Ancient Logic

I've spent the past few days thinking about the ending of "Blue Mars," the final book in the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars series. It took me a while to decide what exactly I felt about the book. On one hand, this book had perhaps the best writing of the entire series. The characterizations were sharp and memorable, the long descriptive passages evoked times and places with poignancy, and the various themes of the previous two books of the trilogy really did meet a satisfactory conclusion. On the other hand, this book felt like an elaborate and prolonged fade-out, one enormous epilogue that never quite came into focus. Partly, this was by design. One of the themes of the series, overall, appears to be tracing the emergence of post-scarcity, peaceful paradise throughout the human solar system. You can't have much of a paradise when things are blowing up and falling apart. Most of the conflict of this story revolved around the remaining characters of the story: Sax Russ...

While "Green Mars," didn't include nearly as much mind-blowing speculative awesomeness as the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it did include one set-piece that I enjoyed very much: The Dorsa Brevia Declaration. As mentioned in my review earlier this week, the plot of Green Mars focuses on the approach of a second Martian revolution. The first revolution, as described in Red Mars, was a spasm of senseless violence, mayhem, and targeted assassination, accomplishing little besides the deaths of many, many important characters in the story. As would-be revolutionaries gather in an enormous lava tube named Dorsa Brevia, the central question is how would any future revolution escape the fate of the first. The process, which I'll describe below, was very familiar to me. During the course of my path to teaching history in Middle School, I worked at an afterschool program named Citizen Schools based in Boston. Citizen Schools had its ups and down...

I got a great comment today from an artist creating visualizations of the technology and locations described in the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars Trilogy. Unwittingly, I borrowed a sketch of his from the Mangalawiki, the source of much of my background info on the novels. The sketch was plenty evocative, but his finished work is just amazing. Give the website a look!

Terraforming is the process of turning a terrestrial body to an environment more suitable for human habitation. There are three planets in our own solar system that commonly mentioned targets of this process in order of increasing viability: Jupiter's frozen moon Europa, Venus, and, of course, Mars . A considerable amount of research has gone into whether or not terraforming is achievable or practical. One can also easily find debates on whether or not terraforming is morally or ethically supportable. A significant portion of the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson revolves around just that question. Moholes, genetically engineered lichens and deliberate meteoroid strikes are all described as techniques to add a few more millibars of atmospheric pressure, a few more degrees of heat to a cold, dead wasteland. I'm less sure of the thought given to what terraforming means in literature such as Red Mars. When an author or director or screen-writer includes terraforming ...