Book Review: Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1992
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SPOILER ALERT

Red Mars is super-great, hardest-of-the-hard science fiction.

It is the first book in Robinson’s Mars trilogy and it follows the experiences of the first hundred human colonists on Mars through their difficult first few decades of settlement. It is so practical and so thorough in its details that you can completely imagine it happening in real life. And you can picture yourself there, standing on the frozen, rocky Martian surface with them.

Robinson's “First Hundred” settlers were all carefully selected by their various governments for their technical expertise, diversity of skills, and psychological profiles. They trained together for years in Antarctica in preparation for setting up the first permanent Martian colony. After landing on Mars, they begin building ingenious living quarters, transportation systems, greenhouses, and power plants.

A small group also begins an unauthorized, clandestine effort to introduce Antarctic lichens and other hardy living organisms to the planet to start oxygenating the atmosphere.

Every detail in this book is totally realistic, from the heated pressure suits they have to wear on the surface, to the different types of structures they choose build as homes, to the machines that extract ores and elements from the air and rock.

The colonists’ inevitable arguments and power struggles are equally believable. The longer the First Hundred stay on Mars, the more they separate into the “greens,” who want to terraform Mars to make it livable for humans, and the “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it is.

Meanwhile, as each colonist is trying to create or preserve their own preferred version of Mars, Earth has become dangerously overpopulated and in serious economic trouble. The multinational corporations on Earth who funded the original colonization effort now naturally want to exploit Mars’s resources for Earth’s benefit, and they start sending up more people to do so. Many of the original colonists need the corporations’ support to do their work, but even many of the more Earth-friendly of them are resistant to this complete exploitation.

Corporate representatives eventually build a space elevator to make it easier for ships to make the trip between Earth and Mars. The elevator is a giant cable stretching from a high point on Mars’ equator up through the atmosphere to the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid which has been captured and moved into geosynchronous orbit above the surface station. Passengers and cargo use elevator cars to go up and down the cable between the asteroid and the planet's surface; ships only have to dock at the asteroid and don’t have to burn fuel to get in and out of Martian gravity.

The elevator is great for commerce and immigration. But to many of the First Hundred--especially the "reds"--it symbolizes all that is bad about the direction Mars is going. Eventually, the anti-corporate resistance organizes a revolution, which is unsuccessful and results in the corporations taking over Mars in a military crackdown, but during which they are at least able to bring down the space elevator. The collapse of the elevator is beautiful; it is tremendous slow-motion destruction on a gigantic scale.

To complicate the Earth-Mars conflict still further, a group of doctors on Mars develops treatments which can prolong life by hundreds of years--and they start giving the treatments to their fellow First Hundred colonists. They keep this secret as long as they can, but eventually Earth finds out. This causes chaos on Earth; some politicians want to keep the treatments exclusive, knowing that giving them to everyone would only worsen the population problems, while others say that the treatments are a human right and should be available to everyone for free.

Regardless of what is good for Earth, the age treatments are great for the reader, because they mean that some of the original First Hundred colonists will be able to live long enough to see the fruits of their labors in Robinson’s fantastic later books, Green Mars and Blue Mars.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi
2009
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
 
The Windup Girl takes place in near-future Bangkok after several environmental nightmares have come true. Worldwide oil supplies are completely depleted, so all machines and vehicles are wind, hydrogen, solar, coil-spring, pressure, human, animal, or coal-powered. Global warming has made temperatures soar and sea levels rise dramatically, so Bangkok has to be protected from complete inundation by a system of pumps and levees. And nearly all plants and animals have been wiped out by diseases and have been replaced with genetically engineered variants.

This last is not an accident. Agribusiness corporations deliberately hoarded stores of seeds and then manufactured the diseases, pests, and plagues that wiped out the naturally-occurring plants and animals, so they could profit by selling the starving world their own genetically-modified, disease-resistant, but sterile products. They now basically rule the world economy.

Thailand has held their own against the agribusiness corporations relatively well because they sealed their borders to imports and hired their own secret, illegal “gene-ripper” to develop new, fertile varieties of their own native plants and distribute them on the black market. One of the major agribusiness companies has sent in a secret agent, a “calorie man,” Anderson Lake, to try to discover who the gene hacker is and where his seed bank is stored. Along the way, he meets and (sort of) falls in love with Emiko, a Japanese windup girl – a genetically modified, semi-robotic human conditioned to obey and to serve.

Thailand is ruled nominally by a child queen, and in reality by her regent, the Somdet Chaopraya. Two of her ministries – Trade and Environment – are led by strong, ambitious men who vie against each other to be the next regent. The story is a little confusing and doesn’t really have any one central plot, but essentially what happens is that Emiko and the calorie man get mixed up in the escalating power struggle and eventually serve as catalysts leading to the death of the Somdet Chaopraya and bringing on an all-out civil war.

After I finished this book, I went back and forth for a long time deciding whether I liked it or not. On balance, I decided on a somewhat lukewarm yes.

