Martian Time-Slip | The Mars Frontier
In the following chapter excerpt, Abbott examines the ways in which the homesteading experience of the American West has been recreated by writers in depicting planetary colonies. In particular, Abbott discusses Dick’s treatment of a successful settlement on the Mars frontier that shows the disaster as much as the triumph.
When writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about homesteading in ways that questioned simple stories of success through perseverance, they were situating their ideas in this changing context of American historiography and also reflecting specific historical writings of the 1950s and 1960s that were probing beneath the surface of the western myth to find uncomfortable and incongruous realities. Novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner in Beyond the 100th Meridian (1954) and historian Walter Prescott Webb in ‘‘The American West: Perpetual Mirage’’ (1957)...
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