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Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML:Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel â?˘ Kim Stanley Robinsonâ??s classic trilogy depicting the colonization of Mars continues in a thrilling and timeless novel that pits the settlers against their greatest foes: themselves. â??One of the major sagas of the [latest] generation in science fiction.â?ťâ??Chicago Sun-Times Nearly a generation has passed since the first pioneers landed on Mars, and its transformation to an Earthlike planet is under way. But not everyone wants to see the process through. The methods are opposed by those determined to preserve their home planetâ??s hostile, barren beauty. Led by the first generation of children born on Mars, these rebels are soon joined by a handful of the original settlers. Against this cosmic backdrop, passions, partnerships, and rivalries explode in a story as spectacular as… (more)
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"Only on Mars did they walk about in an horrendous mishmash of the dreams of the past, causing who knew what disastrous misapprehensions of the real terrain: the Lake of the Sun, the Plain of Gold, the Red Sea, Peacock Mountain, the Lake of the Phoenix, Cimmeria, Arcadia, the Gulf of Pearls, the Gordian Knot, Styx, Hades, Utopia...." (121)
As with the first book, the novella-length components alternately follow different principal characters, most of whom are still members of the original expedition, now well into their second (terrestrial) century of life. These characters accordingly are driven to reflect on memory, both in actuality and theory. The two new focal characters are Nirgal (a native Martian of first Hundred parentage) and Art Randolph, an new immigrant sent as a liaison to the Martian underground from one of Earth's metanational corporations.
This middle book of the trilogy is a tale of transformation that describes the accomplishment of the Martian biosphere and political independence. As with the first, it is replete with political and scientific meditations, anchored in the travails of admirable but credibly fallible central characters. The lore of Big Man and the little red people of Mars (272-274) also acknowledges the vital presence of a fantasy dimension, that is nevertheless not deeply explored. The end of the book is clearly only the beginning of a story, although it does deliver some satisfaction in its own right.
The story continues in the same style as previously - sections are devoted to a specific character and told in a fairly tight third person - although not quite as tightly as in Red Mars, there are a few disconnects with other characters jumping in.
I gave up trying to keep track of exactly when events happened, but Green Mars starts quite a bit after the end of Red - the 'war' in '61. Which didn't turn out quite as well as it seemed, the First 100 are down to 39, and still bitterly divided about the fate or Mars. However the old Transnational companies have now become Metanationals - shortened to Metanats, which I always read as Mentants as in Dune, very annoying - and in a very convenient and not quite belivable plot twist, one sympathises with the Martian 'natives', so that as the conflict over the ownership of Mars escalates and the conditions on Earth deteriorate there is more information around and the natives can be better prepared - if only they can agree in which direction they wish to be prepared!
Hiroko is still an enigma, and although we gain a bit more detail about Coyote he too is still much of a mystery figure. However we do get a lot more information about the new youngsters on Mars, 2nd thrid and even fourth generation children, who naturally enough don't quite see eye to eye with the elders.
Much less science in this book compared to the last - although there is still some especially early on. The background now is more about rebellion and discussion. How would you go about taking over a planet? How do you as an anarchist copmrimise enough to form a government? How do discussion work and where does agrement come from. Again the tight third person narrative gives a good view on the different sides of the matter. There is also some wonderful commentary on getting old, and the problems a healthy and long lived population have to come to terms with. I wasn't completely convinced that a 120yr old martian would be able to be accepted as a immigrant from earth without any questions being asked! And there is still way too much water being found compared to the infromation that we now know. The Metanats are otherwise remote and not quite convincing either.
Overall it's still a cracking good read though, and the many problems of Mars and it's people are captivating - not just as a story but as all good SF should be, also as commentary on the problems we as society may face. Much of the discussion dialog you can see repeated in internet forums every day - iconoclasts who don't/won't or can't see anothers opints of view; or even that there are two or more equally but contradictory right answers to a given problem. Is going it alone the right thing to do?
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This was an excellent novel, but I didn’t like it as well as Robinson’s Red Mars, the first in the series.
