Stowaway to Mars

Published in 1935, this story about a voyage by rocket to Mars has so much scientifically wrong with it that you might think when you start that it’s just another Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure.

The English rocket blasts off from Salisbury Plain. The crew, carrying rifles and ammunition, only need oxygen masks on the planet, whose canals really are full of water and surrounded by dry, prickly foliage. And there are Martians, real live, breathing, humanoid Martians.

But John Wyndham was more than just a spinner of science fiction adventures. The Day of the Triffids examines the way humans might handle catastrophe. Which would be best? And worst? The Chrysalids looks at religious fundamentalism. The Kraken Wakes offers us a world in which all our preconceptions about being top of the evolutionary pile are turned on their heads. There’s a sharp intelligence at work in his fiction, and Stowaway to Mars is no exception.

It's not his best book. It’s not even in the Top 5. But at its heart is a discussion of what constitutes life and intelligence, and that’s what hooked me. The humanoid Martians are slowly being superseded by a race of machines. Intelligent machines. And they accept the change because they know their race will continue, albeit in mechanical form. The Earthlings are shocked.  Machines? But who’s to say, the Martians argue, what constitutes existence. Existence is existence, and if it’s to be the machines that inherit the planet, so be it.

Definitely not Edgar Rice Burroughs.