This page uses content from the Rainbow Mars biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.

Rainbow Mars is a science fiction short story collection (published in 1999) by Larry Niven, in which humans from Earth visit Mars and find it populated by the creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, H.G. Wells, and Stanley G. Weinbaum - in short, all the great science fiction writers who have written about Mars. This means that Mars is a very crowded planet, inhabited by several different intelligent species and cultures.

The book compiles a series of short stories by Niven, including Flight of the Horse, in which he introduced the Temporal Research Institute. The premise of the novel is that the old Secretary-General has recently died; his heir is more interested in extraterrestrials than the Earth beasts who went extinct due to excess pollution. This left the Temporal Institute scrambling to invent space flight, and several of its agents to visit Mars.

The starting temporal point is the year "+ 1108 Atomic Era," corresponding to 3053 AD in the Gregorian Calendar. The main character is Agent Hanville Svetz, a brave and resourceful man. Neither he nor any of his colleagues ever realize that that all his expeditions have actually been to Parallel Universes, and the animals he retrieves are all creatures from fiction, such as Moby Dick, and from Mythology, such as Quetzalcoatl. The idea that he may be traveling into realms of fantasy does occur to Svetz a couple of times, but the notion is refuted and crushed by others.

When the expedition arrives in Mars, the year is "-550 Atomic Era," corresponding to 1395 AD/CE.

Rainbow Mars (1999), ISBN 0-312-86777-8

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the biographical information on this page under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.