Part of that, I’m sure, is simply the wearing off of the first novel’s novelty. The landscape descriptions of this novel
Also, this novel is much more characteristic of Robinson’s tendency to write what are, in effect, speculative essays with enough drama (and characters) to be labeled as fiction. Red Mars did not have a linear plot, had a book ending with John Boone’s murder, had a lot of inherent drama in showing the First Hundred splitting into murderous factions and ended with a destructive war. (Boone looms, like his murderer Frank Chalmers, large as a legendary figure over this book.) In short, it had drama and physical action.
This novel’s plot is straightforward and much more cerebral. That's not a bad thing given the discussions of economics, politics, and history. (I still find Robinson’s economic ideals, particularly the ludicrous combination of capitalism and communalism silly (land, air, and water are common property as is human labor yet human labor’s fruits belong to the individual). It ends not with a violent revolution changing the political order on Mars. The model of the American Revolution is specifically rejected in Red Mars for, amongst other reasons, the vulnerability of the infrastructure that supports life on an unterraformed Mars and the inability of the land itself to support life. Rather, we have a “velvet revolution” on the model of those that toppled the Soviet Union – the authorities simply give up challenging massive civil disobedience. Where Red Mars ended with the violent destruction of human cities and Martian landscape, Green Mars ends with only the city of Burroughs being destroyed. Red Mars featured murder and war. The most violent incidents in this book – Maya Toitovna’s killing of Phyllis Boyle, Sax Russell’s rescue from the prison city of Kasei Vallis and its eventual destruction – are given very little space in a 535 page book.
Most of this book is taken up with characterization and the exploration of political and economic ideas and landscape descriptions. I also think it would have been better served with a more detailed map. Robinson’s detailed landscape descriptions can be confusing – especially since he is no doubt drawing from detailed surface maps of Mars.
There was much I liked here. Robinson skill in the “literary” school of writing is impressive as he is able, through technological and scientific metaphor (his use of this technique – so often associated with cyberpunks – is not as flashy but as extensive), symbolism, plotting, and character to carry his themes through a long book juxtapose them, and wrap them up neatly at the end. The tension between Red and Green visions of Mars runs throughout the book, is unresolved, and seems a more intractable difference than the various political/economic visions of Mars' future (as shown in a sort of constitutional convention in Dorsa Brevia – or, more accurately, a declaration of principles and independence).
Robinson also plays around with his characteristic concern for history and its meaning. History is thought of, by Nadia, as possibly a Lamarckian process. A sort of Marxian (in the sense of man progressing through economic stages of development) vision of man’s political/economic past and future is laid out. (Robinson subscribes to the shopworn notion of a future improbably dominated by transnational and “metanational” companies though the end of his novel – where nations simply seize corporate property – points out its absurdity.) Robinson also nicely combines the psychological effects of longevity treatments (most of the First Hundred have problems remembering their early days on Mars) and speculation on the meaning of history in the character of Maya. She wonders what the use of longevity is if old people, like the young, can not use the supposed benefit of a long life – experience. Are old people damaged by life, their capacity for optimism and idealism crippled or do they benefit from wisdom bought by experience? When she begins to suspect Chalmers had Boone killed, she finds herself having to read history books to find out what was really happening with her lovers – and she finds the books of little help, filled with bad information or observations that bear little resemblance to her life. What lessons can be drawn from history when the accounts of it seem to have so little truth in them and the memories of even those who lived history are so unreliable?
The “Scientist as Hero” section would, in other hands, be a daring tale of revolutionary espionage as Sax Russell goes underground with an assumed identity to spy on the transnationals. Here, though, it is merely a fascinating portrayal of a man who sees everything through rational, scientific eyes – a man forever classifying things, calculating results, even calmly observing and noting his own emotions of fear and sexual attraction. (He does a fair job of trying to escape after Boyle discovers his identity.) I liked seeing the world through his calm, curious eyes, and I liked his transformation into “the mad scientist” of the revolution, motivated in part by his “rational” conclusion that the current political setup on Mars and Earth can not sustain itself and his pain and brain damage at the hands of security force torturers. He develops a formidable passion for building weapons, a scientific and aesthetic love of Mars and the life slowly taking it over, and a desire to rid the world of government thugs like those who tortured him.
