Which is not to say that the Mars of Dire Planet feels in any way unoriginal. It is a vast and sprawling land whose Golden Age has long since passed, and the treasures of that Golden Race lie in wait for those bold enough to seek them out and clever enough to avoid the guardians that also lie in wait.
It is a planet of contrasts, with hideous spider-folk and beautiful near-elven warrior races. Jenkin’s Mars is no less savage, and populated by the expected menagerie of vicious fauna and multiple races of Man. (To say nothing of bare limbed – it’s hot on the desert planet!) The image of Mars painted by Joel Jenkins inn Dire Planet certainly owes a great debt to Burroughs. Or perhaps the science-fiction genre, one that claims to have moved on, still carry fragments of Edgar Rice Burrough’s DNA within its mitochrondria.Įither way, savage Mars continues to serve as an excellent canvas for writers to paint epic stories of exploration, romance, and bare-knuckle action. It’s a land just out of reach, yet close enough to taste, and so it makes a perfect setting for the lost hero to discover a new world, and make an immediate impact on the almost human societies that call Mars home. A planet that hides its secrets beneath shifting crimson sands and waving alien flora.
Like our own, but a planet where the fragile façade of civilization and security have been stripped away. Even though we’ve all seen photos of the desolate surface taken by our robot pioneers and know on an intellectual level that nothing waits for us on Mars but red dirt, freezing winds, and the wreckage of the machines we’ve sent to do our exploring for us, we just can’t help but look at that angry red dot in the night sky and imagine a world like our own. There’s just something about the vast red wastelands of our nearest planetary neighbor.
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