The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

[Sancho]

Here’s a neat trick the writer does concerning the climate-change issue here on Earth, and it gets us back into the “sci” part of the sci-fi genre. He backhandedly compares a too-warm planet (Earth) to a too-cold planet (Mars) by putting together a big science symposium on Mars to discuss methods for warming the planet, Mars that is. The atmosphere on Mars is now a thin air (compared to Earth’s) and it’s not yet breathable by humans but is supporting lichens and high alpine plants. It’s a mycologist’s dream planet. But Mars is still really cold. The scientists at the symposium wind up falling in two basic camps - the one side wants to heat the planet by pumping a bunch of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which, as we know, will warm the planet by creating a greenhouse effect. The other side is dead set against using carbon dioxide to warm the planet because then they’ll be left with the problem of scrubbing the CO2 out of the air to make it breathable and keep the warming from getting out of hand, and they don’t yet know how to do that.

Sound familiar?

[Danik 2016]

Here’s a neat trick the writer does concerning the climate-change issue here on Earth, and it gets us back into the “sci” part of the sci-fi genre. He backhandedly compares a too-warm planet (Earth) to a too-cold planet (Mars) by putting together a big science symposium on Mars to discuss methods for warming the planet, Mars that is. The atmosphere on Mars is now a thin air (compared to Earth’s) and it’s not yet breathable by humans but is supporting lichens and high alpine plants. It’s a mycologist’s dream planet. But Mars is still really cold. The scientists at the symposium wind up falling in two basic camps - the one side wants to heat the planet by pumping a bunch of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which, as we know, will warm the planet by creating a greenhouse effect. The other side is dead set against using carbon dioxide to warm the planet because then they’ll be left with the problem of scrubbing the CO2 out of the air to make it breathable and keep the warming from getting out of hand, and they don’t yet know how to do that.

Sound familiar?

It certainly does, just now as there is a new international climate conference and one never knows if something useful will come of it. But I always thought of Mars as a hot planet, because it is not so far from the sun. That Mars must be warmed up sounds very strange to me.

[Danik 2016]

Oh Phyllis most definitely is out for revenge, but it’s up in the air as to whether or not she gets it. Phyllis, you see, is one of the original 100 and she has aligned herself with the Transnats, which puts her in a powerful position on Mars but estranges her from the other remaining first 100 settlers.

A new character in Green Mars (and a fairly compelling one) is Art Randolph. He’s an amiable middle-aged man who’s been sent to Mars to make friends and influence people and ultimately figure out how to buy Mars outright for William Fort, the founder and majority owner of the powerful Transnat - Praxis. William Fort Isn’t presented as an evil industrialist, but rather as a brilliant and eccentric guh-zillionaire along the lines of Howard Hughes. We could probably update his description to a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk-type character. Fort has determined that stripping Mars of its natural resources is a fool’s play. The real value of Mars is as a fully terraformed planet that can accept people from Earth, which has become unsustainably overpopulated. Smart guy, eh? We’ll see where it goes.

Anyhoo, Danik, don’t feel too bad about Ann savaging your beloved Fedor Dostoyevsky. She’s a sympathetic yet difficult-to-like character (for the reader as well as the other characters). Robinson describes her as an older, more severe version of the farmer’s wife in Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic:

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic

Also I think he’s having a little fun with us there. Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, Prince Myshkin is a very likable character and not an idiot at all, but rather a good natured, guileless man. I’m not sure what will happen to Ann, but I’m sorta pulling for her, even if she’s the kind of person I avoid at a cocktail party - “uhhh, pardon me, sister, and sorry to interrupt your long-winded rant, but I gotta go see guy about a horse.”

Transnats? You mean there are already Mars generations, born from earth settlers? Things seem to move very quickly in Mars.

A character, that surprised me was Ann. I figured a young sort of intergalactic warrior, but the lady in the link you included looks really more like a farmer woman, a bit puritan perhaps.

