The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

[Sancho]

So I seem to be on a trilogy kick. Has anybody here read Red Mars, Green Mars, or Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson? Or for that matter has anyone here read any of Robinson’s books? I’ve read a couple: New York 2140 and Aurora.

I’m roughly half way through the first book of the trilogy, Red Mars, and it only took me this long to figure out the titles of books are reference to Mars going from a dead planet (Red) to a living planet (Green) to an Earth-like planet (Blue). Mars is being colonized and terraformed by settlers from Earth in the not-too-distant future.

It starts out like this:


And so we came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West — it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.

Kim Stanley Robinson in the Mars Trilogy is not near the stylist that Cormack McCarthy is in the Border Trilogy, but yowza can he pack a bunch of information into his books. They’re big fat books but he doesn’t waste any space on fluff. They’re all packed with info. For me it took a while to get into his rhythm but now that I’m there I’m rocketing along smoothly.

Anyway it’s been fun so far.

Comments anybody?

[Danik 2016]

double

[Danik 2016]

Hi, Sancho,

I didn´t read them, but I seem to currently specialize in discussing books that I haven´t read. One of the important functions of a forum, is after all, to review literature. I discovered Kurt Vonnegut last year though and the impressions of "Slaughterhouse 5" must be buried somewhere in this forum.

I believe the Mars Trilogy may be one of the many psychological preparations for a life outside the earth as so many sci-fi novels are today. It seems to be the same function as the travel literature in the Renaissance: it prepared the Europeans for all the discoveries and for a life outside Europe with treasures, monsters, cannibals, and what not.

Quoting your quote:

"It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West — it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings."

Is it all happening again?

[Sancho]

Agreed, Danik. And I believe one of the best ways to make sense of literature is to talk about it with someone.

That said I suppose I don’t bring much to the table with a science fiction book. I don’t read much sci-fi, not since high school anyway. Probably an avid reader of the genre would see more than I do. Oddly though, lately I’ve been getting into it more. Seems like it’s gotten more literary that it used to be (if there’s such a thing as that).

Pew - Pew - Pew “Die you alien scum”

^ Not so much of that in this book. The book was written in ‘92 and the action starts in 2026. Theres initially a hundred or so highly trained, hand-picked colonists to go settle Mars - Astronauts, engineers, construction workers, chemists, biologists, geologists, horticulturists, scientists of all kinds, political people, a psychologist, and basically people with every skill set they think they’ll need. Earth is struggling with overpopulation. Shocker, huh? So anyway not only are they trying to make Mars a habitable planet, they’re also trying to set up a new society, and it becomes obvious the society will be unlike anything they’re used to back on earth. That’s what’s interesting to me.

I’m not giving too much up here, but early on in the book there’s a murder. They are human after all, they’re Martians not Earthlings, but still human, I reckon.

[Danik 2016]

I have no idea, Sancho, what our small bunch of Litnetters is reading these days. Any genre is welcome, I think. And I think, sci-fi permits related discussions. It seems significative anyway that more readers are becoming interested in it.

What I think interesting about Slaughterhouse 5: the guy Billy has a terrible war experience while in Germany during WWII. He comes home, marries, has two kids, rises in his profession. He tries to lead a normal life, but he keeps traveling back and forward in time, visiting scenes of the past and the future. And at one time he is kidnapped by alliens, not to Mars but to some allien planet. And if I'm not inventing things, he even falls in love with an allien lady. What I liked about it is that there is an obvious connection between his war trauma and his feeling permanently dislodged in his after war existence.

It would be fine if you could differentiate the three Mars books and write separately about each, as you did with the Cormack Trilogy. After all it is about our future!

[tonywalt]

I love Slaughterhouse 5, the book, and the movie. It's a pretty realistic portrayal of the aftereffects of war. Kurt Vonnegut experience as a prisoner in Dresden- imagine surviving that!

[Sancho]

It is sort of small bunch now, eh Danik? Way back in the day it was a quiet little corner of the web and then it got big and raucous and now it’s little again. So it goes on the lit-net.

