Green Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson

Reviewed December 6, 1997

ISBN 0-553-57239-3, LoC 93-31596

Has it really taken a full year to get from Red Mars to Green Mars? Apparently so. I am reading these only about as fast as they were written.

As I had promised myself, I read this one with the dictionary ready at hand and was rewarded for it although it seemed at times as if I were reading the dictionary and stopping occasionally to look up something in Green Mars. I even went to the trouble of asking Gordon Wood at work what Shikita Gai Nai means. We finally decided it meant "death to the foreigners from the north." This was the final section of Red Mars and the "Remember the Alamo" cry thereafter.

What's more exciting is that yesterday I heard and met Stan Robinson himself. He was the final speaker at the AAS (American Astronautical Society) Annual Meeting held this year in Pasadena. A clean cut, slightly nervous, introvert with characteristics of Michael Owens, George Purcell, and Richard Wilton (U of H EM teacher), he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the map of Mars, is a quick study (then forgetter) of all the little supporting fields of study, and has many ideas about possible futures for man among the planets of which the Mars Trilogy is only one. I have e-mailed him offering astrondynamic help if he wants and needs it in the future. I got his autograph on my hard cover of Blue Mars but will have to take it out of the safe deposit box (little joke) long enough to read it soon. And, in my effort to get a better balance between output and input, I hop to be reading a lot more in the coming year and so maybe I will get to Blue Mars sooner than December 1998!

I should acquire a map of Mars to make Blue Mars even more enjoyable. More stuff to carry around.

The story begins in Zygote, where the ectogens are growing up like weeds and will eventually take their own place in the world. The issue is aeroforming, not reproducing something done elsewhere, but making the new, unique Mars that will support the humans. We learn some of the earth history of some of the surviving First Hundred as their new stories unfold and we get more in touch with the MetaNat situation, particularly the huge "Green" company, Praxis and William Fort, and their envoy Art Randolph who I like. We learn some remembrances of the Boone assassination and some humor about how history and remembrance become legends. With all these people living hundreds of years (Maya turns 130, for example) we see their reactions to their own chronicles and their own lost memories. They all move around among their relationships and partnerships, vocations and locations: current American standards plus longevity.

Without plodding through the details of the plot, this volume is basically about the period of time after the revolution of '61 is forgotten up until the break for independence is made and sealed. It is relatively bloodless. Sure, Coyote and people go around sabotaging (and ecotaging) things, Sax gets beat up then Maya murders Phyllis. Zygote is attacked and the mysterious, sensual, spiritual leader Hiroko has to retreat to Gamete, then away from the polar cap altogether. A constitutional meeting is held in another underground sanctuary. Articles are drawn up. A scientific conference is held and Sax and others attend under pseudonyms. The First Hundred are wanted persons, but seem to move about fairly freely.

A whole world of Martians grows up, not caring a whit about Terra and following their natural leader, Nirgal of the famous parents, Boone and Hiroko. The internals of the revolution are well conceived and written. The waiting takes many chapters, indeed, many sections of the book. It gets tedious. Everybody has their own agendas and goes off and does silly things on their own and there is a very real threat of deadly fragmentation. This is indeed Òlife as we know it.Ó Sax provides infrastructure for the new underground and blows away all the old at the trigger point and Nadia ends up, supported by these tools, being the defacto leader with Nirgal and Maya as the young and old spokespeople. And there's Jackie, a raving woman who will clearly be showing up again. Ann is also going to be a problem; she is not taking The Treatments anymore. Peter died early in the book, even Nirgal couldn't save him with marrow and heat. The Treatment nor the rest of the technology can't do everything. Imperfections like that make this all believable.

And that was another thing about Robinson's talk yesterday. He said that we weren't talking about anything here that we weren't already capable of doing, it was just a matter of scale, politics, and economics (my interpretation). Clearly some big shifts are needed to get things to one of the many ways that I might want them but we're not talking about warp drive or time travel here.

As with Red Mars I was only brought up short once. Sax had anticipated that a city full of people might have to walk some distance on the open surface and had made up half a million filter masks which could be delivered somewhere on short notice. Sure he had. But the hike out of Burroughs ahead of the advancing flood was an exciting climax. Seventy kilometers uphill in about 24 hours, then special trains sent by beneficents from all around. All of it carried live back to earth on CNN (or whatever) where they could identify with the strife, where the western Antarctic ice sheet was slipping off due to a volcano underneath and was raising sea level on Terra. And no, it wasn't global warming. These little human blips on the environment aren't as big as our egos about them. This trek was longer but not as strenuous as a hike out of the Grand Canyon. It went smoother than it really would have.

My favorite scene was the recruiting of Art. He and others are flown out of San Francisco on a long flight with many gentle banks in it. They are not supposed to know where they are going, but people on board try to figure it out from observations anyway. It is somewhere between north and southwest and somewhere up to 10,000 miles, maybe further if hypersonic. When they see the beach island setting at the landing point, they all try to guess Pacific or Atlantic (or Indian) islands that it might be. Art says, characteristically, "San Luis Obispo?"

And there is the way William Fort treats them. He is the cook that serves them that first day before they go into training. Based on this, I expected to find Robinson incognito at the conference so as to observe undisturbed up until his speech at the end. I checked name tags and even introduced myself to a few likely people (but who knows what likely is, I didn't even know whether he was male or female, 20 or 70, or any other thing about him). It turns out he was not incognito, he was not one of his own characters, still he was approachable in fame afterwards.

And so Mars is free and will be setting up its own government and there are bunches of details to be worked out. Robinson, a PhD in literature, has an excellent grasp of politics. Perhaps there's something of value in all those books that he had to study to get there. I need to do more reading. That will be the new balance. I've always wanted that. And I need to teach the kids this too.