"Also I think he’s having a little fun with us there. Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, Prince Myshkin is a very likable character and not an idiot at all, but rather a good natured, guileless man. I’m not sure what will happen to Ann, but I’m sorta pulling for her, even if she’s the kind of person I avoid at a cocktail party - “uhhh, pardon me, sister, and sorry to interrupt your long-winded rant, but I gotta go see guy about a horse.”

That was well remembered, Sancho. I hadn´t thought of that, but of course it was a reference to Price Myshkin.
But that´s reminds me of a story I read some time ago. A Russian reader of Dosto felt personally offended by the title of the novel "The Idiot", so he went to the courts and sued Dostoyevsky. Proceedings were slow due to the impossibility of locating the defendant. Eventually they found out that he had been dead for some time, but the law demanded that the proceedings had to be concluded somehow. If I rightly remember, Dosto was found to be guilty

[Sancho]

Good story. I didn’t know about Dostoyevsky being sued and found guilty after he’d died, but it somehow doesn’t surprise me considering everything else that man suffered in life. I think I’ll read a Russian novel after the Mars trilogy. I’m just getting started on the third book in the series, Blue Mars.

The timeline of these books is epic. Red Mars runs from 2026 until 2061. Green Mars Picks up the story in the early 2100s. The original settlers were probably in their 30s or 40s when they first arrived on Mars. Luckily for them they had a scientific breakthrough in gene therapy that slows the aging process - a longevity treatment. In the first book a couple of the scientists are in the lab watching a cell of a lab rat repair itself. The rat itself, they note, is 14 years old. One of the scientists says to the other something like - “wow, this changes everything.” And so it does. Also, you might imagine, it causes some problems. Back on Earth they’re already overpopulated, so folks living to 150 doesn’t help. It also exacerbates the division between rich and poor, the rich being the ones who can afford the longevity treatment. In Green Mars the first 100 who are still alive in are aged around 120, but they look and feel like they’re in 60s. A writer can get away with that sort of thing in sci-fi.

A lot of the science you get from this particular sci-fi writer is climate science. It’s sort of his thing. Some of his later books have been called Climate Fiction or cli-fi rather than sci-fi. The Mars Trilogy isn’t really cli-fi, but it’s leaning that way.

Anyway proximity to the sun is certainly a big factor in the surface temperature of a planet, but the planet’s atmosphere determines how well it retains heat. Mercury, a planet with almost no atmosphere and also the planet closest to the sun, has a daytime temperature at the equator of around 427*°C and a nighttime temperature around -173*°C. Mercury rotates on its axis slowly so a day on that planet lasts about 2 months. Next comes Venus, which has an extremely dense atmosphere, so dense that if you were to stand on the surface of Venus the pressure would feel like you were about a kilometer under Earth’s ocean, yikes. The average surface temperature on Venus is 450*°C - toasty. Earth is next, a sweet spot in the solar system for habitability. I know we’re next because the late-great astronomer and unearthly good guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, calls us “The Third Stone From The Sun” (May you never hear surf music again). Then comes Mars. Mars only gets 43% of sunlight that Earth gets and takes about 2 Earth years to orbit the sun. It tilts on its axis much like Earth does, so Mars has seasons similar to Earth’s, except twice as long. But Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere, so its surface temperature ranges from -143*°C at the poles to 35*°C at the equator during the day. A Mars day lasts about 25 hrs.

I love those kind of details.

[Danik 2016]

"The timeline of these books is epic. Red Mars runs from 2026 until 2061. Green Mars Picks up the story in the early 2100s."
So, Red Mars is more or less the present.
Green Mars a "near" future in a more cosmic scale.

"The original settlers were probably in their 30s or 40s when they first arrived on Mars. Luckily for them they had a scientific breakthrough in gene therapy that slows the aging process - a longevity treatment."

