Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Martian Froniter

A Martian farmhand
To many a colonist of Mars, it might seem that if there is a bright center of Solar civilization in the days of the Empire, the deserts of Mars are far from. Sodbusters and homesteaders came in with the promise of free land, but the arid land and rarefied air don't make it easy.


Strange monuments, pyramids, and the occasional ruin reveal the existence of a Martian civilization of the past, when it was perhaps a greener world. Historians are divided over whether any of the current inhabitants are related to these ancient people. The gangly limbed, barrel-chested Sand People of the deep desert that raid Earther settlements, show no cultural interest in the old places and are as ignorant of the ancient hieroglyphs as they would be the mating habits of a Venusian dracosaur. The rodentine scrappers with their crawling junkyards seem no better adapted to the Martian environment that humans.


The Amos Isley Spaceport (named for one of the early rocket barons of the Red Planet) is as raucous as most of the other farm town settlements are quiet. Many a being with a price on its head ends up hiding out here, and in fact, interplanetary criminal gangs are known to have hideouts in the Martian wastes.

2 comments:

JasperAK said...

Amos Isley Spaceport. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

Leo Knight said...

The surface area of Mars is equivalent to all the land of Earth, if you took the water away and squished all the continents together. Plenty of room for adventure! One of the early black and white episodes of Lost in Space had an image of the planet they crashed on that looked an awful lot like Mars. Great ideas. Thanks!