Sleepers Of Mars

Introduction: THE FATE OF THE MARTIANS

The fiction writers have toyed with the notion of travelling to the planets for two centuries or more. But to foresee in the thirties the day when both America and Russia would engage in systematic efforts to explore the surface of Mars, through ingenious rocket machines, with the final object of setting human foot upon that planet, would appear to rely on something more than imaginative guesswork.

In the years before World War II interrupted his writings, the late John Wyndham was a keen observer of the first tentative experiments in rocket propulsion. While others scoffed at the prophecies of those who pioneered the science of astronautics, he lent a sympathetic ear to their aspirations—and found in them inspiration for his tales.

In Stowaway to Mars, his second full-length novel (already revived by Coronet Books), he anticipated the universal excitement which might one day be aroused by the attempt to cross interplanetary space—by three competing nations, in the year 1981. The story relates the adventures of the crew of the British vessel Gloria Mundi, which alone completes a triumphant return to Earth. An American contestant in the space race makes a disastrous landing on Mars. What happened to the crew of the Russian ship Tovaritch, with whom the British astronauts had a brief, unfriendly encounter?

The first story in this new selection of the early work of John Wyndham, from the days when he wrote as John Beynon or John Beynon Harris (his real name), was intended to resolve this intriguing question. Though originally published as a sequel to the earlier novel, it is actually a separate story, in which Commander Karaminoff and his comrades discover the secrets of the mysterious red world and its perambulating machines.

Did Mars once harbour a dwindling race of beings who were compelled to take drastic measures in the face of the gradual dissolution of their planet—measures that might ensure a new lease of life for their kind? As you read the fabled history of this ancient globe and its doomed civilisation, you may be tempted to see in the efforts of the Martians to put off their inevitable fate some hint of the methods which man may have to adopt if he is to survive on his own overcrowded, polluted planet.

Unlike ‘Sleepers of Mars,’ the other stories in this volume saw publication in the U.S.A. before they were presented in Tales of Wonder, the first British magazine to specialise in science fiction, which I was able to initiate in 1937 and which became a war casualty in 1942. The notions they offer still seem fantastic, but are none the less plausible in the hands of a writer who was always noted for his ability to tell a convincing story rather than merely to project a novel idea.

Walter Gillings