I also found the book’s other mad scientist, Ann Clayborne, fascinating though I disagreed with her radical Red agenda. (She goes from being merely vigorous opponent of terraforming to an active saboteur of it.) She reminded me – particularly when she’s at her most mad in “The Long Runout” section of this book and “Shikata Ga Nai” in Red Mars, her most withdrawn and melancholy – of schizophrenic Pris Frauenzimmer in Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You. The resemblance may not be coincidental since Robinson is quite familiar with Dick’s work having done a PhD dissertation on them.
The First Hundred still are the most interesting: Nadia for trying to prevent another destructive war, Maya for being a charismatic, though old revolutionary. While this book features just as many – if not more – massive engineering projects, they seem less interesting though more grand. I think this is because so many are off stage or not directed by the familiar First Hundred (now the First Thirty-Nine). (Indeed Maya stands in awe of the “pharonic” powers of engineering the young Martians take for granted.) I liked that young Jackie and Maya can’t stand each other because they are so similar though neither realizes this. Of the new, younger characters diplomat Art Randolph – a more cheerful, optimistic version of cynical Chalmers – and Nirgal are the most interesting. (Though I expected Robinson to do more with Nirgal’s freakish ability to sense the exact temperature and raise the temperature on parts of his body.)
I liked the ending where Robinson neatly wraps up several themes. The process of aeroforming the mind and culture – the Martian landscape changing men’s minds and cultures and politics and economics – is neatly linked with the other process going on throughout the novel: the terraforming of the planet. This is all done when the inhabitants of Burroughs must flee into the Martian desert and walk the surface with only coats and filter masks and not walkers and helmets. A new social order has been born and its members embrace the new Martian landscape on more natural terms, a unity of Martian civilization is reached or, at least, made closer. A new type of Mars – its future – politically or climatologically – uncertain, has been born. This is something biblical about the trek away from the soon-to-be-destroyed Burroughs, a flight from slavery to the old order, a walk to the promised land.
To quote Wellington: "The history of a battle, is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance..."
The events in Green Mars are like the history of multiple balls, a whole complex of ballrooms. Overall it is a political novel; it just happens to be set in the future.
The sequel follows the model established in the first novel, devoting each section to following another character while feeding into the overarching story of what's being done to the planet, how its future is being determined and by whom. The author might easily have adopted one particular approach to Mars as his protagonist view, but instead he's presented a story that covers the entire spectrum of possible approaches and throws them into conflict with one another. As a reader I was perpetually re-evaluating which faction is right, and discovering it is easier to shift sympathies from one view of the story to another with each new section than it is to arrive at an easy answer. I expect by the end of the trilogy there will be a dominant faction or two, but at this rate it will come with knowing the full price that was paid and having seen other promising visions of Mars' future pass into nothing. It's harsh, but I like it.
The book opens almost a century after the colonization of Mars (recounted in [Red Mars]), with 39 of the original First Hundred settlers still alive and active as leaders in various political and scientific movements and taking repeated anti-aging treatments. They live side-by-side with
Long, with some very tiresome scientific and philosophical debates and few really likable characters. OTOH, if you want to read the Mars trilogy, this is part II and essential to the story line. Many characters are familiar from [Red Mars], and there are a couple of intriguing new ones. Be warned, though: get a map of Mars to use with the book.
--J.
Anyway, some of the first hundred are still alive thanks to the anti-aging treatment and they are still fighting the same battles. This
The transnationals have joined to form metanationals and one is Praxis. Praxis wants to build a foundation on mars by cultivating and investing in bio-assets. People and other biological and ecological foundations. They send someone up to work with the underground to establish a foothold on the side that Praxis thinks will win the inevitable second revolution attempt.
I guess that I will continue on to the final book but not right away.
Corporations return as the evil empire but the real villain here is the Russian babushka who first sleeps her way to the top, wrecks the lives of two men who love her, eventually gets them killed, lashes out at everyone, cold-bloodedly murders the "villain" and goes on to ruin poor unsuspecting kids. Can't help but think the author was doing some personal therapy here with that character.
Hiroko still wins in the crazy department. No one really comes close.