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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Imagining Mars

March 12, 2012 by Scott Timberg

WHATEVER the faults of John Carter, the new film based on the early work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we’re happy to have the chance to head back to Mars. Given the way NASA funding is going, this may be our only chance.

As a species, we’ve been fascinated with the Red Planet for a long time — the film is only the latest of a long line. Why does it draw us to it, and how has our thinking about Mars changed over the years? Those are the issues I tackled on Hero Complex; here is my story.

Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson — whose intriguing list of favorite Mars novels is here — talked to me about images of Mars; when we spoke, he’d not yet seen the whole film, but was impressed by the trailer, calling its stark, mountainous Wild West-like terrain among the best Martian landscape he’s ever seen.

“The was the film can have a real impact is if the true star of the movie is the planet,” said Robinson, a longtime environmentalist. “The shape of a landscape is something very deep in human evolution. In hunting and gathering days, the landscape was pretty much what we had. There’s part of the human brain that looks at new land and says, ‘Wow, what’s the potential here. Boy, you could live there.”

Filed Under: brit culture, film, literary, science, science-fiction

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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