As you say. Billy Pilgrim had a terrible war experience and so did Kurt Vonnegut and so did the people of Dresden. Vonnegut writes about his war experience in what I think was his last book, A Man Without A Country. He was captured by the Germans in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden as a POW. During the allied bombing of Dresden his group of POWs was herded into an underground meat locker #5 for their protection, which is where the Slaughterhouse 5 title came from. He said they were all sitting there, listening to bombs explode, and thinking they probably wouldn’t survive the night. Then one of his buddies leaned over and said, “So what do you think the poor people are doing tonight?” Soldiers have always been good at gallows humor.

You know Kurt Vonnegut’s people came from Germany. He grew up speaking the German and English. Since he knew the lingo he’d struck up a sort of friendship with one of the guards, a man he described as not too bright but good natured. After the bombing the prisoners were put on cleanup duty. They essentially were digging corpses out of the rubble and sending them to the morgue. Vonnegut had heard that the guard’s mother had been killed in the bombing. That might not be so good for the prisoners. He said at one point during the day the guard motioned to him to come over. The guard had one cigarette left. He broke it in two, offered one half to Vonnegut, and the two of them just sat there for a while and shared a smoke.

[Danik 2016]

You bet it is! LitNet must once have been great. People still keep coming back as in search of a lost Eden. I still remember my warm welcome in 2016, when it wasn´t so big anymore, but still a lot of people around. Anyway, even small it has retained it strong, independent presence.

I see, you are both more intimate with Vonnegut, than me. When Stately brought the book to my attention, I made two mistakes: I thought the author was a German because of his name, and that the book was about the medieval Children Crusade.
What I also like about the book, is the difficulty of the narrator in entering his subject.

Beautiful scene that of companionship between "enemies" among so much destruction, Sancho!

[Sancho]

The children’s crusade was sure a weird moment in history, proving again that truth is stranger than fiction. And although the sci-fi genre can certainly be strange it still hangs its hat on the human experience, sort of like Vonnegut hung his time-traveling protagonist on his own experience in the war.

Red Mars is largely the story of colonization and there are certainly similarities to European colonization efforts of the past few centuries. But there’s also a keen awareness of environmental degradation on Mars mostly as a result of what’s already happened on Earth.

So the colonists break into two factions, The Reds and The Greens. The Reds want to leave Mars as pristine as possible. They don’t believe humans have the right to muck around with another planet (even though they’re already there). They even start a Mars First! Movement, which sounds a lot like the the real-world Earth First! Movement that was borne directly out of Ed Abbey’s comic novel from the 70s - The Monkey Wrench Gang. The Greens want to terraform Mars, build an atmosphere, get plants growing, and basically make it habitable for humans.

Here’s Ann, the de facto leader of the Reds. She’s talking about how the things happening on Mars are also having an effect back on Earth, in particular in this case on The Antarctic:



They’re running out of oil down there, and the Southern Club is poor, and there’s a whole continent of oil and gas and minerals right next to them, being treated like a national park by the rich northern countries. And then the south started to see these same rich northern countries start to take Mars completely apart, and they said What the hell, you can tear a whole planet apart and we’re supposed to protect this iceberg we’ve got right next door with all these resources we desperately need? Forget it! So they broke The Antarctic Treaty, and there they are drilling and no one’s done a thing about it. And now the last clean place on earth is gone too.


And here’s John responding to Ann. John is a charismatic political leader, a compromiser:


Damn! Anyway, whenever I get discouraged about all this I try to remember that it’s all natural. It’s inevitable that people are going to fight, but now we’re fighting about Martian things. I mean people aren’t fighting over whether they’re American or Japanese or Russian or Arab, or some religion or race or sex or whatnot. They’re fighting because they want one Martian reality or other. That’s all that matters now. So we’re already halfway there.

Also, welcome to the thread, Tony.

[Danik 2016]

"And although the sci-fi genre can certainly be strange it still hangs its hat on the human experience, sort of like Vonnegut hung his time-traveling protagonist on his own experience in the war."
I think, sci-fi is an eye opener ( I don´t know how far consciously) of the things happen today. They sort of want to map out the future of humanity. Maybe that´s why the genre is so popular. It offers a kind of future, however bad things may be around.

But I have the feeling that the earthen conflicts are only transferred to Mars in the novel:

It seems that if they leave Mars as it is, they won´t be able to live on it.
And if they terraform Mars, they will soon make it not inhabitable again.
I wonder how soon the conflict between rich and poor countries will be transferred to Mars.

