Red Mars

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

I will be honest: the reason I had it on my list as a book to finish in 2018 is because I started it last year, got about a third of the way through and just gave up and did not want to finish. It was not good! I was initially misled, which didn't help, into thinking that it would be about the murder that takes place in the prologue, like a Martian dinner mystery, which it definitely WAS NOT.

Also, the other thing I struggled with in the first section was the significant Ayn Rand overtones for the "first hundred" where everyone is this super smart person who insists that they're the right person to make decisions for everybody else.  I mean, they vet all these people and on a mission that is like a knife's edge of failure, and before you even get to mars you already want to start a revolution, disengage entirely from the Earth people supporting you, completely rehaul the design of your living accommodations and just make this shit up as you go?? It seemed not only very short sighted, but also extraordinarily presumptuous for any one of them to assume that their ideas were any good in relation to the actual reality of being on Mars. How was a team of scientists and governments on Earth working cooperatively going to be any worse for the planet than some random Mensa type who summarily decides what should be done before even getting there?

There were, in fact, far too few mechanical difficulties - it was actually distracting how easy it was for them to set up a colony: oh we have everlasting power, and machines that don't break down, and even though the whole planet is freezing and icy and uninhabitable, no one ever dies from it, or has an accident, or is so tired they fall asleep at the wheel and make a crater. It's just like, oh, we built a house! Oh, we set up windmills! Oh, we separated into like, fifteen small encampments, and none of them gets mysteriously wiped off the map.  There are a lot of comparisons in the book to the discovery of America (which makes sense) but also there are a lot of colonies in America that just died out for totally unknown reasons.  I mean if we want to use that analogy we should be discovering dead Martian colonists for the next thousand years and frankly in the course of this book there are no major disasters except essentially the man-made ones with the immigration nonsense. Even the months-long dust storm is just an inconvenience, ho hum, we have literally no visibility for months, but it never craps up our balloon, and we're still able to lock on to a homing beacon.  Even the people who go mad actually turn out just to be very foresighted about the upcoming arguments over Martian development. COME ON.

And also where are they getting all of this food from? Food doesn't become a scarce resource until like 80% of the way through the book but how are they getting all of this freaking food for the first fifteen years? Are they growing it? Are they having it shipped from Earth? It is completely unclear to me and also unclear how the colony on the south polar cap manages to survive for 20 years. 

So that was my initial beef, and although I did end up getting more into it by the end (it helped that there was more focus on the socio-political side of things, and geared up into action finally) there were just a lot of issues I had with the book.

 

At one point there's a whole bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo about opposites and contraries and the psychologist who later goes mad goes into like a whole side issue about marriage being allowed, female adultery being not allowed, male adultery being neither forbidden or not allowed and incest being forbidden and I'm not entirely sure what the whole point of this process is. It's so bizarre and frankly unnecessary to the book and he does it trying to figure out people's personalities too (stabile, labile, extrovert, introvert). I think the author flips too much between science and entertainment and leaning too heavily or one of the other at different times.

One of the other problems is that none of the characters are very likeable. We start off with Frank who indirectly leads to John's murder -

 

SIDEBAR: It is never adequately explained why Frank would manipulate people to the extent that they're ready to murder John. We're never presented with Frank's point of view during John's life except that brief excerpt in the prologue.  I mean, but even in John's section of the book, we're givin some indication that he's not being told stuff, but because he doesn't even notice he's not being told stuff, we don't even know what we're missing!  By the end of the book Frank's doing just about the same things politically that John was trying to do and trying to create a separate Mars, and it was never clear to me that they had different goals/objectives in the first place, aside from all that unnecessary nonsense about both wanting to date Maya. Don't even get me started on that. END SIDEBAR

 

- John whose first man shtick begins the longer "civilization/detective" portion, Maya, who flips back and forth between the two of them and is incredibly unlikable as a result, Arkady, who incites revolution at the very beginning and yet doesn't really seem to fill up to that, Nadia, who does robots, Ann, who's another whiny bitch in a book that doesn't need more whiny bitches, Simon, who's a wet rag, Sax, who is monotonic the entire time, and Hiroko, who leaves before we ever get a chance to know her and frankly doesn't deserve all of the accolades the other first hundred seem to give her because Frank's right which is that she just left like, 10% of the way into this rather than deal with other people. And the fact that she has been bearing children spliced with all of the other people's donor material is briefly mentioned but then entirely dropped and frankly it's a disgusting invasion of privacy. Hiroko is no one's hero. 

All of these people are obnoxious, Masters of the universe type personalities and I think the book would have been more enjoyable if at least one of the perspectives was from a "normal," i.e., one of these immigrants whose entry we so decry later on. And THAT whole thing didn't make sense to me - even a million people is hardly a drop in a bucket to countries that are apparently so overcrowded Earth is in a constant state of war.  Russia's population right now is 144 million, and the US is 325 million.  There would have to be HUNDREDS of millions of people exported before anyone on Earth would even notice they were gone.  And in the meantime, again, who the fuck is paying for all this? I mean, I appreciated the concept that Mars would basically become a plutocracy, and it has a charming resemblance to the current economic shithole we're pouring ourselves into, but it felt more like the whole thing happened for plot reasons, and not organically through the story. Kinda like the deus ex machina that saves Ann's son, since I know he narrates the second book in the series.

And my last beef (which I know is a surprise since it seems like they are neverending) but how are you going to have a freaking map in the front and not put half of these locations and place names on it?? I was flipping around all over the place especially in the beginning trying to figure out where any of these things were and they are not on the stupid map. Why even have a map at all? In the final portion when they're trying to make their way down to the the South polar cap and they're trying to avoid a giant basin full of ice water I have no idea where this basin ends and begins the map is very unclear about the outlines of it. You and your "map" can go to hell.

09: A book you meant to read in 2018