I certainly would appreciate that sort of therapy and I guess I wouldn't be the only one he, he! Who wouldn't want to look and to feel half ones age! But, besides the problems you mentioned it could be used to manipulate whole populations.

"Anyway proximity to the sun is certainly a big factor in the surface temperature of a planet, but the planet’s atmosphere determines how well it retains heat. Mercury, a planet with almost no atmosphere and also the planet closest to the sun, has a daytime temperature at the equator of around 427*°C and a nighttime temperature around -173*°C. Mercury rotates on its axis slowly so a day on that planet lasts about 2 months. Next comes Venus, which has an extremely dense atmosphere, so dense that if you were to stand on the surface of Venus the pressure would feel like you were about a kilometer under Earth’s ocean, yikes. The average surface temperature on Venus is 450*°C - toasty. Earth is next, a sweet spot in the solar system for habitability. I know we’re next because the late-great astronomer and unearthly good guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, calls us “The Third Stone From The Sun” (May you never hear surf music again). Then comes Mars. Mars only gets 43% of sunlight that Earth gets and takes about 2 Earth years to orbit the sun. It tilts on its axis much like Earth does, so Mars has seasons similar to Earth’s, except twice as long. But Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere, so its surface temperature ranges from -143*°C at the poles to 35*°C at the equator during the day. A Mars day lasts about 25 hrs."
The above would make an interesting post for the astronomy thread, that is if this data are real and not invented by the author.

I´m curious to know the following and possible rounding up in Blue Mars.
Presently I´m reading "The Last Gift" by 2021 Nobel winner A. Gurnah, but I´m not enjoying it so much. He has a grand theme: the Zanzibar emigrant. It´s honest fiction but parts of it are a bit boring.

[Sancho]

Ha! I could use a longevity treatment myself.

I think the numbers concerning the 1st 4 planets in the solar system are accurate. I get the sense the sci-fi genre needs to anchor itself to solid science or sci-fi readers will toss it into the first waste bin they come across. The trick for the reader is to figure out when the science forays into fiction (or fantasy). One thing I really like about this writer is that he goes into a lot of scientific disciplines. There’s astronomy of course, but also geology, biology, mycology, biophysics, climatology, just to name a few. With the longevity treatment (fiction) it allows him to explore gerontology (science). Robinson clearly has a curious mind and isn’t that where science starts? - somebody is curious about something and then starts to ask questions and then sets out to figure it out, which is the scientific method in a nutshell.

He’s got a chapter in Green Mars called The Scientist as Hero in which the hero is Saxifrage Russell. Sax is one of the 1st 100 and a quintessential scientist. He’s a polymath and is curious about everything. Like so many scientists he’s a little awkward socially, but he tries to suss out confusing social situations by applying the scientific method, which of course is a very scientist sort of thing to do. Anyway the evil space b**ch Phyllis has Sax arrested and they try to extract information from his brain by invasive medical means (fiction not science) and in the process they badly damage Sax’s brain. And that is an opening for the author to start an exploration of neuroscience.

Fascinating.

[Danik 2016]

Yes. I think, good sci-fi often anticipates important developments because of this curiosity added to a fertile imagination and research. The other day I saw in the news, that they created pigs somewhere as carriers of human organs for transplantations. Atwood anticipated these same pigs making them break lose and run wild in "Orix and Crake".

And I don´t know if it is a typical sci-fi novel, but there is "1984". And there are Microsoft, Google and all the companies busily hoarding data, doing away with privacy. Each time you enter a site you now have to allow them to get your data and you hope they never will find much use for it.

Its a shame what they do to Sax, albeit this Phyllis must have had their own brains somewhat rattled, while she was floating through the cosmos. But I think that is another point about sci-fi. No matter how innovative science gets. humanity basically remains the same. Whether here, in Mars or in Venus, authoritarism and related cruelty will flourish.

