Mars, the fourth planet from our sun, has fascinated human beings for centuries. Certainly this has been true for scientists, but it has also been true for writers. Among those authors who have written works of fiction with plots focusing on Mars are Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) in his novel The Martian Chronicles, and C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) in his novel Out of the Silent Planet. Having just finished reading Bradbury's book for a class I am teaching, I thought it might be interesting to compare the two works.
On the one hand, both Bradbury's and Lewis' novel exhibit a number of similarities. For one thing, both authors present a Mars that is based more on human imagination than scientific fact. For example, in both The Martian Chronicles and Out of the Silent Planet, humans are able to walk about on the surface of Mars without requiring any special equipment or a space suit--even though in reality Mars' atmosphere is too thin for humans to breath. Lewis describes a Mars with lakes and Bradbury a Mars with seas and canals, but we now know that it has been a very long time since Mars has had liquid water on its surface. Another similarity between the two works is that they both portray a Mars that is a quite ancient, even dying, planet. Thus, in The Martian Chronicles, a member of one of the first expeditions from Earth to Mars tells the commander of the expedition after an initial exploration of the planet: "'That city there, Captain, is dead and has been dead a good many thousands of years.'" In Out of the Silent Planet, Oyarsa, the angel-like being who rules over Mars asks the villain Weston, "...are your wise men [on Earth] so ignorant not to know that Malacandra [Mars] is older than your world and nearer its death? Most of it is dead already." Yet another similarity between the novels is that they both depict a Mars that is threatened with invasion from Earth (unlike the sci-fi cliche of Earth being threatened with invasion by Mars!).
On the other hand, there are several differences between the two novels. One obvious difference is that while both depict a Mars that is inhabited, in The Martian Chronicles, the inhabitants of Mars--who have "fair, brownish skin" and "yellow coin eyes" and "soft musical voices"--are of one race, while in Out of the Silent Planet, there are three distinct Martian races--the seroni, the pfifltriggi, and the hrossa. Another dissimilarity is that in Bradbury's book the Martians attempt unsuccessfully to prevent the human invasion of their planet, but in Lewis' novel the threatened invasion is thwarted by Oyarsa. One of the most interesting differences is theological. In The Martian Chronicles, the Martians are polytheists--encountering an Earthman for the first time, a Martian exclaims "Name of the gods!"--and they are hedonists of a sort--as one character in the novel tells us, for the Martians, "Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible." In contrast, the inhabitants of Mars in Out of the Silent Planet are trinitarian monotheists (no doubt reflecting Lewis' own Christianity). Thus, when the hero Ransom asks whether it was Oyarsa who created their world: "The hrossa almost barked in the fervour of their denial. Did people in Thulcandra [Earth] not know that Maleldil the Young had made and still ruled the world? Even a child knew that. Where did Maleldil live, Ransom asked. 'With the Old One.'" Apparently, the hrossa are referring to God the Father ("the Old One") and God the Son ("Maleldil the Young").
In short, these two novels both offer compelling visions of another world--Mars--that are quite similar in some ways but in other ways strikingly different. Both are also quite worth reading and I strongly encourage my readers to do so if they have not already.
Image of Mars from Wikimedia Commons