AFTERWORD TO THE GODS OF MARS
This story started, as many of these stories did, during an informal workshopping/brainstorming session at my apartment. As I recall, Jack was down on a visit, Michael had come over, and we were sitting around in my “backyard,” which was a rectangular slab of concrete surrounded by a head-high wooden fence, because it was too hot in my apartment to use it for anything other than perhaps drying meat into beef jerky. It was dusk, and this was July of 1982—July 20th, I think. We’d been trying to come up with new ideas for collaborative stories, and this was one of the plot ideas I threw out to them from my story-idea notebook, where it had been sleeping since 1971, when I’d read an account of the Mariner 9 mission. As Woody says in the story, a dust storm had hidden the entire planet just before Mariner 9 could begin taking the first close-up photos of Mars; when the storm lifted, and the photos were taken, the Mars that they showed was totally unlike the Mars that everyone had expected to see—no canals, none of the classic Lowellian features at all. And so, I immediately thought, what if the Lowellian features had really been there after all, but, under cover of the sandstorm, somebody had changed it all before we could get photos of it, changed it to the now-familiar Mars of the Mariner and Viking photos? And then suppose, just before the first manned expedition gets there, it gets changed back, so that the Mars the astronauts land on is the Mars of Burroughs and Lowell, not the Mars of Mariner 9?
This idea seemed to appeal to everyone, and we spent the rest of the evening talking about the story, working out the details of the plot. The story seemed to call for a high-tech opening sequence, with a NASA mission orbiting Mars, and since we considered Michael to be our High-Tech Expert (he, after all, had actually written stories with spaceships in them, which was considerably more than Jack or I had ever done), he was tapped to take first crack at a draft of the story. By the weekend of Jack’s wedding to Jeanne Van Buren, the weekend of January 1,1983, Michael had produced a draft which took the story up to the initial landing sequence, and brought the draft with him to the wedding; at some decent interval after the wedding (the next day, I think), we had a quick story conference, and decided that Jack, as our Phenomenology Expert, should take it from there—which he did, roughing it out to a point just before the actual ending.
Michael may have taken a crack at another draft at this point, I’m not sure. At any rate, my work calendar shows that I started work on it myself on March 5,1983, worked on it pretty intensively during the middle of April, and finished the story on April 20,1983. I added an ending, and did an extensive coordinating and homogenizing draft, going back through the story from the beginning, adding new sections and injecting new material interstitially into existing sections throughout. It seems to me that my biggest contribution to the story was in deepening and intensifying the characterization of Thomas throughout, giving him a more complex personal background that increased his psychological motivation to actually do what he later does; in the process, I got to work in mention of an old Ron Cobb cartoon that I had been impressed by years before.
Shockingly, neither Jack nor Michael had ever read any of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian novels—so all the Barsoom Nostalgia here was supplied by me.
Our working title for this was “Sex Kings of Mars.” (It’s a joke, son.) We sent it out under the title “Storm Warning,” which Ellen Datlow talked us into changing to “The Gods of Mars.” We also did a cut at Ellen’s prompting, eliminating a couple of thousand words from the manuscript. Michael and I worked on making the cuts in a couple of sessions at the end of July and the beginning of August. The story was published in Omni, and showed up on that year’s final Nebula ballot, much to the disgust of Sue Denim in Cheap Truth.