Mars is lovely this time of year
Har Deshur: Visions of an alternate, slightly more habitable Mars, is an ongoing online Speculative Biology project written and illustrated by T.K. Sivgin (otherwise better known for the palaeo-media blog Manospondylus
), a colleague of C.M. Kosemen, started on July 25, 2022. It takes place in an alternate universe where many predictions and observations about planet Mars, especially those shortly before the Mariner-4 mission, turned out to be true. While the red planet is still uninhabitable for humans and there aren't any civilizations, living or extinct, conditions are stable enough to allow for the existence of extremophile multicellular life on the surface. These creatures are presented through the perspective of a veteran astronaut retelling his journeys, while sometimes also offering glimpses into the other corners of this alternate solar system.
The work is largely a love-letter to the Planetary Romance genre, as well as many outdated depictions and speculations about the red planet, be they from Percival Lowell, H. G. Wells or Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the same time it tries to genuinely explore what life on Mars could have once been like, either in the past or if conditions had been different. The project is notable for using hand-drawn stippling illustrations similar to old-school textbooks.
It can be read here
Recently, the creator has started turning it into a video series, by using AI to have Dagoth Ur and other characters narrate it. This can be viewed here
Har Deshur contains examples of:
- Absent Aliens:
- While the universe as a whole fully runs on Solar System Neighbors when it comes to plants and animal life, intelligent life beyond Earth is notably absent beyond some ambiguous artifacts.
- Averted with the natives of Vulkanus, though they are archaic stoneage beings.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Happens on Mercury after an experiment with self-replicating factories did not account for the possibility that the mining robots could cannibalize each other. Funnily enough, the rogue A.I.s fall victim to this themselves (see Irony below).
- Alternate History: Apart from the planets of our solar system being different, many things in Earth's timeline have been altered as well. The Soviet Union still exists, along with the resulting Cold War tensions and the Space Race. Some NASA and Soviet space probes that failed in real life, such as Mars 3 or the Mars Polar Lander, were also successful here. Various things in the entertainment industry have also gone down differently, such as Atari still being a major console producer.
- The entry on Mercury mentions that “MacArthur glassed Manchuria”, which confirms that general Douglas MacArthur’s scrapped plan to use nuclear weapons during the Korean War actually did happen in this timeline, which has some horrific implications.
- Ambiguous Time Period: It is never stated from what point in the alternate timeline the narrator is telling his stories or when the Horus missions took place. The technology resembles what was deemed plausible for the near-future of the 1950s, most of the references to Earth-culture and people indicate somewhen in the early 21st century, while some of the dates given in the mock-references stretch all the way into the 24th century. These discrepancies are perhaps deliberate.
- Ancient Egypt: The work is named after Mars' designation in Egyptian mythology (as an aspect of Horus). Some of the aliens also have Egyptian names.
- Artistic License – Chemistry: The fact that the alternate Mars atmosphere contains in almost equal parts hydrogen and oxygen could be taken as this, as it means that, on paper, the air is explosive, but the narration is aware of this and offers a few points on why this is not as big of a risk: The autoignition temperature of the Knallgas reaction is higher on the (already cold) Mars than on Earth due to the lower air pressure, there is too little vegetation to cause wildfires, the giant dust storms cause lightning strikes to be exceedingly rare (which is also the case in real life) and when the air is ignited on rare occasion, the flame is immediately doused, as the product of hydrogen fire is water.
- Bizarre Alien Locomotion:
- Ballousaurs fly using their two hindlegs, while the single arm is used as a leg.
- The Zitharta is an aquatic animal that uses jet propulsion, which in itself is not that outstanding, if it weren't for the fact it uses a whole battery of pumps to the point it resembles an alien spaceship.
- Lifeforms on Titan, due to lacking energy for muscle-power, use wind to move, with some evolving forms of locomotion that evoke strandbeests.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction:
- Much like in Expedition, nearly all Martians are hermaphrodites, often fighting with each other during mating to determine who gets to impregnate the other.
- Shellubim give birth to flying larvae which eventually settle down and become immobile sessile animals
- The related Skolex have alternating generations like plants, with the diploid stage resembling a shellubim and the haploid one an armoured slug or worm.
- Chiropedes begin life as a plant that sheds of its “leaves” which then walk off as their own centipede-like creature. The method is called strobilation, similar to jellyfish.
- Bug War: Jupiter’s moon Europa overruns all the human bases on it with countless icecrabs (which even resemble the arachnids from Starship Troopers) and even larger caste forms. Subverted in that the humans are simple scientists unprepared to such respond to such a threat.
- Crystalline Creature: Life on Saturn‘s moon Titan is not made of cells, but instead composed of crystallised hydrogen cyanide.
- Eat Dirt, Cheap: Dust slugs are capable of digesting the iron oxide dust of Mars, using lithotrophic microbes in their guts.
- First Contact: Happens between humans and the primitive natives of planet Vulkanus. It happens quite similarly to meeting an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon.
- Genius Loci: The sub-surface ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa eventually turns out to be this.
- Historical In-Joke:
- Many of Percival Lowell’s observations, such as the Martian canals and the Venus spokes, turn out to be Real After All, though there is no sign that they were actually made by intelligent forces.
- The Banuptet profile mentions that the first man on Mars was Michael Collins, who in real life was the barely remembered Third Wheel of Apollo 11. He notably died one year before the project began.
