"The Mars of reality was not the Mars of imagination. The old Mars had died, and we must now learn to live with the new."
— Arthur C. Clarkenote
Mars is the next great frontier for humanity's journey into the cosmos. Landing on our nearest planetary neighbor would instantly become one of mankind's greatest accomplishments, as well as one of its most expensive and intensive. Establishing a colony and Settling the Frontier would be an even greater undertaking.
In space fiction, however, Mars is often portrayed as less of a glorious destination and more of a dull, "has-been", backwater world. Humanity did get there, and it was exciting at the time... but once Casual Interplanetary Travel and/or Casual Interstellar Travel become commonplace and make more interesting planets accessible (especially if they're Earth-like), Mars gets "left behind".
There are many reasons for this, and they frequently overlap. Without extensive Terraforming, the low atmosphere, massive dust storms (which can cover the entire planet at times), sterilizing solar wind, and cold temperatures (with especially large swings between day/night) typically limit human habitation to claustrophobic domed and/or underground cities. Most of the available resources (iron, other metals, water ice) would require extensive mining and shipping operations, with colonies likely growing up around these, giving them a blue-collar Company Town vibe (and all negative traits therein, especially when the "company" is a MegaCorp with No OSHA Compliance). Scientific research (especially if it's dangerous) is another common use for Mars, making it something of a planetary Safely Secluded Science Center. In any case, it's treated as best avoided and like being Reassigned to Antarctica for those forced to go there in other roles (administration, security, research).
See also Insignificant Little Blue Planet, for when Earth gets a similar treatment from the galaxy at large, and Venus Is Wet, which covers the older pre-space-probe tradition of portraying Venus as a lush, jungled world. Contrast Once-Green Mars, which can make it quite a bit more interesting and relevant.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Cowboy Bebop: Following the devastation of Earth, Mars has become the new center of human society and "mundane" in a different way: it's now the closest thing to "ordinary life" in a solar system full of stranger places. While other worlds in the setting have striking identities (Venus with its Floating Continents, Ganymede as a water world, Jupiter's moons full of frontier outposts, asteroid colonies operating like lawless boom towns, etc.), many terraformed to more easily support life, Mars is just where people live normal lives in cities much as they were on Earth.
Comic Books
- EC Comics: One story in Weird Science is about a man who works washing dishes in a dingy diner. He explains that he’d once dreamed of becoming an astronaut and travelling to other planets, but life had gotten in the way. It’s not until the end of the story that we find out the boring desert town he lives in is actually on Mars.
Films — Live-Action
- Ad Astra: Mars, while colonized, is mostly a bureaucratic outpost between Earth and the outer solar system with a few scientific stations. It exists primarily to support communication and transit logistics for deep-space missions, feeling more like a remote, muted government office. Travelers passing through treat Mars as just another stop along the way to somewhere far more distant and meaningful. Even the Moon is more built up, with actual colonies and visiting tourists.
- Total Recall (1990): Mars is a dusty, industrial, corporate-controlled colony where miners and laborers struggle to survive under oppressive conditions. Not only is the environment cramped and polluted, but workers live under the constant threat of their air being cut off by their corporate overlords and of developing disfiguring mutations from the planet's radiation. When Quaid goes to Rekall to purchase a memory-implant vacation, the technician tries to upsell him on something more exotic and exciting (such as a cruise around Saturn's rings), joking that Mars is a "has-been" destination that people get stuck working on, not a place anyone would visit for fun. Quaid insists because of his recurring dreams involving the planet, but the scene underscores the trope: Mars isn't the future, it's a planetary equivalent of a struggling mining town that's long since lost whatever sense of adventure it once held. Subverted near the end when ancient Martian terraforming technology is discovered that can give the planet a breathable atmosphere.
Literature
- Between Planets: Although other Robert A. Heinlein novels portray Mars as the center of the action, in this one Mars is explicitly described as a backwater planet, not really "fit for humans" and the one place in the Solar System where the majority of the humans there are scientists; there are also Martians, an "ancient and dying race", whose customs (and ancient ruins) are the chief object of study of the human researchers on Mars. Mars is regarded by the government as being a mere outpost full of "harmless longhairs" and needing only a "skeleton garrison" — all in stark contrast to Venusnote , with a comparably much larger and more diverse human population, who are now in a state of open colonial revolution against Earth. For exactly these reasons, Mars has quietly become a major center for "the Organization", the interplanetary resistance movement — most of whose members are scientists — formed to oppose the Solar System's repressive government.
