Book Of The Week: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy

The Book Of The Week this week is Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars". This is often referred to as the Mars Trilogy, but none of these books are about Mars. There's plenty of awesome scientifically accurate detail in these books on Mars geology, the moons of Mars, Mars colonization, Mars terraforming, and even some interesting speculation about Mars native life and building a space elevator on Mars. The books are certainly set on Mars but that's as far as it goes. In my opinion, these books are as much about Mars as Hamlet is about Denmark.

These books are about politics, the real kind, and what happens when it devolves into war. The books start with group dynamics, petty infighting, the formation of camps and the inevitable fracturing of community. The lines are: those who want to terraform Mars and those who want to keep Mars red. But the battle lines don't really matter, what was shocking was how quickly those two viewpoints became irreconcilable, and dominate the entire debate - by the time the shooting starts there are no third options, you're either a green or a red.

To me, these books are Kim Stanley Robinson's cautionary tale to the space advocacy community. We are already fractured. Moon vs Mars with asteroids, orbital colonies, space solar power, spaceplanes vs VTVL, SSTOs, and all the rest. We snip and we snarl, run our separate conferences and roll out our separate experts to influence the politicians. With all the aggressive personalities that we've acquired, and even elevated to leadership positions... thankfully we're all so friendly, for now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Disabling OS-X Device Removal Warnings In Yosemite

Image
If you're anything like me you've probably seen the Disk Not Ejected Properly message so many times that you've forgotten how annoying it is.. despite the fact that you never even wrote anything to the usb drive that you're yanking out of your Mac the operating system insists that you remove it "correctly". You're supposed to click the eject button. Why? I dunno, Apple seems to think that if you can write to it then the operating system might have written to it - and being Apple, they probably have. Well ya know what? Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Note: this will not fix your external drive disconnecting when your Mac goes to sleep. For that problem try disabling "put hard drive to sleep when possible" in both the Battery and Power Adapter tabs of the OS energy saver settings. What appears below is a dirty hack for deliberately removing a warning that Apple insists on showing you every single time you yank out a usb stick. ...
Read more

Rebirth Of The Spaceship

Image
Over the last year the space advocate community has splintered into two major groups in answering the question "where should we go next?" Moon First or Mars First . This division was present in the Review of Human Spaceflight (aka Augustine) committee's final report in late 2009, with the surprising conclusion that there isn't the funds for either, suggesting a number of intermediate destinations first - including asteroids. However, as few people consider asteroids to be truly interesting destinations for the human utilization of space ( except me! ), the debate rages on. Many Moon First advocates are "Mars Next" advocates while most Mars First advocates are "Moon Again?" detractors. The former claim that Mars exploration will benefit from lunar exploration, particularly in experience and risk reduction, and perhaps the procurement of propellant. The latter claim that lunar exploration is just a distraction and want to avoid the risk of be...
Read more

Living Inside An Asteroid

Image
Deriders of the new NASA direction have latched on to the announced human asteroid mission in the 2025 timeframe as something they "can't imagine" and therefore is not worth doing. Of course, the administration is talking up the "science" that can be done on an asteroid, and how this could better inform us should the need arise to divert or destroy one that threatens Earth. This is good politics as nothing motivates like fear, but for those of us who think the human spaceflight program is really about preparing us to live at the future homes of humanity, asteroids would seem to be just a stop on the way - I disagree. As I've written previously, the new NASA direction isn't about asteroids - it isn't about destinations - it's about going and specifically, it's about going to Mars. I'm not sure NASA knows yet why they're going to Mars, but they're focusing on the technology to get there and get back safely, and some of the ...
Read more