Rainbow Mars

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Rainbow Mars
First edition cover
Author	Larry Niven
Cover artist	Bob Eggleton
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction short story collection
Publisher	Tor Books
Publication date	1999
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	316 (hardcover)
ISBN	0-312-86777-8

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. This means that Mars is a very crowded planet, inhabited by several different intelligent species and cultures. The story began as a collaboration with Terry Pratchett; a number of his ideas remain in the final draft, mainly the use of Yggdrasil.

The book compiles a series of short stories by Niven, including The 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.