Introduction

There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from a story that knows exactly what it is. It does not pretend to be more than it sets out to be, and in that confidence it becomes something larger than its modest premise ever promised. Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars is precisely this sort of story: a brisk, witty, gleefully inventive piece of mid-century science fiction that wears its absurdity like a badge of honor while quietly tucking a genuine puzzle—and a genuine sense of wonder—into its back pocket. To open it is to step into an era when imagining the planets was a kind of national pastime, when the red dot of Mars hanging in the night sky was less a destination than a dare, and when a writer could take an outlandish idea, follow it to its logical conclusion, and produce something both ridiculous and strangely beautiful.

This edition presents the tale in a modern translation, adapted for the contemporary reader. That phrase deserves a moment of explanation, because it shapes everything about how you will experience the pages ahead. The original story belongs to a specific moment in the history of imaginative writing, a moment with its own rhythms of speech, its own assumptions about science and society, and its own conventions of how a story should be told aloud to an audience hungry for the future. Some of those conventions have aged gracefully; others have grown stiff with time, like old leather left in a drawer. The aim of this adaptation is not to sand away the personality of the work—heaven forbid—but to clear the small obstacles that can trip up a reader encountering it fresh, so that the humor lands as crisply as it did when it first appeared, and the ideas shine without the dust of dated phrasing obscuring them. What you hold is meant to feel immediate, alive, and conversational, the way the best science fiction always sounds when read by lamplight with the rest of the house asleep.

Before we go any further, a promise: nothing in this introduction will spoil the central surprises of the story. Bixby built this little machine with great care, and half its joy is the slow dawning realization of what is actually going on. To reveal the workings in advance would be like explaining a magic trick before the magician has finished his patter. So we will circle the story, admire it from the outside, set it in its proper context, and prepare you to enjoy it—but the trick itself remains yours to discover. Read on without fear.

A Writer Who Made Strangeness Feel Familiar

To understand the particular flavor of this story, it helps to know a little about the man who wrote it and the world that produced him. Jerome Bixby was one of those gloriously versatile talents who flourished in the great proliferation of American genre writing in the middle of the twentieth century. He was a working writer in the truest sense—a man who could turn his hand to a tense horror tale, a sweeping space adventure, or a quiet domestic eeriness, and who understood that the foundation of all of it was story. He is perhaps best remembered today for a handful of works that escaped the magazines and lodged themselves permanently in the cultural imagination, including a famous and deeply unsettling tale about a small boy with terrible powers that became one of the most celebrated episodes of a beloved television anthology series. But Bixby’s range was enormous, and his bibliography is studded with stories that demonstrate a restless, playful intelligence forever testing the boundaries of an idea to see how far it would stretch.

What unites Bixby’s best work is a certain mischievous precision. He liked premises that could be stated in a single sentence and then explored with rigorous, almost mathematical delight. Give him a strange rule about how the universe works, and he would follow that rule with the seriousness of a logician and the grin of a prankster. This is exactly the engine that powers the story before you. The setup is comic—even slapstick, in the best tradition of the bumbling expedition and the well-meaning crew getting in over their heads—but the comedy is never lazy. It is built on a real idea, a “what if” that Bixby pursues with such commitment that the absurdity curdles into something genuinely thought-provoking. By the time you reach the final pages, you may find that the laughs have given way to a quiet, almost philosophical astonishment. That is the Bixby signature: he makes you smile, and then he makes you wonder, and you are never entirely sure when one became the other.

The mid-century period in which this story appeared was a golden age for short science fiction. The magazines of the day were hungry for material, and writers competed to deliver clever, surprising, idea-driven tales that could grab a reader on a crowded train or in a quiet evening chair and refuse to let go. This was an environment that rewarded economy, wit, and a strong hook. A story had to earn its place among dozens of competitors, and the best of them developed a kind of muscular efficiency—not a word wasted, every paragraph pulling its weight, the whole thing built like a well-tuned engine designed to deliver maximum delight in minimum space. The Holes Around Mars is a beautiful specimen of this craft. It does not waste your time. It introduces its characters, establishes its situation, plants its seeds of wonder, and pays everything off with the satisfying click of a well-made lock. There is real artistry in this economy, and part of the joy of reading the story today is appreciating just how much Bixby accomplishes in such a compact space.

It is worth pausing, too, on the cultural fascination with Mars that hums beneath the surface of this tale. For generations, the red planet held a unique place in the human imagination. It was close enough to seem reachable, mysterious enough to invite endless speculation, and just visible enough to the naked eye to feel personal, almost intimate. Astronomers had spent decades peering at it through telescopes, debating the meaning of the markings on its surface, spinning theories about canals and civilizations and the possibility of life. By the time Bixby was writing, Mars had become a kind of communal dreaming-ground, a blank slate onto which writers projected every hope and anxiety about humanity’s future among the stars. The very title of this story announces its participation in that grand tradition while signaling, with that delightful and slightly baffling phrase about holes, that it intends to do something a little different with the familiar setting. That tension—between the well-worn romance of Mars and the unexpected, almost geometric strangeness Bixby introduces—is one of the great pleasures awaiting you.