- The works of Arthur C. Clarke: Clarke wrote about Mars extensively across several decades, and his portrayals shift as real-world understanding of Mars changed. Some of his early works (How We Went to Mars, The Sands of Mars) treat Mars as mysterious and possibly inhabited. However, after the Mariner mission to Mars in the 1960s showed it to be arid and lifeless, his later works treat Mars as scientifically understood, dry, and mundane. This reflects Clarke's own disappointment and scientifically grounded shift, with his later works (The Promise of Space, various interviews and essays) acknowledging Mars not as a world of ancient canals and lost civilizations, but as an airless desert that is "scientifically fascinating but emotionally disappointing".
- The Expanse: In the series, as well as its TV adaptation, Mars begins as humanity's great utopian project with a centuries-long, society-defining effort to terraform the Red Planet into a second Earth. The Martian Congressional Republic builds its identity, politics, and military culture around this singular goal. But once the Ring Gates open, offering access to thousands of fully habitable planets, the dream of Mars stalls. The planet's economy declines, its massive terraforming infrastructure is abandoned mid-project, and its population begins to emigrate off-world in search of a better life. The government struggles to maintain purpose, the military hemorrhages talent to other colony ventures, and Mars becomes a setting defined by disillusionment.
- Itinerarium exstaticum: The oldest known work (1556) depicting a journey through the solar system, Mars is a desolate, rugged landscape marked by volcanic activity. Quite mundane compared to the much more interesting Jupiter (clear water, mountains made of silver) or Venus (air smells of amber, trees that blossom precious stones).
- In the The Draco Tavern story Losing Mars, a human bureaucrat is aghast when Mars gets handed over to an alien race that's interested in buying it. Humans lost interest in traveling to the rest of the solar system once aliens had made First Contact, so the alien arbitrator decides that humans have no vested interest in the planet. Bartender Rick Schumann set up the deal and gets a percentage, so he assures the bureaucrat that they can at least use his plot of Martian land to set up an embassy.
- Venus Prime: In this future, Mars was given to the communists as a consolation prize for their loss in the Cold War. Consequently, the colony is heavily unionized and loaded with bureaucracy.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: Mars was humanity's oldest colony and the site of Starfleet's largest ship-building facility. That said, despite centuries of colonization, it remains red, dusty, and industrialized with habitation limited to domed cities. Compared to the Federation's many other habitable worlds (most Earth-like), Mars fits the trope's recurring trend of being an important place, but one where you're assigned to go, not choosing to visit. Come the events of Star Trek: Picard, Mars is bombed so heavily by rogue synths that it is still burning some 14 years later.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech: Mars was the first planet to be colonized, but once faster-than-light travel was discovered via jumpships, much of its appeal was lost thanks to it being easier to find planets that were closer to Earth's gravity and atmospheric density. While it's still inhabited and is home to a decent-sized 'mech factory, it's really never amounted to anything more than that.
- Fate Core: Inverted in the setting of "Red Planet", which presents Mars as the promising new utopian bright spot of the solar system while it's an Earth still caught in a cold war between oppressive regimes along traditional lines and espousing obsolete ideologies that's the backwater.
- Space 1889: Played With. Mars has the reputation of a "has-been" world slowly dying... among the Martians, who see the gradual decay over millenia of their planet and civilization in a very fatalistic way, believing that there is nothing that can stop it. Inverted for Human explorers, as for them Mars is a bold new frontier to explore and to discover the secrets of the ancient Martians and see current day ones in need of their ideas of Christianity, Progress and Science.
- Starfinder: Akiton, the Mars-equivalent, is a run-down, often lawless, desert wasteland after the planet's main industry, thasteron mining, collapsed after the advent of drift engines.
- Warhammer 40,000: Mars is humanity's oldest and most important colony world, but it is no longer a place of wonder or discovery. It is the first and greatest Forge World of the Imperium of Man, a planet-sized factory complex that produces weapons, vehicles, starships, and every other piece of war materiel the Imperium depends on. Millennia of unbroken industry have left Mars a smog-choked, irradiated hellscape where the sky is always filled with ash, dust, and machine exhaust. Mars is vital, powerful, and sacred to the Cult Mechanicus, but it is also entirely consumed by function. It is simply where the Imperium manufactures its war machines, eternally.
Video Games
- Destiny: Mars was once a thriving human colony during the Golden Age including terraforming, large cities, and Clovis Bray research facilities. When Darkness struck, much of the colony was "swept away". Mars is now a frozen desert half-buried under centuries of dust storms, with the ruins of abandoned colonies scattered across its surface getting picked clean by looters and scavengers.
