As Hollywood re-discovered Mars on its own (with MISSION TO MARS, RED PLANET, at least one TV movie and persistent rumors of a James Cameron film project), written SF went back to Mars another time: Bova’s Return to Mars, Baxter’s Voyage, Hartman’s Mars Underground, Robinson’s The Martians all went back, sometime literally, to the red planet for one more adventure. Interestingly enough, even though there was a first Mars boom in the early nineties, (Bova’s Mars, Williamson’s Beachhead, Anderson’s Climbing Olympus, etc…) the Pathfinder expedition of 1997 (as well as the flap about Martian “fossils” in 1996) rekindled interest in the fourth rock from the sun. A refreshing chance after Burroughs’ fantasy Mars. The crowning Mars work of the decade, of course, goes to Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterful Mars trilogy, which set the tone for a series of scientifically accurate novels perhaps more concerned with writing future history than overblown SF. SF writers returned to the Red Planet en masse, virtually re-inventing our SFictional view of the planet in light of NASA’s latest discoveries about it.
The nineties have been an excellent decade as far as Mars and Science-Fiction have been concerned.
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