Book Review: Green Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1993
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
SPOILER ALERT

This is the second installment in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It is a sequel to Red Mars, the extremely realistic story of the original hundred colonists’ landing and their first few decades of settlement on the red planet. 

In this book, the population of Mars is growing fast. Some of the growth comes from immigration from Earth, as it always has, but much of it now also comes from children born on Mars. The native children tend to be physically different from Earth people – taller and leaner, better at loping around in the lower gravity. 

Martian political conflicts still abound and are even more complicated. Most importantly, since Mars is now run by transnational corporations, there are all kinds of resistance movements across the planet trying to organize a second revolution. 

There is also still a basic tension between the “greens” (who want to terraform Mars) and the “reds” (who want to keep Mars in its original state). The greens are winning by default, having released some unauthorized lichens which have adapted to the atmosphere and have taken off. Since it would be next to impossible to bottle this up again, the reds are getting increasingly hostile and reactionary. 

Robinson tells the story while switching among the points of view of several different people. Sometimes we follow Sax Russell, one of the first hundred colonists and a terraforming proponent. Sometimes we follow Ann Clayborne, another original colonist and one of the most ardent reds. Sometimes it’s Nadia Chernyshevski, a genius at construction who has built many of the power plants and major settlements and only reluctantly gets involved in politics. And sometimes it’s Nirgal, one of the native first-generation Martians. 

This technique is great because after living in the shoes of all these different people, you find yourself being sympathetic to all sides of the political debates. You realize there is no clear-cut easy answer to any question about development. You see why they fight, and you also see how they can actually find common ground and work together sometimes. 

I think my favorite characters are Nadia, who is very practical and realistic, and Sax, who was one of those who originally started the clandestine seeding of the planet but who learns a lot from Ann and goes through a lot of changes of heart over the next hundred years. 

I found the politics less interesting than the biology, however. While all the bureaucratic conflicts are going on, the “greening” of Mars is relentlessly underway. The lichens that the first colonists distributed have started to produce oxygen and are mutating into new varieties. As the book goes on, we begin to see leafy plants and bushes and finally animals – insects, centipedes, and birds. Robinson is so good at this hard, realistic, imaginable SF. I just loved the unpredictable and very, very slow but inexorable transformation of Mars. 

Toward the end of the book there is a catastrophe on Earth when a huge chunk of Antarctic ice breaks off and begins to melt. Sea levels rise, destroying many coastal cities. I had a difficult time watching Earth descend into poverty and chaos while up on Mars people were still able to make and re-make their own societies. It reminded me a little bit of the story in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles where the population of Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war and the only humans left are the lonely colonists on Mars. 


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

Hedgehog Hubble

Book Review: Timescape

Gregory Benford
1980
Awards: Nebula, Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Timescape is set in the very near future. The back story is that pesticides developed in the past few decades have made their ways into our oceans and have started changing the cellular structure of microorganisms there. These altered microorganisms consume oxygen-producing algae and are spreading like mad, slowly destroying the entire food chain. By 1998 (which is the future, in this book) this has led to massive shortages, poverty, and crime, and things are getting worse fast.

Meanwhile, a group of scientists has discovered that if they broadcast tachyons in controlled bursts to a specific location in galactic space – to a location that the Earth used to occupy – they can send a coded signal back in time. If they want to send a signal back 50 years, for example, they would beam the tachyons towards the point in space where the Earth would have been 50 years ago. They figure if they can do this, they can let the scientists of the past know about the dangers of the pesticides before the pesticides even get manufactured, and thus the future will be changed for the better.

The tricky part is that the scientists of the past don’t know about tachyons yet and won’t know the message is coming so they won't be looking for it. So the scientists of 1998 have to beam the tachyons to a time when they know there were nuclear resonance experiments going on and basically cross their fingers, hoping that the tachyons will come up as noise in those experiments and that the scientists of the past will see the noise, realize that the noise has a pattern, figure out how to decode the pattern, and believe it once they have decoded it.

The nuclear resonance experimenters of 1963 do pick up the noise, fortunately, but then have to go through a methodical scientific process of trying to figure out what it is. It feels agonizingly slow. They go down several blind alleys and get distracted by outside events. I wanted to yell at them, “It’s a message from the future already! Hurry up and figure it out before it’s too late!” But it is also realistic; you can't expect responsible scientists to go any faster with something like this. And this creates good suspense.

The science is, in fact, the best part of Timescape. Gregory Benford is a physicist himself, so the theories, processes, laboratories, and equipment are believable and solid.

The details of academia also add a lot of color and clearly are written by someone who knows what he's talking about. The characters go through totally realistic classes, publications, advisory sessions, departmental squabbles, presentations at inter-disciplinary colloquia, and even a doctoral candidacy examination.

Being a time-travel story of a sort, the book raises the usual questions about paradoxes. In particular, if the scientists of 1963 prevent the development of the pesticides, then the scientists of 1998 won't need to send the message back in time anymore. Will that mean that they won't have sent it after all and we will get stuck in an endless paradox loop? Or will the scientists of 1998 emerge from their lab babbling like madmen about an environmental catastrophe that everyone else knows was avoided decades ago? Benford’s resolution of all this is interesting.