[Sancho]

Hey, Danik, I as well read the story about using pigs to grow human organs. And into my head pops Ann Clayborne from the novel - “what gives us the right?” Then I listened to a story on the radio about the climate summit going on in Glasgow this week. Specifically the story was about several climate activists from African countries who wanted to attend but couldn’t because of Covid travel restrictions. They didn’t have access to the vaccine therefore couldn’t travel. It started sounding like the situation in the novel where the longevity treatment was only available in rich countries.

So yes, I agree. Art imitates life and life imitates art. And sci-fi writers have vivid imaginations. They do swing and miss sometimes though. < I’m using a baseball metaphor here since the World Series goes to game 6 tomorrow - Go Astros! Anyway as for humans colonizing Mars in 2026 - whoosh - swing and a miss (suckered by the change-up pitch). He wrote these books in the early 90s so I’m sure it seemed possible then, but we’re not even close. However kudos to Kim Stanley Robinson for anticipating Apple’s Siri - only he calls it Pauline. That kind of cracked me up. One of the first settlers, John Boone, has an artificial intelligence interface named Pauline and whenever he needs to know something he just asks Pauline. “Hey Siri…ahem…I mean Pauline…”

Also, given the times, I’m starting to like the way Ann thinks more and more.

[Danik 2016]

"Then I listened to a story on the radio about the climate summit going on in Glasgow this week. Specifically the story was about several climate activists from African countries who wanted to attend but couldn’t because of Covid travel restrictions. They didn’t have access to the vaccine therefore couldn’t travel. It started sounding like the situation in the novel where the longevity treatment was only available in rich countries."
Yes. I didn´t hear about the African activists, but last thing I know si that Africa has only about 5% of her people vaccinated as yet, because they can´t buy the vaccines. But Covid is one of the issues that plainly demonstrated the differences between the rich and the poor between countries and also inside the countries. Hopefully something good comes from this climate summit.

I'm presently watching again a soap opera (because during the worst of Covid TV had to suspend making new ones) with a kind of sci-fi theme. Remember lamb Dolly? It´s the story of a human clone. A father has twins, which look absolutely alike. One of them dies in an accident. The best friend of the father is a genetic scientist. More out of impulse than intention he mixes the semen of the surviving twin with the ovules of a woman who wants a child but has a sterile boyfriend. The experiment works but the confusion begins in the maternity, because the woman and her boyfriend are African descendants and the twins Cortana instantly, I don´t want any tale telling artificial intelligence on my PC.
I guess there will still be a lot to anticipate by sci-fi!

[Sancho]

I do remember Dolly. In fact I think she was borne after these books were published. More frightening now we have a couple of gene-edited twins running around - CRISPR babies. Seems like over and over a scientific or a technological advance comes along and only then do we start looking into the ethical ramifications.

There’s a neat little exchange in Blue Mars between Sax and Michel Duval. Michel is a psychiatrist and one of the 1st 100. His job was to watch over the 1st settlers mental health and keep them sane. This he did at some expense to his own sanity. Sax, an empirical scientist, thinks of psychology/psychology as a pseudoscience. That said Sax has made an amazing comeback after his brain injury largely due to his work with Michel. He still struggles to express himself verbally much the way Albert Einstein struggled with words. Sax, in very Sax-like way, has started studying etymology in his spare time.

Anyway, Sax and Michel are discussing what to do about Ann. Ann’s people - The Reds - have totally left the reservation. Michel reveals to Sax that Ann was abused as a child and he thinks it’s left her with deep emotional scars:

At the base of human culture … is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then sometime in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father—this strategy often lasts forever, and people of that culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these complexes—the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.

[some more discussion about what to do about Ann]

Sax shook his head. Astounding, really that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. […] In fact the mind was poorly understood.
“What are you thinking?” Michel asked.
“Sometimes I worry,” Sax admitted, “about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.”
“Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.”
“Both precise and accurate?”
“Well, what, they’re the same, no?”
“No. In estimates of value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still being not very precise…
Michel has a curious expression on his face. “You’re a very accurate person, Sax.”

