Stowaway to Mars Review
Robots on Mars
John Wyndham is a good writer. As far as I can tell, all of his novels were either science fiction, or science fiction-like and it’s a shame that his works aren’t easier to find. His most famous novels are The Midwich Cuckoos, which was made into two films, both named Village of the Damned, and The Day of the Triffids which was made into a not very good movie in 1963 and two television series. I haven’t read The Midwich Cuckoos, but I have seen the original Village of the Damned and it’s excellent; the script is really well-written and George Saunders’s performance is perfect for the film. I have read The Day of the Triffids and it’s a testament to Wyndham’s skill as a writer that he managed to write a very good book about walking, venomous, carnivorous plants. The Triffids are a genuinely menacing species despite moving about awkwardly. Unlike many science fiction novels, many of the central questions about the Triffids — where did they come from, were they a weapon — remain unanswered.
When I found a copy of Wyndham’s 1935 novel, Stowaway to Mars (previously known as Planet Plane and published under the name John Beynon) in a used bookstore, I bought it. I’m interested in science fiction written between the two world wars and I was curious to read a pre-war novel by an author who also wrote during the Cold War. It’s also fun to read the earlier work of a writer whose later works you enjoyed. We knew far less about Mars in the 1930’s compared to, say, 1950 and so in some ways, the earlier Mars novels are more creative about life on Mars because we didn’t understand the planet as well as we do now. By 1934, we did know that Mars had far less oxygen in its atmosphere than Earth, which features prominently in the book.
The book is set in 1981, and there’s a multi-million dollar prize to reach Mars. The first part of the book follows British entrepreneur and aviator Dale Curtance’s ship Gloria Mundi as it travels to the planet Mars. The ship is crewed by Curtance, an aviator named Dugan, a journalist named Froud, an engineer named Burns and Dr Grayson. Very quickly, they realize that they have a stowaway…and she’s a girl named Joan. This stowaway is not an ordinary young woman, she’s the daughter of a prominent physicist who lost his career after he became convinced that he’d found a Martian machine. Really, the Martian machine found him and then followed him home so it’s not as if he could have just ignored it. Joan snuck onto the ship so that she would have a chance to meet the Martians who made that machine. During that long trip to Mars, she shows the crew the evidence for her father’s claims, and not only are they convinced, they have her teach them Martian. The second part is shorter and it follows their time on the planet Mars. Upon landing, they quickly find other machines similar to the one that followed Joan’s father home, though they behave very differently. Joan is kidnapped by Burns, then rescued by a Martian Machine and taken to one of the Martians’ cities. While the rest of the crew tries to figure out what to do, an American Ship crashes and the Soviets land a ship near the Gloria Mundi. This leads to much squabbling because, even in 1935, the Soviets didn’t get along with anyone else.
As is usually the case in novels about Mars, Martian civilization is dying. There isn’t enough oxygen for humans to survive on the surface without supplemental oxygen and the same is true for Martians, who are also having trouble reproducing. Joan gets a tour of the remains of one of the Martian cities. It’s like one of those ancestral castles where the family lives in one wing while the rest is sealed off because they can no longer maintain it and it’s starting to crumble in a photogenic way. Most of it has been abandoned because there are only a few thousand biological Martians left in the city. It’s a sad part of the book because it is clear that Mars once had a thriving civilization and the Martians have decided to allow themselves to go extinct instead of figuring out why they are having so few children and trying to find a solution to their decline in fertility.
What is interesting about Stowaway to Mars is that the biological intelligent life has built robots to replace them. They’re not transferring their consciousness into the robots, they’ve just used their intelligence to create them and therefore these robots are their children. The Martians designed and built the robots to survive and thrive on the surface of Mars. As a result, they have a type of intelligence — the Martians even gave all their books to their robots. These robots are designed for function, not aesthetics. They don’t look particularly threatening, but they are strange-looking enough that most humans would stay away. On viewing a photograph of the one that came to Earth:
It appeared to consist of a metallic casing, roughly coffin-shaped and supported horizontally upon four pairs of jointed metal legs….Another was a close-up of one end, showing a complicated arrangement of lenses and other instruments grouped upon the front panel, and the last gave detail of a section of the side, showing the attachment to the casing of two lengths of something looking not unlike armored hose save that each piece tapered to its fee end. Looking agin at the full-length photographs Froud saw the, in some, all four of these side members were closely coiled against the body of the machine, while, in others, they were outstretched apparently in the act of waving about.