There is another sci-fi trilogy about the future of the world but still on earth that seems interesting to me. It´s Margareth Atwood´s MaddAddam Trilogy. I had only courage to read the first volume, Orix and Crake. But maybe one of you or both have read it?

[Sancho]

I haven’t read MaddAddam. In fact I haven’t read anything by Margaret Atwood, but she’s on the list. I have read several story collections by her fellow Canadian, Alice Munro, and they are awesome.

Well the rich/poor country contention does come into it somewhat, but in the form of transnational companies going to Mars to strip out the natural resources and send them back to Earth. Much as international maritime operations pick a small country with an advantageous tax structure to register ships under, the Transnats on Mars are working under a “flag of convenience.” And since there is no government on Mars to speak of, the Transnats bring their own police forces and pretty much do as they please. I’ve been to countries where the police aren’t really there for public safety but rather to protect some very specific interests. They’re more like private security. In any given situation they could be your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on who’s paying them. Black folks in certain cities here in the USA are thinking - shiiiiiit you ain’t gotta go to no other country to find cops like that.

Anyway once profit is the main motive, everything changes, even the priority of the engineering projects on Mars. Here’s a note on Robinson’s style. It’s a wordy, sort of matter-of-fact style, which is weird considering the fantastical things he’s writing about. So I’ll be reading along on autopilot, considering the actions and inner thoughts of some of the main characters, and then I’ll stop cold and go - a whaaat? A space elevator!? Turns out a space elevator is a real theory that’s been around for quite some time. And they wind up building one to make it cheaper and easier to get people to Mars and resources out of Mars. It goes like this: they boost an asteroid into a geostationary orbit and then they run a cable from the asteroid to the surface of the planet and now they can run an elevator car up and down the cable. Metallurgy has clearly come a long way.

[Danik 2016]

I like the short stories of Alice Munro a lot. From an artistic point of view I think that she is even a greater author than Atwood, but Atwood has these original and disturbing futuristic plots and I dare say, she researched a lot to construct them. She published The Handmaid´s Tale long before woman´s rights had that public relevance it has today.

"Well the rich/poor country contention does come into it somewhat, but in the form of transnational companies going to Mars to strip out the natural resources and send them back to Earth." That seems very typical to me. Your author was very informed about tax rules. Transnats indeed.

"And since there is no government on Mars to speak of, the Transnats bring their own police forces and pretty much do as they please. I’ve been to countries where the police aren’t really there for public safety but rather to protect some very specific interests. They’re more like private security. In any given situation they could be your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on who’s paying them." This Mars sounds very earthy indeed. Only the address has changed.

"A space elevator!? Turns out a space elevator is a real theory that’s been around for quite some time. And they wind up building one to make it cheaper and easier to get people to Mars and resources out of Mars. It goes like this: they boost an asteroid into a geostationary orbit and then they run a cable from the asteroid to the surface of the planet and now they can run an elevator car up and down the cable. Metallurgy has clearly come a long way."
Doesn´t sound at all practical to me. Any reach people will want to have their own or several interplanetary private cable elevators, when it comes to that, as they have imported cars today. Now imagine the confusion of cables all over the cosmos, the elevators jams, the accidents with people been expelled into the all. Better some flying vehicle that might better adapt to the circumstances.

Waiting for more news about Mars!

[Sancho]

If I had to pick the Alice Munro story with the most hang time in my noggin, it’d be Child’s Play in the Too Much Happiness collection. I can still vividly picture the special-ed girl with the pale-blue flowered cap smiling and swimming out to meet the two mean girls. The story is told from the perspective of one of the mean girls who is now an old woman. Yeeech!

***Spoiler Alert***

The space elevator isn’t an interplanetary vehicle, it just allows for ease of transport from Mars orbit to the surface. But you’re absolutely right about it being problematic. However rather than the car getting stuck and stranding everybody on it, the elevator winds up being the target of sabotage. You see the humans on Mars find themselves in a civil war. They are human after all and war is one of those things that humans gonna do. So the one side cuts the cable and sends counterweight asteroid along with Phyllis and a bunch of folks from the other side hurdling out into space. So long Phyllis you evil space b**ch.

Anyway I’m now about a third of the way through Green Mars and although you wouldn’t think they would, they wind up building another elevator. And reports have it that Phyllis isn’t dead and she’s on her way back and she’s probably pretty pissed off.

