Book Review: Lost Mars: Stories from the Golden Age of the Red Planet edited by Mike Ashley

This review was first published by Booklist on August 20, 2018.

There has been a craze lately for retro and golden-age science fiction, and Lost Mars fits right into that trend, presenting a collection of 10 classic short stories about Mars written between 1887 and 1963. It features works by H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and J. G. Ballard as well as authors less well known to modern audiences. These stories are of the highest quality and illustrate how our evolving understanding of the Red Planet changed the way we wrote about it and how Mars came to occupy a prominent position in our hopes, dreams, and fears as the modern age dawned and grew. Editor Ashley (The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF, 2013) offers a brief and thoroughly researched introduction which provides background information about both the major Martian discoveries of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and the history of Martian science fiction from H. G. Wells through Andy Weir. It serves as a fascinating overview of the history of Mars in science fiction, from the birth of the genre through the beginning of the space age.