The near-future Bangkok that Bacigalupi presents is rich and multi-layered and easily pictured. He has unique inventions – the windup girl herself, the calorie men, the genetically engineered animals that populate the city, and the types of energy and propulsion that people have to use in a petroleum-depleted world.

On the other hand, there are a couple major things that are either too disturbing or too annoying to ignore.

First: language. For one thing, this book is written in the present tense, which I’m realizing I generally don’t like in a novel (although I have to admit that it isn’t nearly as annoying here as it is in the Yiddish Policemen’s Union). But the primary irritant in this one is the use of hyperbole.

Everything is described so dramatically. This over-emphasizes the minor events and makes them seem cataclysmic, so that you get desensitized to the drama, and then the parts that really are cataclysmic have less of an impact than they should.

Also, his hyperbolic phrases are pleasing and catchy at first, but after they are used for the fourth or fifth time, they begin to seem formulaic. After a while, I started writing down the particularly obvious repeats:

- Alleys running thick with blood
- Light spearing eyes
- Scalding skin / skin on fire (with heat)
- Ribs exploding with pain / ribs screaming (after beatings)
- Blossoming (e.g. Blood blossoming red after person is shot; a blossom of pain; legs blossoming with hurt)

Second, and more importantly: there are two major rape scenes, both involving Emiko. I’m not sure how to judge the necessity of a graphic rape scene, but these certainly were very disturbing and seemed to go on well past the point where the point was made. I really started to bridle viscerally at how much Bacigalupi felt he had to do to prove how Emiko’s conditioning made her obey even at the cost of her total shame and extreme physical pain.

I did particularly like one of the first scenes in the book, though, where Anderson Lake has to shoot a megodont (a genetically engineered elephant) who has gone rogue in his factory. It reminded me a lot (perhaps intentionally so) of George Orwell’s great essay Shooting an Elephant.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Dunecat

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Book Review: Dune

Frank Herbert
1965
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Dune is a complex book (and a complex world) and it is impossible to say everything I want to say about it in just a few paragraphs.

In Dune, Herbert creates a rich universe of worlds bound together by layer upon layer of intricate political intrigue and manipulation. It is easy to believe that his technology, religion, and governmental systems are results of thousands of years of evolution since our own time; they are all mixtures of the ancient and the futuristic. The interstellar space travel and the laser weaponry seem to come from far in our future, but the backward gender roles and hybrid combo-religions seem to come from deep in our past.

The story takes place almost entirely on Dune, one of the planets in Herbert’s universe. Dune is inhospitable, being almost completely covered by desert and populated by enormous man-eating worms. But it is also the only source of “the spice,” the universe’s most important natural resource, which is not only physically addictive but is also the source of energy for all inter-world space transportation. Noble off-world families are constantly jostling and scheming to control Dune and thereby control the supply of spice. The nobles also are cruelly repressive to the Fremen, the native desert people of Dune, who do the scut work in the spice mining operations, wear long robes, are deeply religious, and are somewhat repressive, in turn, to their women.

(Stop me if you see an allegory for anything in our own world here.)

To try to make a very long story short, the book begins with the good guys (Duke Leto Atreides, his wife Jessica, and his son Paul) taking over the management of Dune from the bad guys (their cousins, the evil Duke Harkonnen and his two nephews) following a lukewarm edict from the emperor. The Harkonnens don’t want to leave so they sabotage the Atreides’s takeover, planting booby traps all over their house. Duke Leto is killed and his wife and son flee into the desert.

All appears to be lost… except that Paul & his mother are taken in by the Fremen. It turns out that the Fremen have been living underground, concealing their numbers, training themselves in battle, and patiently preparing for hundreds of years to receive a prophesied messiah who will lead them in a great jihad against the imperium and help them to reclaim the planet. It takes a while for them to warm up to Paul and, especially, his mother, who is a powerful practitioner of the Bene Gesserit religion which they think of as witchcraft, but eventually the Fremen start to accept that Paul might just be the savior they have been waiting for.

I saw David Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune before I read the book for the first time. I don’t normally like to do that because it means I’m thinking about the movie’s actors and sets the whole time I’m reading, but in this case, it worked. Partly because the book is rich enough not to be boxed in by a single movie. And partly because the movie is great. Sure, it is a bit goofy, and doesn’t stick exactly to the book, but the worms are awesome and it has excellent actors in it (Kyle MacLachlan, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Linda Hunt, Max Von Sydow, Dean Stockwell, and Brad Dourif, to name just the most fabulous) who I enjoyed mentally plugging into their roles as I was reading.

The book also explores certain plot points more deeply than a two-plus-hour movie has any hope of doing. For one thing, the book talks more about the CHOAM spice corporation and its influence over the royalty of the universe of Dune. It makes even more obvious a statement about the danger of becoming dependent on a single limited resource and how this is a situation ripe for corruption.

The book also goes deeper into the role of Jessica’s Bene Gesserit religion. If you just saw the movie, you’d think the BGs were only religious priestesses and that everything that Paul and Jessica did to prove themselves to the Fremen really was entirely supernatural. But what you learn from the book is that generations of BGs have been following a specific plan. They’ve been going around to different planets, using their roles as Reverend Mothers to deliberately plant legends and prophesies, and then attempting through selective breeding and strict training to create people to make those prophesies come true.

