curiosity’s discoveries so far bear out few of these nightmares — or,for that matter,fantasies. But who knows the shape of things to come?

yamini.lohia@expressindia.com