Archive for October, 2001
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
Sunday, October 14th, 2001Puppy: on Word of the day: areography
I can’t believe I read the whole thing.
One of Kim Stanley Robinson’s characters put it best:
And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals–all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on–such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far she could tell. (Blue Mars, page 518, Bantam paperback)
The two thousand pages of the Mars trilogy left me agreeing with Zo. This is not, as it is advertised to be, the ultimate in Mars fiction. Moving Mars by Greg Bear covered the political and social issues just as well and had a plot to boot. Bova’s Mars gave a more convincingly hazardous first landing scenario. Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars and ten sequels) is more fun to read. Even obscure samples of the art, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip, at least possess the virtue of being novels.
Robinson’s erratic, fragmentary tomes most resemble the previous classic in the field, The Martian Chronicles, although he hasn’t Bradbury’s excuse of having written them as short stories beforehand. Even his flood of language, in which many passages feel more like a thesaurus than a prose work, can be traced back to an earlier Mars:
The Men of Earth came to Mars. They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all.. (The Martian Chronicles)
Robinson seems to have broken every rule in the book, and gotten two Hugos and a Nebula award for it. He’s set “show, don’t tell” back thirty years. He’s neglected the basics of plot in favor of a fragmentary overview of centuries of future history. His characters, while well-crafted, are largely unsympathetic.
His approach to scientific ideas is sometimes magical, as in the case of robots who build the Martian infrastructure almost unsupervised. Usually, however, it’s exhaustingly exhaustive, as if saying all the right words (and all their synonyms) about a laundry list of scientific theories were a substitute for a plot. And sometimes his ideas seem to be at odds with one another–did he make the colonists immortal just to give them enough time to watch the terraforming? And then mortal again to provide an ending for the trilogy?
None of this is to say that the trilogy was not well-written. It may even be an excellent example of a modern literary work which happens to be about scientists and Mars. What it was not was a science-fiction novel. I used to think that everything in the genre–whatever its weakness in character, science, or scene–had to have a plot. Perhaps no one has tried before to pass a series of character vignettes, scientific lectures and flights of description off as a novel before because no one has had those and only those talents. But I think it’s something else.
Realism is antithetical to science fiction–in the real world, we’re sitting on our duffs here on Earth rather than reaching for the stars. Early on in the trilogy, the characters gave me the feeling that if Man was like this, I didn’t want us to spread to other worlds. That’s not the feeling one expects when one picks up a science-fiction novel. Sci-fi is an epic genre, and epics ought to have heroes. Give me John Carter any day.
- Mars in Myth and Science Fiction - a nice historical introduction
- Mars in Popular Culture - books and movies
- Mars in Fiction - a list of titles
Komarr
Friday, October 12th, 2001Puppy: off Phrase of the day: "abundant year"
A quote from the column “Welcome Back, Duke: From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues”:
Once about 10 years ago there was a story–you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer–about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That’s what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark. (Peggy Noonan, October 12, 2001)
I read, I write. I think I’m over the hump in Blue Mars, so if I’m feeling especially industrious this weekend I may have a review (informal, broggy and plausibly deniable) up by Monday. I’m trying to finish the neverending Mars trilogy before I read Memory, an LMB book that recently reappeared at the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library. I won’t hoard it for as long as the previous borrower. I hear that LMB just finished her next book, Diplomatic Immunity, but it won’t be out until May, and then only in hardcover–well beyond the budget of starving artists, more’s the pity.
If you’re asking who LMB is…what can I say? You haven’t lived? You haven’t read? I myself lived in ignorance of the execellence that is Lois McMaster Bujold until a few short months ago. I started with A Civil Campaign, which was not a good place to start but was the only LMB book in the local Brighton branch of the Boston Public Library. That’s just another sign of the wretched ignorance of LMB that pervades this, her native land.
Most of her books are about Miles Vorkosigan, a man who would try to deck the shark (not to mention succeed) and his family. My favorite LMB book is Komarr, although it seems to have received the least recognition. My favorite line: “It doesn’t hurt.” When I said Startide Rising was a perfect book and just mentioned Shards of Honor, that was only because I’ve come to assume perfection from LMB, and assume the worst about most other sf writers, even if they’ve gotten Nebulas for their efforts. You can find out all about LMB at The Bujold Nexus.