- Vulcan (which was a planet hypothesized to exist in real life and not just a Star Trek invention) is confirmed as existing in this version of the solar system.
- Mercury is presented as a tidally-locked planet, differing from real life. This was indeed thought to be the case before the age of modern astronomy.
- Humanoid Aliens: Played with. The great ushabtis are vaguely humanoid in that they walk upright on two legs and have quite womanly hips, but they only have a single arm, a weird head and, most importantly, are not actually intelligent. This has not stopped authors on Earth from inventing stories about intelligent ushabtis, however.
- Insectoid Aliens: The inhabitants of Vulkanus somewhat resemble stick-insects.
- Irony: After the machines on Mercury turn rogue and act independently of their human creators, the computer viruses they developed as weapons against other machines turn rogue and start attacking their mechanical creators.
- Meaningful Name: The work is named after the Egyptian version of Mars as they were one of the few cultures that associated the planet with a positive deity. The names of creatures like cecrops, wadjets, ushabtis, khonsu or bennu also have meanings that befit their attributes. In contrast, some like hortax, zitharta or tynus have no deeper meaning other than that they sound distinctive and spacey.
- Mechanical Ecosystem: Planet Mercury develops one after an experiment with evolving machines goes haywire and they start cannibalising each other.
- Mechanical Evolution: The cause of the aforementioned accident were factories capable of selective “breeding”, modelled after the “evosphere”, a real life concept proposed by roboticist A.E. Eiben.
- Mix-and-Match Critters:
- Wadjets resemble insects with the heads of Palaeozoic fish.
- Bennus look like flightless birds in profile, have the internal anatomy of brachiopods, can retract their necks like turtles and their “beak” is made of teeth similar to those of marine worms.
- Onychognaths combine characteristics of vertebrates and arthropods.
- Nothing Is Scarier:
- The Syncarpus page mentions some sort of horrible massacre that occured on the Moon, with no more details other than that it involved a cult and the implication that children were severely harmed.
- Jupiter's moon Europa opens up an almost unlimited amount of questions, whose possible answers, which will likely never be revealed, each come with more disturbing implications than the ones that preceed them.
- Once-Green Mars: While this version of Mars is still much more habitable than the real one, it is still a desert wasteland that once used to be far wetter and greener.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Wadjets resemble the so-called air-rods.
- Planimal:
- Shellubim live their adult life completely sessile, using their former wings as leaves for photosynthesis.
- The more derived Skolex even evolved alternating generations, much like Earth-plants.
- Spongisporia and Fractaria, despite now making up the majority of the planet's flora, originally descended from organisms not unlike sponges or seapens.
- Pseudarticulates are the reverse of this, being fauna that evolved from flora, independently of the other animal lineages.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The unsettling description of the ushabti as the "perfect woman" is based off an actual conversation the creator had with C.M. Kosemen during their podcast
- Science Marches On: Happens in-universe multiple times, as the phylogenetic relationships of the aliens keep getting reshuffled. A notable example is the phylum "Brachiostoma", which turns out to have been a waste-basket-taxon into which all vaguely worm-like Martians used to be lumped. Many similar thing have happened in real life.
- Shout-Out: Has its own page
- Shown Their Work: While not meant to be a true-to-life representation, a lot of data about Mars’ orbit, seasons, geology and geography is accurate to the real thing. For the climate map and atmospheric composition the author even referenced real life computer-model studies on prehistoric Mars. The first introduction post is also an out-of-universe comprehensive history of speculations and observations of real life Mars.
- Silicon-Based Life: Heavily Downplayed.
- Life on Mars is carbon-based and also uses the same other elements as Earth-life, though various organisms, like macroareonts, trichordates and onychognaths use silicon minerals to build up shells, skeletons or even eyes. This is arguably not all that different from what diatoms and glass sponges on Earth do.
- Life on Titan is technically still carbon-based but has otherwise nothing in common with life on Earth or Mars, being highly derived cyanide crystals that grow from hydrocarbon-mud.
- Speculative Documentary: The work is presented as a series of journal entries by a veteran astronaut, complete with mock-citations and references to fictional scientific papers.
- Starfish Aliens:
- Many of the alien taxa qualify, from what are essentially multicellular bacteria to pseudo-birds with clam-like ancestors and vertebrates with silicon-eyes. The trichordates and related taxa are also quite literal examples.
- Life on Titan uses neither water nor is it composed of cells, instead having evolved from self-replicating hydrogen cyanide crystals that resemble virus-capsids.
- Starfish Language: The natives of Vulkanus have harp-shaped heads with strings they pull to communicate. Their language is described as sounding like sitar music.
- Toothy Bird: Bennus resemble flightless birds, though their "beak" is literally made from teeth.
- Tripod Terror: Pedicambulates and Deltadactylians are tripods, though in different variations. One has the third leg at the back, the other at the front.
- Venus Is Wet: Subverted. In the glimpse we get of Venus it is shown that the planet is only slightly less of a hellhole than it is in real life. Most life has fled to the skies, while the bottom-dwellers are thermophiles with deep-sea-fish-like adaptations to the immense pressure. Seas and lakes are mentioned as existing, but they are boiling hot and only kept liquid thanks to the extreme air pressure.
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: Onychognaths started out with six limbs, though some have reduced this down to three.
