On Fri, 8 Aug 1997, Anne V Stuecker wrote:
> >Well, not pool, but wrestling and softball; beer, yes; and yes to the
> >neighbours too. You'll find them all in Kim Stanley Robinson's _Pacific
> >Edge_ (1990), the best literary utopia (IMHO!) since Delany's Triton...
> >
> >Edward James
>
> What do you think of the Mars trilogy, Edward? I've read _PE_ and am
> interested in some sort of a comparison, because that's the KSR I'm most
> familiar with.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -- Anne
>
If you _really_ want to know what I think of the trilogy, read my review
of Blue Mars in an issue of Times Literary Supplement last year: it went
something like this... (Well, exactly like this, actually :-)
Robinson's first trilogy, made up of _The Wild Shore_, _The Gold Coast_
and _Pacific Edge_, looked at Orange Country, California, in the middle of
three very different twenty-first centuries, and had already established
Robinson as a major American writer. _Pacific Edge_ (1990) is surely the
most convincing (and attractive) utopian novel written since the 1970s.
But the completed _Mars_ trilogy, which began with _Red Mars_ (1992) and
continued with _Green Mars_ (1993) [[and finished with _Blue Mars_ 1996]],
now puts Robinson in a position of preeminence among contemporary writers
in this most quintessentially contemporary literary genre.
This is not because Robinson is "the best", whatever that means.
It is because he has taken the notion that is absolutely central to
science fiction -- the extrapolation of current trends and beliefs into
the construction of a future history for our civilisation -- to more
detailed and epic lengths than any of his predecessors. Mars will for a
long time remain the touchstone of what is possible in this kind of
science fiction. Tremendous scientific and environmental changes can be
analysed, and a future history written, in a way that does not diminish or
dwarf the human protagonists.
The sequence of titles refers to the gradual terraforming of the
red planet, taking place over the period of two centuries covered by the
novels (or by the three parts of one novel, around a million words long).
By the second volume the sometimes brutal engineering projects have formed
the conditions for the transplantation of genetically-altered plant and
animal life; by the end of _Blue Mars_, seas and lakes have been created,
and the atmosphere has become almost breathable.
There are a number of assumptions we have to accept before the
novel can seem plausible; that the whole process of the colonisation and
terraforming of Mars was deemed economic by Earth governments; that
terraforming could indeed be virtually complete within two centuries; and
that we might develop a technique to prolong life. I had initial doubts
about the wisdom of including this last device; but I discover that I am
writing this review in the week in which American scientists have
announced the location of the gene which controls aging. In the novels the
technique causes tremendous population problems on both Earth and Mars,
bringing political crisis in _Blue Mars_. But it allows some of the First
Hundred, the initial multinational team of colonists who landed on Mars in
2020 (in _Red Mars_), to remain the people through whose eyes we see the
events, right to the end of _Blue Mars_, in 2212. The prolongation of life
thus becomes a literary device which knits the three novels together into
one, and allows the reader to become involved in the development of the
human characters as well as of the unearthly landscapes.
Robinson is indeed very moving in his description of the human
personality in the face of extreme age, and through the eyes of these
immigrants from Earth we see the emergence of the new ways of living
devised by the generations born on Mars. As one might have anticipated
from his earlier Orange County trilogy, Robinson is much stronger than
most science fiction writers on sociology and on politics. Not only do his
scientists feel like real scientists-- the excitement of science is
captured beautifully, and this from a writer whose PhD is in English --
but they also feel like real scientists trying to cope with politics. By
theend of _Blue Mars_ a system has evolved, after three political
revolutions, which might well be described as utopian. But it is a Utopia
that the reader has to infer from hints and from the nature of human
relationships; it is never described in detail, tediously, as in a
traditional utopian novel.
The revolutions not only involve a struggle with Earth, but also
between various groups on Mars itself. It is above all a struggle about
the future of landscape and environment. Initially it is between the Reds
and the Greens, where the Reds, of course, are the conservationists who
want to preserve Mars as far as possible in its untouched, red, state; the
Greens are the revolutionaries, who want to remake Mars in Earth's image.
But by the beginning of _Blue Mars_ the Reds are a spent force: the
political struggle now is over the level of immigration from Earth. The
new landscape has already been created. And it is really the changing
landscape which is the main protagonist of this extraordinary novel.
Robinson, himself a mountaineer and backpacker, portrays landscape with
enormous passion and poetry. He knows his areography well; the vividness
of his description makes his fictional Mars seem so much more real than
the actual surface of the Moon which we have glimpsed through the mundane
words of the Apollo astronauts. The research which Robinson has done into
Mars and its areography occasionally threatens to overwhelm the reader.
But it also adds to his authority, and to the paradoxical realism of this
very impressive work of the imagination.
That was the review. Whether it is at all relevant to _this_ particular
list, I do not know. I would argue that the utopias depicted in _Pactific
Edge_ and in _Blue Mars_ are in fact feminist utopias -- at least in the
sense that a state of egalitarianism between men and women has been
reached by the end of _Blue Mars_. And I think that Robinson has created a
number of very powerful and plausible women in the trilogy. (Less so in
_Pacific Edge_, though.)
But I realise that the whole business of whether men can write feminist
novels (Brin's _Glory Season_??) is a controversial one...
Edward James
..............................................................................
Professor Edward James, Dept of History, Faculty of Letters and Social
Sciences, University of Reading, Whiteknights, READING RG6 6AA, UK
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~lhsjamse/home.htm
Editor: FOUNDATION: THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION
Joint Editor: EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE
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