Something happened to the writing style between Red Mars and Green Mars. I’m finding Green Mars to be much easier to read. Maybe I’m just less distracted. One of the themes seems to be - what is, just is, there’s no deserve. What happens, just happens, regardless of what should happen. It doesn’t matter what you do, when death comes for you - you gonna die.

Ann, one of the original 100, is out by herself doing geological work and considering this idea. She’s thinking of how many of her friends have died and wondering why she’s still alive. She starts considering Dostoyevsky and time the Czarist police had taken him out to be executed only to be brought back hours later to wait his turn:


Dostoyevsky had been changed for life, the writer declared in the easy omniscience of biography. An epileptic, prone to violence, prone to despair. He hadn’t been able to integrate the experience. Perpetually angry. Fearful. Possessed.

Ann shook her head and laughed, angry at the idiot writer, who simply didn’t understand. Of course you didn’t integrate the experience. It was meaningless. The experience that couldn’t be integrated.

[Danik 2016]

"If I had to pick the Alice Munro story with the most hang time in my noggin, it’d be Child’s Play in the Too Much Happiness collection. I can still vividly picture the special-ed girl with the pale-blue flowered cap smiling and swimming out to meet the two mean girls. The story is told from the perspective of one of the mean girls who is now an old woman. Yeeech!"
Yes, I know exactly which story you mean! It´s terrible.

Vixe! Seems again that those Mars humans aren´t different from their earthy relatives. The good thing about fantastic fiction and soap operas is that only the author decides who dies. Any logic goes to space as we say here! I wonder if Phillys is going to revenge herself.

"Something happened to the writing style between Red Mars and Green Mars. I’m finding Green Mars to be much easier to read." Maybe another person wrote the second novel under the same name. They may have a bureau of authors. Funny things happen. In Spain, a certain Carmen XXX won a prize for a certain gorish serie, which is very popular there. At the award ceremony, instead of the expected lady, three men turned up to receive the prize.

"Ann shook her head and laughed, angry at the idiot writer, who simply didn’t understand." Now Ann, please more respect with my beloved Dostoyevsky. I can tell you he integrated quite a lot of things.

[Sancho]

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.”

[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. :D 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 :D. 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.

[Sancho]

Well I’m coasting in for splashdown on the Mars Trilogy, and it’s been a most enjoyable trip. I’m sorry to see this ride end. It’s been almost 2000 pages of densely written prose, but it’s been a constant companion for the better part of a month. I’ve spent my days looking forward to getting to a place where I can sit down and read for a while. Anyway, Danik, thanks for coming along. It definitely helps to chat with somebody while on a long read.

Anyway, I was clumsily trying to compliment the German people by saying they’re a laid-back version of the Swiss. What I mean is they’re like the Swiss except more easy going, less uptight, less obsessive-compulsive. You know, they’re more fun to be around. And even though when you’re in Germany you’ll still get scolded for crossing against the little red man, in Switzerland I think they feel obligated to run you over if you’re crossing against the little red man. They won’t even brake or swerve away from the offending pedestrian. I believe they’d actually speed up and swerve into a walker who has the audacity to disrespect the little red man. To do otherwise would be contrary to living in a well-ordered society. You see, if you let the small stuff slide, you might as well let everything go. Letting someone cross against the little man is just a hair’s breath away from anarchy.

[Danik 2016]

Books are being good travel companions in these times where real trips have become difficult if not impossible. I gather you are much traveled but you haven´t been to Mars before. And you are a fast reader. 2000 pages in less than a month is a feat. I used to be a fast reader long ago. I think I am starting to look at sci-fi with other eyes. It seems to be a kind of training for possible futures. It has been fun exchanging ideas even without having read the books. Maybe there will be more in the future.

I have to say I am sorry for I quite misunderstood your joke, because I didn´t know what "a laid-back" version was. I somehow thought you where complimenting the Swiss. The German love their rules, but when they are nice, they are very nice! And they usually are trustworthy.