- Doom: Mars is home to the Union Aerospace Corporation's utilitarian research facilities staffed by scientists, security personnel, and workers who live in sterile corridors and industrial complexes. It's a remote assignment where personnel are sent to support experimental research far from Earth. The only thing that makes Mars memorable in the series is the catastrophic experiment that opens a portal to Hell.
- Halo: Mars is one of humanity's earliest colonies, but by the time of the main series is a heavily industrialized planet mostly known for its shipyards, training bases, and military headquarters. It's crucial to the UNSC war effort, but not a glamorous destination compared to more dramatic frontiers like Reach, the Outer Colonies, or alien worlds. Mars is a utilitarian place where people are assigned, not one anyone dreams of visiting.
- Helldivers II: Mars was one of the earliest planets to be colonized and terraformed by Super Earth, where it then served mostly as a practical support world housing military training facilities where Helldiver recruits were drilled before being deployed across the galaxy. This sense of Mars as routine ended abruptly during the Razing of Mars, when the Illuminate burned the planet's surface and all its infrastructure. Even in destruction, Mars is treated less as a lost frontier paradise and more as the loss of a dependable stronghold in an interstellar war.
- Red Faction: Mars is a mining colony run by the Ultor Corporation, where miners live in overcrowded, unsafe conditions and endure low pay, pollution, and routine abuse. The planet is not a bold new frontier so much as a remote company town where workers are sent because they have no better options. The settlements are industrial and bleak, with little sense of progress or promise. Mars becomes the setting for rebellion because life there is grim, stagnant, and entirely defined by corporate control.
- Mass Effect: Humanity's interstellar age starts with the 2148 discovery of Prothean ruins on Mars (about 35 years before the first game in the series), whose data vaults unlock mass effect physics and, soon after, the Charon relay. Originally a prospect for terraforming and colonization, humanity quickly moves beyond Mars to colonize more Earth-like exoplanets connected to the mass relay network. Mars' southern pole (the site of the Prothean data vault) is made into a protected research preserve while immigration and development to the rest of the planet are heavily restricted, leaving Mars historically important but largely overshadowed by humanity's more habitable colony worlds.
- Starfield: Mars is home to Cydonia, humanity's oldest extraterrestrial colony, originally built during the first great wave of extrasolar expansion. Its resources (particularly Iron) helped to fuel the expansion, especially the Deimos Staryard in orbit which builds ships for the United Colonies Navy. However, by the time the game takes place, the colony's initial promise has long since faded. Cydonia is a cramped, industrial mining town carved down into the Martian bedrock to protect it from the planet's many hazards and run under exploitative corporate management. Its infrastructure is decades out of date, its economy is dependent on whatever contracts the rest of the United Colonies spare for it, and its overworked residents frequently talk about wanting to leave for "anywhere else". During the main quest, when searching for UC Vanguard Moara, his commanding officer notes that Moara, who grew up on Mars, actually requested to be stationed there while every other member of the Vanguard treats it as being Reassigned to Antarctica. While Mars was once a symbol of humanity's future among the stars, it is now treated as a worn-down, blue-collar backwater.
- Stellaris:
- In the standard start, Mars is present in the Sol system and is uninhabitable without first terraforming it (a late-game technology). Even with that investment, Mars becomes just one of dozens of colonized worlds with no special traits.
- Downplayed in the Commonwealth of Man/United Nations of Earth preset starts, where Mars is automatically a terraformable candidate with special features. While it still becomes one of many colonies, with others more valuable/interesting, it at least has something to make it a little less "mundane".
Western Animation
- Futurama: Downplayed in that Mars was terraformed and it has a renowned university, but most of the planet is like a future version of the American Old West, with cattle ranches (for large bugs called Buggalo) being the main industry.
Real Life
- The spirit of this trope has some basis in real-world history. From the late 19th century through the early 20th century, Mars was a highly romanticized setting in speculative fiction, often imagined as home to advanced civilizations, canals, lost empires, and exotic cultures equal or superior to Earth's. Works by authors like H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others made Mars a place of adventure and wonder. When the Mariner and Viking missions (1965–1976) revealed Mars to be a cold, barren, and lifeless desert, the cultural image of Mars changed dramatically. Much of the earlier optimism and mystery faded, and later science fiction more often depicted Mars as harsh, industrial, abandoned, or routine rather than heroic or fantastical. The resulting sense of disappointment and deflated wonder contributes to the modern depiction of Mars as mundane rather than mythic, heavily inspiring this trope.