The term “robot” first appeared in 1921 in the Czech writer Karel Čapek's play RUR about a robot revolt; stills from the original productions exist and the robot costumes were very Art Deco. The Maschinenmensch in 1927’s Metropolis also had had an Art Deco appearance. Though its purpose was to keep the workers down and under the heel of ruthless industrialists, it was a beautiful robot. I find robot science fiction written prior to 1945 to be fascinating because it was written before we had modern computers. There was simply no current or historical experience with computers to start from. I cannot imagine a world without personal computers let alone one without any type of computer. Artificial intelligence wasn’t even a term, but many of the robots from that era had rather sophisticated artificial intelligence. This is the case with the Martian robots in Stowaway to Mars. The one that makes it to Earth chases Joan’s father and even manages to knock out a headlamp on his car. Later on, it teaches the two of them the Martian language. All the while, it doesn’t look at all like the biological Martians who designed and built it. One of the stranger aspects of the Martian robot civilization is that there is a colony of robots (these are the robots the crew of the Gloria Mundi first encounter) from earlier experiments where they programmed them to have memories before they were turned on. The Martians think of as mad and the Martians allow them to continue to exist and that the biological Martians think that they may well teach the properly functioning robots something; we consider this a basic decency in our current society, but in Wyndham’s time that was not true for many countries. The robots that are “normal” exist in the Martian city and they have their own repair shops. These robots are almost immortal: the consciousness and memories disappear only if the memory unit is destroyed. They are constantly replacing parts of their physical bodies in order to improve them. These robots are continuously learning machines. In some ways, they resemble the artificial intelligence we have today, but in some ways they’re also old-fashioned.
The book shows its age in other ways. An ongoing theme in the novel is what is how women are treated compared to men. On more than one occasion, Burns tries to rape her. To modern readers, this may seem exploitative or unnecessary. The book probably would have been fine without those parts, but they were well-executed; when I was growing up in the ’80’s and ’90’s, it was pretty common for a show that a character was a full-fledged villain by having him rape or try to rape a woman and it was often exploitative. Wyndham’s use of this plot twist fits with the rest of the plot. The first attempt occurs on the spaceship and the other crew members have to stop him and one of them gives her a gun for protection. Throughout the rest of the journey, he is sullen and often rude to Joan when she tries to be nice to him. (I find this a realistic response because if you’re stuck on a ship with someone who’s already attacked you, you want to keep it from happening again and being nice to them may deter it.) Once they land, Burns drags her off into the Martian plains, now convinced that she’s slept with every crew member except for him. One of the Martian robots finds them, kills Burns and brings her back to the Martian city. As a result she is the only one who meets a biological Martian. The other crew members debate what to do. Should they follow her? Would tracking them down and trying to get Burns to let her go just endanger her life further? They decide not to follow at the time and when they encounter Burns’s body, which has been badly mangled, they assume that she is dead too and give up on searching for her. Later on, once they’ve all returned to Earth, she gets attacked in the press. When the other crew members regain their reputations, she still gets painted as a liar and is held responsible for the destruction of the Soviet spaceship. There are some people who would be bothered by this. I am not, in part because I am a woman and it’s not as if this kind of behavior is news to me. In an ideal world, this would not happen, but in the 1980’s as imagined by someone in the 1930’s this is an entirely plausible outcome.
If that is not enough to show that this is a novel of the 1930’s, the early part of the book contains some funny mimics of the ideologies of the 1930’s. There is no doubt that Wyndham loathed the Nazis and was quite familiar with their claims of Teutonic superiority.
Pottsdamer Tageblatt which pointed out on behalf of the Fatherland that Keuntz, a German before he was an American, had with true German generosity offered his prize to the whole world. Keuntz, replied that the Emblem with some heat, was a jew who had been forced to flee the Fatherland in the days of the first Fuhrer.
Wyndham also gives us a very plausible summary of the Soviet-sympathetic newspapers.
outside the main brawl the Views-Record was announcing that “mars must be internationalized.” Swannen Haffer in the Daily Socialist was asking “Will the Martian Workers be Exploited?” The Daily Artisan was predicting the discovery of a flourishing system of Martian Soviets. Gerald Birdy wrote articles on “Planning a New World” and the need for a Planetician in the Cabinet.
The political world in 1981 turned out to be very different from Wyndham’s predictions. Fortunately, the Nazi regime fell less than ten years after the book was published. I suspect that by 1981, there were very few people left in the Soviet Union who truly believed in the Soviet system, though there were plenty of people writing propaganda for it. Predicting the future of technology is hard, but predicting the future of politics is even harder so I never expect a science fiction writer’s political predictions to be accurate. It’s enough for them to be plausible or entertaining. In this, Wyndham most definitely succeeds; the excerpts from the political newspapers papers are the funniest part of the book and nice addition to an otherwise serious science fiction novel.
I really liked this book. It’s one of the better pre-WWII science fiction novels I’ve read in a while. The characters are believable and have some depth to them. Wyndham’s writing is smooth and doesn’t have the choppiness that one often finds in the pulp science fiction of that era. The robots are not cliches, and while science fiction is full of stories about Martians who are dying, Wyndham’s dying Martians are much more interesting than the Martians you find in most books. I also appreciated the spot-on satire of the various Earth powers vying to be the first to arrive on Mars. One of the reasons I started writing these reviews was that I wanted to find older science fiction novels that are forgotten or aren’t read as much as they should be. Stowaway to Mars is still in print via Modern Library, but it isn’t as well known as it ought to be, especially given how well it is written.