[Sancho]

I’ve gotta agree with you concerned sci-fi, Danik. I’ve gained a new appreciation for the genre. I’d actually gone to the bookstore interested in one one his more recent novels: The Ministry for the Future. I liked the set up. An organization is started (in 2025) to advocate for the future of Earth. And not just for future generations but for all the animals and plants as well. I liked the idea. But alas, the book was only available in the hardback format and I’m not keen on dragging a book the size of boat anchor around with me in my suitcase. And I don’t really like reading books on an electronic device. So I bought the Mars books instead, but since there’s three of them, they probably wound up taking up just as room. Oy vey.

I don’t think I read all that fast. In fact I prefer to read slowly. The previous trilogy, Cormack McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, I read very slowly. He’s such a stylist that I enjoyed going word by word, sentence by sentence and just taking in the language. I can’t go too fast with McCarthy or I’ll miss something. That said Kim Stanley Robinson writes with such detail that if I started reading too fast I’d run the risk of missing something big. I’d be reading along and only partially paying attention to all the horticultural specifics of alpine lichens and then - WHAMMO - a space elevator is built, or an ocean bubbles up on Mars, the western ice shelf of Antarctica slides into the sea. So I’d have to backtrack a few pages and figure out what happened.

Sorry about the “laid back” terminology. I thought it might be problematic. I think it’s generally considered to be a good attribute. I picture a California surfer dude — horns are honking, traffic on the 405 is backed up to Santa Monica, tempers are flaring, but out on Huntington Beach he’s like - “whoa, dude, surf’s up.” Of course it’s not always a good personality trait. For instance if your boat happens to be taking on water, you don’t want to be too laid-back, you’d be better off getting a bucket and commencing to bail.

[Danik 2016]

Lol! Anyway you made a good deal exchanging three books for one. I got used in reading books on tablet and PC. I have reading apps, with features that make reading more agreeable, I can change the background, the size of the font and specially the glare. If I want to I can read in a totally dark room( but it´s not recommendable). I sadly quite lost the habit of paper books. But I think for a own library there are still beautiful hard cover editions.

You are right. When you read some authors style is almost as important than the content sometimes it is even more. And here is a challenge for you: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/when-in-hell-embrace-the-devil-alison-entrekin. The publication of the new translation of the great Brazilian epic is scheduled for 2020.

I myself have become a very slow reader. I usually read in the evening and I usually read until I start to get sleepy over the book.

I understood this “laid back” terminology as somehow easy going. But it seems not to be quite that. Any German would be deadly worried about his boat and if that was possible, organize an efficient method of emptying the boat ;).

[Sancho]

You know, I’ve always shied away from reading literature in translation because I get the sense I’m missing too much. Languages are so complex and nuanced that unless there are copious footnotes it seems I’m missing a lot in a translation. And if the text is heavily footnoted, I sort of lose the flow. That said one of my favorite books of all time is The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek. And that said I’m sure there’s much in Švejk I’m missing. But I pick up something new each time I read it.

It looks like Alison Entrekin missed her 2020 deadline to translate Grande Sertão: Veredas. Or anyway I can’t find it anywhere. I wonder how the project is going. I’d certainly be interested in reading it if she ever finishes. As I was surfing around the web (surf’s up, dude) looking at her work, I came across a novel she’d translated by Chico Buarque - My German Brother - evidently it’s semi-autobiographical. It gets high marks by readers on the Goodreads website. I’m certain, Danik, you’re familiar with Buarque’s work, but he’s new to me. And that’s another thing I really like about this website - I come across so many interesting leads I’d like to track down.

[Danik 2016]

I understand you, Sancho, it´s exactly what made me learn English so many years ago. I wanted to read Dickens in the original. I don´t know if Alison Entrekin´s translation will have footnotes, she is basically set on recreating Rosa´s language and that is a herculean task. I shouldn´t wonder if she interrupted her task to translate easier pieces of work, she has to live from her job and literary translations are the most challenging but also the ones that render the worst payment. Anyway it seems now that the new deadline is 2022.

I read some of Chico´s novels, I liked specially "Budapest". I heard about "My German Brother", but I still have his last but one novel "Spilt Milk" unread in my bookshelf. It must be good and yes it seems to be about a son out of marriage from his father, which was born in Germany. I´ll have a look at Goodreads.
"And that’s another thing I really like about this website - I come across so many interesting leads I’d like to track down." I think
you revived this trend by writing about the books you read. It´s mostly you and kev that write about the books they have read these days.