Haha! That’s Sax being very Sax. And I think Michel gets a jab in at the end there. Doesn’t he mean Sax is precise? Not accurate.

Anyway they never really figure out what to do about Ann.

[Danik 2016]

"I do remember Dolly. In fact I think she was borne after these books were published. More frightening now we have a couple of gene-edited twins running around - CRISPR babies. Seems like over and over a scientific or a technological advance comes along and only then do we start looking into the ethical ramifications." I fear worse. I fear that those experiments contribute to loosening the ethical norms. The scientist in The Clone experiences the ethical conflict, both as a personal conflict but also socially and professionally as a permanent danger of exposition and punishment, but he can´t help producing that embryo.

Do you know what your Sax reminds me of? Sax(on) He is quite German, that one. But I`m glad he is recovering fast.

And here you chose a nice summing up of what Uncle Freud called the Copernican Revolution: "At the base of human culture … is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then sometime in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else." And there are it´s neurotic sequels as well. Hurrah, we have neurosis in Mars! And again, well red Robinson seems to refer to the dubious reputation of Psychoanalysis in comparison to what many scientists understood to be science.

Now that: "No. In estimates of value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still being not very precise…" (Is precision the numerical translation of accuracy? I want my mammie!)

No wonder they don´t decide what to do about Ann. Maybe it´s better that way. And I hope the side that´s trying to preserve humans and planets wins!

[Sancho]

Hey! That reminds me of a joke. Stop me if you’ve heard it before:

The Germans have come up with an extremely strong and extremely thin type of wire, stronger and thinner than anyone thought possible. They are understandably proud of their accomplishment and so they send a one kilometer long roll of it to Zurich as a brag - “Look at the wire that German engineering has produced.” The Swiss then drill a hole down the center of the wire and send it back to Stuttgart - “Nice, but look at the tube that Swiss engineering has produced.”

In the trilogy the Swiss colonies on Mars seem the most stable.

Sax does seem German (or Swiss), but I think he’s from Colorado. I probably watched too much TV as a kid so Sax reminds me of Mr. Spock on Star Trek. At any rate he has a scientific mind. He asks a lot of questions, and he tries to answer them with science. Mars is too cold for human or plant life, so why not focus more sunlight on the planet with an array space mirrors. He has trouble with verbal communication so why not engage in a study of etymology, which tends to turn him pedantic as evidenced by his accuracy-precision explanation to Duval. In Blue Mars Sax starts tracing his words back to their proto-indo-European roots. People start falling into factions on Mars, acting irrationally, banging heads, and the whole planet seems to be heading towards civil war, so Sax begins a study into political science. (A pseudo science, according to Sax) it’s all Sax being Sax again. He’s probably the most developed character in these books, which is appropriate since he is a scientist (a physicist) and these are sci-fi novels.

***SPOILER ALERT***

So then at the end of Red Mars there’s a huge planet-wide revolution and it goes badly. It’s extremely destructive and very bloody. At the end of Green Mars there’s another revolution and this one goes much more smoothly. It’s largely bloodless and is more a war for independence than a revolutionary war. Although they want independence from Earth, what they really want is to shake off the tyranny of the huge mega corporations that are raping Mars and abusing the rights of the people. They were smarter about kicking off the second insurrection. They waited until Earth was too distracted to deal with Mars. So what happens, and this is fascinating, is the western ice shelf of Antarctica breaks free and slides into the ocean causing the sea level on Earth to rise by about 6 meters - bad news for places like Rio de Janeiro and New York. You would think the writer is making a comment about climate change, but the mechanics of the catastrophe are totally different. A volcano beneath the ice erupts, brakes off the western shelf, lubricates it with steam and melt water, and shoves it into the sea. Robinson describes all this in exquisite detail.

***SPOILER ALERT***

[Danik 2016]

Lol!
To tell the truth I know more about the Germans, being half German myself than the Swiss!