The Comedy of Discovery and the Discovery of Comedy

Science fiction has always had a complicated relationship with humor. The genre is so often associated with grand themes—the fate of civilizations, the loneliness of the cosmos, the terror of the unknown—that we sometimes forget how naturally funny the situation of human beings in space actually is. Here we are, fragile and absurd creatures, hauling our coffee and our quarrels and our petty vanities across the void, encountering phenomena that make a mockery of everything we thought we understood. There is comedy in that gap between our pretensions and our limitations, and the writers who recognized this produced some of the most enduring work in the field. Bixby was one of them. He understood that wonder and laughter are not opposites but cousins, both born from the same sudden confrontation with the unexpected. The gasp and the giggle come from the same place.

In this story, the humor arrives early and stays late. There is a wonderful tradition in adventure writing of the expedition that goes sideways—the carefully planned mission that collides with reality and produces chaos, confusion, and the kind of human comedy that emerges when professionals are forced to improvise. Bixby leans into this with obvious affection. His crew are not gleaming heroes of the spaceways but recognizable people, with their irritations and their improvisations and their tendency to talk past one another at exactly the wrong moment. The voice of the storytelling carries a knowing, almost twinkling quality, as if the narrator is leaning in close to share a particularly good tale with the assurance that you, the listener, are smart enough to enjoy the joke. This conversational warmth is one of the qualities the present adaptation has worked hard to preserve and even amplify, smoothing the older cadences so that the comic timing—which is everything in a story like this—remains sharp and true.

But here is the crucial thing, the thing that elevates this story above mere comic diversion: the joke and the wonder are the same joke and the same wonder. The very feature of the situation that produces the laughs is also the feature that produces the awe. Bixby has constructed a premise where the absurdity is the marvel, where the thing that makes you smile is also the thing that makes you sit back and think, “Wait—how would that actually work?” And then, because Bixby is a careful and honest writer, he tells you exactly how it would work, and the explanation is so satisfying, so neatly logical, that the smile becomes something closer to delight. This is the rarest and finest kind of science fiction comedy—the kind that does not undercut the science but celebrates it, the kind that finds the genuine strangeness of the universe to be the best joke of all.

The “unexpected discoveries” promised in the subtitle are real, and they are worth waiting for. Without revealing anything, I can say that the pleasure of the story is the pleasure of watching a mystery assemble itself piece by piece, each new observation adding to a picture that the characters—and the reader—slowly come to understand. There is a detective-story quality to it, a sense of clues being laid down and then snapped together in a moment of revelation. Bixby plays fair with his readers, which is the highest compliment one can pay a writer of puzzle-stories. He gives you everything you need to anticipate the solution, and yet the solution still lands with the force of surprise, because he has been clever about where he points your attention. When the final pieces fall into place, you may well want to flip back through the earlier pages to admire how thoroughly the conclusion was prepared. That re-reading is one of the great gifts of a well-built tale, and this one rewards it richly.

There is also a tenderness to the story that sneaks up on you. Beneath the comedy and the cleverness, Bixby is interested in the human encounter with the genuinely new—the way our minds struggle to accommodate phenomena that do not fit our existing categories, and the way curiosity, that most human of impulses, drives us forward even when we are confused and out of our depth. The crew of his expedition are funny precisely because they are trying so hard to make sense of something that initially makes no sense at all. And in that effort—the squinting, the arguing, the measuring, the slowly dawning comprehension—Bixby captures something genuinely moving about the scientific spirit. We are creatures who cannot leave a mystery alone. We have to know. We have to understand. And the universe, it turns out, is full of things designed (or accidentally formed) to test that need to the limit. The story is, in its quiet way, a celebration of that restless human hunger to comprehend, dressed up in the cheerful clothing of a space comedy.

How to Read This Edition, and Why It Matters

A word now about the experience of reading older science fiction in a modern adaptation, because understanding the philosophy behind this edition will help you settle into the right frame of mind. When a story comes to us from an earlier generation of writing, it arrives bearing the marks of its origin. The slang is of its time. The technological assumptions reflect a world before certain discoveries and after others. The pacing follows the conventions of the magazine market that nurtured it. None of these things are flaws, exactly—they are part of the texture of the work, the fingerprints of the moment that made it. But for a contemporary reader encountering the story for the first time, some of these period qualities can act as small barriers, tiny moments of friction that pull you out of the experience and remind you that you are reading something old. A reference that no longer parses. A turn of phrase that has shifted meaning. A rhythm of dialogue that feels mannered to a modern ear.