[Sancho]

Well, since we’re talking about reading fast and slow, I’ll mention the book I’m reading now: Roger Deakin’s Waterlog. I’m reading it slowly. It was written in the 90s when the writer was in his 50s and like many men at that point in their lives, he finds himself alone and with time on his hands. So he starts a hobby, which in his case is open-water swimming. He sort of tours around Great Britain and swims in just about every body of water he can. It’s nature writing, travel writing, humor, memoir, and philosophy. That is to say it’s not categorizable - if I were to walk into a bookstore and try to find it, I’d be at a loss as to which section to look in first.

One reason it’s a slow read is because it’s so well written. And so with books like this, I like to slow down and enjoy the ride. But another reason is because the writer is British and I’m American and although our languages are similar, they’re not the same. Here’s a simple example. Early on in the book Deakin is out for an ocean swim in the Scilly Isles, which is off the Cornish peninsula, southwestern Great Britain. (I had to look it up) As he’s walking back to town he sees a group of coaches sitting there. So I’m picturing a bunch of guys wearing track suits and ball caps, each with a whistle on a lanyard around his neck, and sitting at a cafe, drinking coffee, and working out their game plan. Turns out what he sees are some old railroad cars that have repurposed into camping shelters.

[Danik 2016]

Lol! Yes such misunderstandings happen all the time with Portuguese from Portugal and Portuguese from Brazil.

For me Nature is an enjoyable theme. I read not long ago, a book called Heimkehr (Coming Home) by Wolfgang Büscher. Büscher is a journalist specialized in writing uncommon travel books. This one is about fulfilling an old dream. When he was still a schoolboy he used to build hunting huts with his friends in the wood near by. During the night when the boys had to be at home, the forest ranger destroyed the huts. So now he decides that he wants to live for year in a hunting hut. He goes to the nobleman of the region and gets an invitation to stay in his hunting hut. Only a few days he will need the hut for his hunting party.

Büscher starts roughing it in the coldest winter. He lives as a real hunter would: no electricity and no facilities from the outside world. Only a second hand car, that he needs to visit his mother, who is dying in a hospital nearby. The first days are very, very cold. He soon discovers, that a cover and a fire aren´t enough to protect against the sharp winter. And he also learns to protect his food ( no fridge, of course) against the small mice who want to share his fire with him.

But then he makes friends with the current forest ranger, who loves his job and tells him a lot about the trees and plants and the animalsof the wood.

This period in the wood is in fact a voyage back into the past in every sense of the past. With his mother dying he examines his personal past, his family story. And also the story of the wood, with his footpath made by ancient folks. And last but not least, the story of this part of Germany with it´s possibly last aristocratic family that lost all it´s power but still has the respect of the people that live in the "Residenzstadt" near by, where the family still lives. Not even an ugly Nazi chapter is missing. But there is also the anedote, that the Prince of the family visits Büscher in his hut. With his simple household Büscher has a problem: one can´t suppose His Royal Highness drinking coffee out of a tin cup. So he goes to the house of his family, which is now his and takes one of the golden lined porcelain cups of his mother.

[Sancho]

I like nature writing as well. But it seems to work better when it’s encompassed in a broader work. Last year I read Hope Jarhen’s Lab Girl. It’s mostly a memoir about the writer finding her way in life - growing up in Minnesota, being drawn to science (botany in her case), dealing with an undercurrent of misogyny in the lab, struggling with depression, chasing grant money, etc, but inter spliced in all of that are some amazing descriptions of trees and how they work. Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods is ostensibly a book about guy having a mid-life crisis and deciding to hike the Appalachian Trail, but along the way he describes how plants and animals as well as the soil, the rocks, the water, and the air fit together. No one has written more beautifully about the Southwestern U.S. than Ed Abbey in Desert Solitaire, and the nature writing is only part of a greater cautionary tale about human progress. Anyway it seems to me me that straight up nature writing needs to hang itself on something else to become truly compelling literature. If there’s a symbiosis between certain plants and animals then there’s certainly a complimentary relationship between nature writing and the broader literary work.