I sadly don´t know much about Dr. Spock. My parents didn´t like TV, so I started watching it only much later, when I wasn´t a kid anymore. But Sax seems to be an interesting character, though as a scientist he is somewhat a dilettanti. He tries out several kinds of sciences, without believing in all of them.

A war of independence from the earth or earthly misuse) sounds funny but not altogether impossible. As for the geographic changes maybe Robinson thought about climate changes, although the theme wasn´t so conspicuous then. Anyway these Mars stories sound more recent, than they really are.

I wonder if he figures out any solutions, when Mars turns into a sort of second earth.

[Sancho]

I’ve got a little Herman the German in me as well. My grandfather was German. Or rather his parents were. They’d come to America in the late 1800s. He was borne here. Most of the rest of my people were chased here from Ireland by the potato blight. Anyway we’ve got no Swiss that I know of.

That Swiss/German joke can cut both ways. I’ve heard the Germans described as a laid-back version of the Swiss. Which is probably a good thing for the Germans, but sounds weird to someone who’s been scolded in Germany for crossing the street when the “Don’t Walk” light is lit — Achh! Mien Gott! Das ist nict gut! Ve does not cross ze strasse ven de little man ist red! Ve only cross ze strasse ven de little man ist green! Tsk - Tsk.

I agree. It is amazing how current the Mars books seem. In the book once they gain their independence they start fighting amongst themselves. Sort of like right here and now in the U.S. The democrats have gained control of both houses of congress, but they can’t seem to get anything done. Now they just fight amongst themselves.

I gotta tell ya, this writer doesn’t take any shortcuts. After the Mars people have won independence they convene a congress to hammer out a constitution. In some ways it seems like our founders meeting in Philadelphia to work out our constitution, but in other ways it’s totally different. Whereas there are issues that will concern any group of humans no matter the time or place, there are of course other issues unique to the Mars people. They do have the benefit of knowing the constitutions and histories of countries on Earth. So they’re aware of things that have worked and things that have not. They can stand on the shoulders of nations that have gone before them. The writer goes through the entire process.

Here’s a short sample of the Mars people working through a problem. As with any big polity — like Mars, or Brazil, or The United States, — there’s a delicate balance between centralized power and decentralized power. Federal vs State.

“This global versus local problem is going to be hard,” Art said one night. “It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.”

They call the cities “tents” because a lot of the towns are situated in the canyons of Mars and “tented”. Essentially a huge hi-tech tarp is pulled across the canyon rims and breathable air pumped in. That way people can walk around in town without a spacesuit.

“Maybe the Swiss system,” Nirgal suggested…
But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. “A countermodel rather,” Juergen said, making a face. “The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a license to breathe.”
“And the cantons have no power anymore,” Priska said. “The federal government took it away.”
“In some of the cantons,” Juergen added, “this was a good thing.”

Sounds familiar, eh? So it goes back and forth for a while and they wind up here:

No—the truth was, they were in a new situation. There was no historical analogy that would be much help to them now.

So they soldier on.

[Danik 2016]

"I’ve got a little Herman the German in me as well. My grandfather was German. Or rather his parents were. They’d come to America in the late 1800s. He was borne here. Most of the rest of my people were chased here from Ireland by the potato blight. Anyway we’ve got no Swiss that I know of."
A good mixture! But Sancho, never ever tell any German this version of "Germans are a laid-back version of the Swiss". You probably will hear much more than you did when you crossed the street by red . Know that most Germans are born with a little button which assures them of the German excellence and that this button is permanently On.

Not wanting to talk about politics, I'll just state that I was very hopeful about new US conditions. They started well, but now the challenges are appearing.

The above example shows me how serious the constitution is taken. Now doubt Robinson again researched on the theme and pinpointed its difficulties and contradictions. In this aspect I wish that all politicians, who are charged with elaborating new laws and constitutions would do likewise.