What drags the book down is the human-interest filler stuck in between the scientific parts. I was totally bored by the personal lives of the scientists in both 1963 and 1998. I didn’t care about their love interests or their emotional baggage.

Also, when the characters are not talking about physics, their conversations are stilted and awkward. This is particularly true for the British characters, who sound forced and inauthentic. One of the Britons uses the word “sod” three times on one page and it clunks all three times.

Fortunately, the human interest sections make up only about a third of the book. If you skip over all of them, it makes for quite a good story.

(Note: see No Enemy But Time for a slightly different resolution to a similar time-travel paradox.)


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

This Is Some Rescue

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: Man Plus

Frederik Pohl
1976
Awards: Nebula Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Good story ideas come in all sizes. Some are so big they need to have trilogies (or even ennealogies) written to fully flesh them out. For others, one 200-page book is fine. And others are better off as short stories.
 
Frederik Pohl seems to have an instinct for writing up his original ideas (or original takes on old ideas) into appropriately sized books. He fully explores his premise but doesn’t beat it to death. This means that his books usually end up being relatively short but efficient Cool Idea Delivery Systems. I think this is the best book by Pohl that I have read so far. 

Many people have written stories about the colonization of Mars by humans. Usually the premise is that we will terraform Mars to support human life. In Man Plus, instead, the U.S. has a top-secret project to physically modify a human being – a man named Roger Torraway – so that he can survive on the surface of Mars.
 
Scientists replace his skin with a super-tough, rhinocerous-like hide that can withstand high solar radiation and temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. They replace his lungs and most of his circulatory and digestive systems with machinery so that he needs hardly any oxygen or food. They give him new eyes that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet bands of the spectrum. And they put big solar panels on his back to power the parts of him that are now mechanical.
 
Naturally, there are forces at work conspiring to make the project difficult. One is internal; Roger’s wife Dorrie is a bit of an unsupportive whiner and is also having an affair with one of the project’s scientists. This is pretty upsetting to Roger, especially at a time when he’s being turned into an unrecognizable monster and preparing to spend two years alone in space.
 
The other problem is external. According to all the most reliable governmental models, the world will soon descend into nuclear war. The only thing that will turn the projections around, apparently, is a successful manned mission to Mars (to rally and inspire humanity, I presume). The pressure on the Man Plus scientists to succeed in an unrealistically short time is therefore immense, so much so that their only other Mars-altered human subject died in the lab from too much aggressive testing.
 
It’s a good premise and the story is suspenseful in its own subtle way. You want to find out if Roger can survive all the operations and the mental and physical stress and make it to Mars, and you really want to find out what it’s like through his eyes when he gets there. For most of the book, Pohl keeps dangling the promise of the upcoming mission just out of reach (of both you and Roger) like a tasty carrot.
 
There is also a quiet, almost incidental mystery running through the book about who the narrator is. Most of the time I forgot to wonder about it, as I was absorbed in the rest of the story, but it does add a nice additional piece of intrigue and allows the book to end with a bit of an extra flourish.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Baby Kraken

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: Dreamsnake

Vonda N. McIntyre
1978
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ - -

SPOILER ALERT

Yes, the cover of this book's 1986 mass-market paperback edition makes it look like it’s going to be one of those super-goofy magical fantasy novels. But it’s really quite good.

It takes place on a post-nuclear-war Earth (always a good start). Nobody remembers what society was like before the war – or even that there was a war. They are all living either in small towns or as nomads in the countryside. All overt modern science and technology has been lost.

Or – that is what it appears at first. It turns out that some science does remain, although it is not very well understood, even by its practitioners.

For example, the main character, Snake, is a healer. She has a set of venomous snakes that she uses to cure people. At first it seems like random ritual but it turns out that the snake venom actually is an antibiotic and that the training the healer received was essentially first aid and basic nursing – so there is a reason why it really does work.

At the beginning of the story her key medicinal snake, the Dreamsnake, accidentally gets killed by scared townspeople and Snake has to go on a long journey to find another one. Along the way she also happens to be able to get the people of the towns and the people in the countryside to stop being prejudiced against each other. It is an okay road trip story; the characters Snake meets up with are mostly interesting and the locations are good. I especially liked reading about how the land is spotted with giant pits—which everyone avoids—that you gradually realize are nuclear bomb craters still full of radioactivity.

But I definitely thought the best part of this book was the way McIntyre presented an apparently undeveloped, backwards world and then gradually allowed you to see how science lay under the superstition. Like A Canticle for Leibowitz, it was a good take on how knowledge might survive but be transformed after the sophisticated structure around it is lost.


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

Early Writing Critique

"There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words
a wonderful obstruction to the mind."

Sir Francis Bacon,
Aphorisms on the Interpretation of 
Nature and the Empire of Man
(as quoted in Hyperion)