I’m not sure if Brazilian Portuguese or American English has strayed further from the language in the old country. I did, although, have an interesting conversation with a flight attendant about just that. She was a German woman, but she was working for a U. S. airline. We were on a flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai and just killing time in the galley. She said the airline staffs the crew with a certain number of flight attendants who speak the language of the departure and destination airport. And since flight attendants get their trips based on seniority, a newer flight attendant (she was young) can get a sweet international trip out of seniority if she’s qualified in the language. This particular woman said she worked mostly between the U.S. and Germany. But what she really wanted to do was fly to Brazil. So she was trying to get qualified in Portuguese. Unfortunately she’d bought a language course back in Germany that was based on the kind of Portuguese they speak in Lisbon, and she told me - “Oh it is sooo much different than Brazilian Portuguese.” Anyway she’d already spent her money and said she was committed to completing the course. She struck me as smart and diligent and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts she’s enjoying herself on Copa Cabana Beach right now.

[Danik 2016]

Yes, I agree with you Sancho and I usually prefer nature in novels and bios. You seem to have read much more books about nature than me. And I thought first I would be bored with this kind of loner in the woods, but in fact the way he blended nature, personal history and the history of the country enchanted me.
I don´t know about American English, but Brazilian Portuguese certainly has strayed far from the Portuguese of Portugal. It begins with the accent, that is very different. From all former Portuguese colonies, Brazil seems to be the only one that developed an own accent. So, at least in the spoken language our independence is complete, he,he. On the other hand, Portugal is more adherent to grammar and the new orthography rules and they sometimes use words that sound very "bookish" to us, nation of non readers. But I think nothing to scare away your German acquaintance. She will know to make herself understood.

I am reading another interesting book now, it´s called "The Children of Hoy". It´s about the town Hoyerswerda in the former East German GRD and the 1991 multiple xenophobic attacks on emigrant workers. The author, Grit Lemke is herself a child of Hoy. She tells the story from the point of view from the children of Hoy, who mere mostly the children of the first workers of the new town, who arrived coming mostly from other German towns but also from other countries. The story is made up of narrative and statements from these former children of Hoy. So when it comes to the terror, the readers have gained an almost insider idea of the life of the town: they have been witness to the free infancy of the children living in collective buildings, they have gone to school with them and seen them grow up and find their employments at "Pumpe" and spending their weekends in more or less undergrounds events.

But one always has the statements of Mozambican David about how they were not allowed to the dances and how they had to walk always in groups.

That´s how far I´ve got up to now.

[Sancho]

I like finding gems like the Wolfgang Büscher book when I’m not expecting it. Last year I read Michael Finkel’s A Stranger In The Woods. It’s about a 20 year old guy, Christopher Knight, who decides he wants to live alone, and so he wanders off into the Maine woods and lives in a hermit hole for almost 30 years with basically no contact with anyone. The first thing that occurred to me was that it gets really cold in Maine in the winter. But he survives. Thrives in fact. His primitive camp is not far from a few summer cabins, but the woods are so dense that nobody ever comes across his abode. A few local legends arise about a hermit in the woods because things are occasionally missing from the cabins, food mostly. Well, he doesn’t voluntarily come in from the cold, but he is brought in when he finally gets caught stealing from one of the cabins. - curses be to security cameras - He said he just wanted to be alone.

[Sancho]

I’m still slowly reading Waterlog. Here’s a short sample of why Deakin’s writing is so much fun to read slowly. It’s a wonderful and vivid description of a flying insect. He first compares the fly to early attempts at powered flight by humans and then comments on the present state of human affairs.


The air is heavy with St. Mark’s flies; shiny, black, and about a half-inch long, feeding on cow-parsley flowers. They are top-heavy insects, with a thorax like an old Dragon Rapide biplane and a body that tapers to nothing. Their flight is jerky and uncertain. They kept taking off like Blériot on a maiden flight, dropping out of the sky quite suddenly, only to catch themselves, as if on an invisible safety net, and set new and equally aimless course. Their larvae live on the roots of wet grasses, and they must all have emerged at the same moment without any clear idea about the direction their lives should take. Truly a fly for our times.

A fly for all times, I’d say.