Yesterday during the freeshell slump I added the Brog to blogdex, but I haven’t had the time to check my logs for foreign activity. Though freeshell keeps GMT time, here in Boston it’s dinnertime, so I’m off…
Harlequin Historicals
Thursday, October 11th, 2001Puppy: off Word of the day: abecedarian
Most recently, instead of Blue Mars, I read a Harlequin Historicals™ pseudo-Victorian romance novel I picked up off a junk pile at work. It felt like walking into an unfamiliar fanfic genre–though it would have made pretty good Jane Austen fanfic. (See The Derbyshire Writer’s Guild.)
Before that, I had sunk to reading the dictionary (a nice, red Merriam-Webster) for new, exotic words. That’s actually a pro-Blue Mars sentiment on my part–the author has a way of creating atmosphere with paragraphs of obscure geological (pardon me–areological) terms that no one could possibly know. It’s highly irritating, yet good filler nonetheless.
I was interrupted in the middle of this brog entry by yet another freeshell incident, but it all seems better now. Just to be safe, I’ll sign off while the wiki is in a favorable constellation…
The TeXBook
Monday, October 8th, 2001Puppy: on
Today is Columbus day, and I celebrated by retraining ViaVoice. It’s not really retraining, just some additional training. My puppy is not performing as well as expected. Maybe I should return him to the breeder–but then he gets some strange word like “breeder” right and I think he’s not so bad after all. Besides, I’m cross-stitching while I dictate this.
I’ve sunken to new lows in my efforts not to read Blue Mars. Today I found myself reading a LaTeX manual instead of the dreaded tome [the better to hack the standard] LaTeX manuscript-formatting class for typesetting science fiction and fantasy manuscripts using the free LaTeX typesetting program […]
Startide Rising, Beggar’s Ride, The Postman
Sunday, October 7th, 2001Puppy: off
I’m not dictating today because I don’t feel like freeing up the memory to run ViaVoice, the Incredible Resource Hog. See if you can tell the difference, Christine.
I’ve just added a few more links to the [former brog home page], as well as linking yours brogly at eatonweb portal - […] and I didn’t even have to embezzle a blogger account. Little did I know that blogging was a movement. I feel so trendy…
I finished Startide Rising today, a little late because I picked up my sister’s copy of Beggars Ride while I was down the street feeding Nice Cat and Mean Iguana. Beggars Ride was one of those books where you get closer and closer to the back cover and you realize that there’s just not enough room left for a decent ending, despite Nancy Kress’ willingness to nuke every character that could have posed a plot complication. Also, the final gametes seemed to undermine the theme of unmodified human resillience. Nevertheless, it saved me from the dreaded Blue Mars for one more day, so it wasn’t all bad.
Startide Rising was a perfect book. I enjoyed David Brin’s The Postman a few weeks ago, but it was more a collection of novellas than a novel. Startide Rising had no such obvious flaws, although the hijinks at the end seemed to be telegraphed for quite a large portion of the book. The copyright page mentions an earlier version in Analog, but I wouldn’t have otherwise pegged it as a novella stretched on the rack to form a novel (cf. Ender’s Game).
Well, I’m supposed to be making some edits on someone else’s book, which means The Wrong Novel is on hold yet again. In fact, the entire Wrong Trilogy is on hold until the economy collapses enough that I’m completely unemployed. Sigh…
Shards of Honor
Thursday, October 4th, 2001Puppy: on
Due to technical difficulties here at freeshell I have been unable to blog for the last few days. Now I have a patch for the difficulty and I’m back in blogness. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It’s not going well. I had my doubts about Red Mars and the other Marses only compound its flaws. I have to wonder what people saw in these books to give them so many awards.
I couldn’t bring myself to take Blue Mars to Nantucket with with me over the weekend, so I read Shards of Honor by LMB instead. After running around in circles on the martian landscape, a book with a plot was a great improvement. Maybe the fundamental flaw of Robinson’s books is the absence of weddings. That’s one martian literary tradition Kim Stanley Robinson failed to include in his trilogy; Edgar Rice Burroughs wouldn’t dare to publish a Mars book where no fair maidens were rescued and married. In Shards of Honor the fair maiden rescues the man, but that’s a minor detail. Sergyar isn’t Mars.
The book I’m currently reading instead of Blue Mars is Startide Rising by David Brin. I read the first Uplift novel a while back and was a little disappointed; it was a good mystery but not the epic I was expecting. Startide Rising is looking little more epic, fortunately, and it even has a plot. Just no areography, please!