This is not to say that there isn’t still a very strong element of magic in Paul’s powers. He does have abilities that the Bene Gesserits didn’t plan for, which eventually makes events on Dune spiral out of their control.

This is an impressive, impressive book. There were just a couple things about Herbert’s writing that were downers for me and that separated this book from being an epic on the level of Lord of the Rings.

The main problem is that all the good guys have a mystical instinct for always knowing the right thing to do in a given situation. None of the chosen people have to puzzle it out or make mistakes. Paul and his mother always get out of tight spots just by mysteriously – bing! – knowing what they have to do or exactly the right words to say. The line “Then Paul knew what he had to do” came up about two hundred times and by the one hundredth, I was pretty sick of it. Whether it was because he really was the prophesied savior or because of the BG implantation and pre-seeding of legend, it didn’t matter to me.

And then every time Paul does or says something preordained by prophesy, the Fremen around him gasp and breathlessly nod to themselves saying, “Yes, he is the one.” It gets kind of annoying with all the wonder and awe of him – especially because he can be, on occasion, a bit of a jerk.

Actually, everybody is always in awe of or enchanted by something. Paul himself is even enchanted by the simplicity of Fremen dew collectors. Really?


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

My Cat Looks Like Batman

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Book Review: Rendezvous with Rama

Arthur C. Clarke
1972
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Campbell, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

SPOILER ALERT

This is one of two Nebula-winning novels I have read so far that involve a totally neat-o, unusually-shaped, artificially-created world (the other is Ringworld).

In this story, Earth is innocently spinning along through space when suddenly our scientists see a blip on the radar and discover that something is coming toward us at tremendous speed from the edge of the solar system. As the object gets nearer they are able to see that it is a cylinder, made of metal and so exactly proportioned that it must have been made by an intelligent life form. At first they are afraid that it is going to hit us, but it slows down when it gets close to Earth. A crack scientific and military team is quickly assembled to intercept it.

When the team links up in space with the oncoming object, it does indeed turn out to be an absolutely enormous cylindrical spaceship. And when the team is able to get inside, they discover that inside the cylinder is actually a world, complete with seas and mountains and prairies. The catch is that the world is inside out, with the seas and mountains and prairies covering the entire inside skin of the cylinder. The cylinder revolves to create a centrifugal force that acts as gravity, so that the seas stay in place. When a human stands on the “ground” on the inside of the cylinder, they feel like they’re standing on a regular planet–even though the other side of the “world” is not under their feet but over their head.

The humans’ exploration of the new world is detailed and entertaining. Clarke not only thinks of the big things, like how the world is supplied with heat and light, but also the little things, like that people might get a little seasick when they crawl down the stairway from the center of the cylinder (where they are almost weightless) to the ground on the inside edge of the cylinder (where there is Earthlike gravity).

The book is not really ever scary, but there are definitely moments when it is quite tense and suspenseful. Especially when you realize that the Earth team might not be alone in the spinning space cylinder…

The only things that rang a bit false to me in this book were the characters. Clarke doesn’t seem to be able to write them so they seem like real people, and their backstories all seemed a bit shallow. But if you can ignore the flat characters and the often stilted conversations and instead focus on the exploration of the really cool world-in-a-cylinder, you’re in for a fun read.

This is actually just the first book in what eventually became a Rama series. The next books are also pretty good; they explore more of the spaceship and eventually let you meet its builders. But Rendezvous with Rama is the best of the bunch. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog. 

Mean Kittens

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Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein
1961
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT

Ick. Ick. Ick.

I think possibly the worst part of this book is the way women are written. They are all perfect people who are calm and soothing and never get mad and are always gorgeous and often clad only in robes. They also totally adore the extremely irritating main character.

The main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who was born during the first manned mission to Mars. He was raised by Martians after all the other humans in his mission died in an accident. He comes back to Earth when he is about twenty.

Because of his Martian upbringing, he has some telekinetic powers and he is dreamy and optimistic and believes in things like free love and individual freedom and self-actualization. He develops a cult of followers which eventually grows into a church and his influence spreads rapidly. He introduces humans to the concept of “grokking” which, from what I understand, became quite a popular term after the book came out. “To grok” is to understand on a much, much deeper, sort of spiritual level than just plain old ordinary superficial understanding.

There is an implication in Heinlein’s writing that if you grok what Smith is about, and you believe in his creepy libertarian vision of what we can make the world become, then you are vastly superior to other people.

Of course, a la Jesus Christ, it is inevitable that established powers on Earth don’t like that Smith is saying these things and that he is gaining quite a lot of popular power. So they try to kill him. Eventually Smith does beat the evil establishment guys but only after his non-corporeal, form-of-energy Martian foster ancestors help out at the last minute by suddenly giving him even more amazing powers than he had before and transporting him to another plane of existence. Deus ex machina.

Not too easy to buy. Or grok. Or stomach.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.