[Danik 2016]

I like finding gems like the Wolfgang Büscher book when I’m not expecting it. Last year I read Michael Finkel’s A Stranger In The Woods. It’s about a 20 year old guy, Christopher Knight, who decides he wants to live alone, and so he wanders off into the Maine woods and lives in a hermit hole for almost 30 years with basically no contact with anyone. The first thing that occurred to me was that it gets really cold in Maine in the winter. But he survives. Thrives in fact. His primitive camp is not far from a few summer cabins, but the woods are so dense that nobody ever comes across his abode. A few local legends arise about a hermit in the woods because things are occasionally missing from the cabins, food mostly. Well, he doesn’t voluntarily come in from the cold, but he is brought in when he finally gets caught stealing from one of the cabins. - curses be to security cameras - He said he just wanted to be alone.
Interesting story specially if based on real facts, Sancho. The guy certainly was an outsider and it unfortunately is so that the small modest thieves are usually the ones that get caught. But I have the feelings that in US there are some facilities for people who want to live in nature, in a trailer or so, and who have very little contact with urban life. I have been following for some time now a association of writers called the Rough Writers(No, no Mc Cormack here) of Carrot Ranch, leaded by a lady called Charly Mills, who drives around the coldest regions you can imagine in a trailer with her dogs. Yes /No found this group out and started sending short stories to them. I see they have updated themselves and can be found on twitter as well.
If you want to take a look:
https://carrotranch.com/2021/11/22/saddle-up-saloon-howdy-ann-edall-robson-2/

[Danik 2016]

I’m still slowly reading Waterlog. Here’s a short sample of why Deakin’s writing is so much fun to read slowly. It’s a wonderful and vivid description of a flying insect. He first compares the fly to early attempts at powered flight by humans and then comments on the present state of human affairs.


A fly for all times, I’d say.

Yes, that reads well! I used to read very quickly, when I was a teen, but then I was after the plot. Today I like to read a good book slowly to savour the style of the author. And then I read late at night. When I start to get sleepy it´s time to leave of.

Speaking of insects and style, I have these days been revising a story, that I never was able till now to appreciate rightly, because of the terror it inspired. I mean that most famous of all literary insects (but nobody knows what an insect exactly he is) from Kafka´s "Metamorphosis".
There is pathos and dark humor in the same segment:
Here an example with Gregor Samsa´s effort in trying to get out of bed:

"It was a simple matter to throw off the covers; he only had to blow himself up a little and they fell off by themselves. But it became difficult after that, especially as he was so exceptionally broad. He would have used his arms and his hands to push himself up; but instead of them he only had all those little legs continuously moving in different directions, and which he was moreover unable to control. If he wanted to bend one of them, then that was the first one that would stretch itself out; and if he finally managed to do what he wanted with that leg, all the others seemed to be set free and would move about painfully."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm

[Sancho]

Whatever happened to yes/no? I’ll check out the rough writers. They sound like my kind of people.

The story about Christopher Knight is true. There was an update about him not long ago. He’s working at his brother’s garage I think and isn’t adjusting all that well.

You’re right about the U.S. having places where you can disappear. In fact it’s been said that one of the pillars of the national personality is the ability to “light out for the territories,” like Huck Finn. It is getting harder and harder to disappear, but people still manage to do it. Ted Kaczynski for instance (the unabomber) did it up in Montana. I get the sense that about half the population of Alaska is on the lam from the law or a most heinous ex-wife. I lived up in the interior of Alaska in the 80s and people from the “lower 48” would always ask why in the world anyone would choose to live in such a cold and desolate place. The answer was always - “well, you know, a lot of people live here because they can’t live anywhere else.

I bet you can disappear in Brazil too, certainly in Patagonia.

[Danik 2016]

Here is the link to Yes/No poetry and pictures blog. It´s no secret, he put the link under his last posts in Litnet:https://frankhubeny.blog/. I haven´t visited the page for a time now, the religious walks seem to be a more recent activity.

People like Christopher Knight generally are forced sooner or late to readjust to "normal life" specially if they live in countries like our (though there are places to disappear in both of them) where they are considered unproductive. The thing is you have to pay somehow for the food you consume.

Yes, many US people seem to have an adventurous streak in them and I think that is where the good stories are born. In Brazil it exists too and yes, there are still places not reached by internet, where you can disappear for years. But there also is a lot of misery and violence. Brazilian middle classes were always precarious and with the pandemics they had to face poverty. And many, many people live in the streets and depend on donations to get basic meals. So that´s plane misery.

On a happier and more adventurous note: there is the Schürmann Family, from Santa Catarina, who practically lives on a sailing boat.They sailed aroud the wold several times and what it´s still better, they wrote books about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schurmann_Family