VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)
By:
August 15, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
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THE MARS TRILOGY | KIM STANLEY ROBINSON | 1992–1996
I read the Mars Trilogy books — Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996) — during a three-week springtime binge in 2022. I don’t know why I waited so long to get to them. Kim Stanley Robinson is an author I generally like; I had just missed these somehow.
It was a weird complicated time. My nonagenarian landlady — who lived in the front house while I lived in a small mother-in-law apartment on the back — had decided to enter at-home hospice. We had a solid Vermont neighborly relationship, there in a pinch or to share extra squash, but mostly kept to ourselves. The change in her circumstances was clearly going to result in a change to mine. My partner had just found out that his lease wasn’t getting renewed after a lot of drama with his upstairs neighbors. After over two years of spending an awful lot of time at home, we were both going to be uprooted at some uncertain time in the future.
The books tell the story of the first Martian colony and the subsequent ongoing settlement and later terraforming of Mars. The narrative starts in 2026, a time nearly three decades off when the books were written, but only a few years in the future when I was reading them. They’re quirky in that way, what they foresee and what they don’t. Once things get started and settled, everyone on the planet has networked wrist communicators and yet there is no social media.
The plot is a complex tale of bending the environment towards human habitation, with a lot of push/pull of various philosophies debating how to do that process in the best way. It’s hard to settle on what “best” means. Factions form. Many of the central characters from the first book become practically archetypes by the third book. The planet gets settled (red), and terraformed to support life (green) and later becomes a planet with water (blue). There are lengthy descriptions of Martian geography and the somewhat tedious terraforming processes, punctuated by revolutions and disasters. A space elevator falls and wreaks impressive destruction. A single person talks for five solid pages about the characteristics of a crater. My favorite character, the red-bearded Russian anarchist, dies.
By the final book, the narrative had a careening quality to it. There were long chunks of complicated interpersonal relationship stuff, more walls of text about dust, weather patterns, the nature of memory, and then a tiny but significant conflict, wrapped up way too quickly. It ended and I was OK moving on from this fictional universe, though I’d liked being there. I barely remember the characters two years later, but mostly the ideas of habitability, of home.
A month later my landlady died, I bought a house a few blocks away, my partner moved into a new apartment in the next town. Everything lined up in such a tidy way; we exchanged old for new keys within a few hours of one another, in different states. It felt quick but also slow. I only moved a few blocks away, but the transition from renter to homeowner, interdependent to independent, edge-of-woods dweller to living in the middle of a neighborhood, all felt like major transitions. I was happy to have weathered this shift, partly by living through the transformations occurring on Mars.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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