Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-17 23:01:16

For those unfamiliar, Kim Stanley Robinson's Red, Green, and Blue Mars, together known as the Mars Trilogy, are three books which describe the growth and development of a Martian society over the course of nearly 200 (Earth) years, through a great deal of technological and societal development as well as a complete terraforming effort for the planet Mars, not to mention the colonization of the entire Solar System, and the beginnings of interstellar colonization. You should read it, and yes that means you.

I just reread the trilogy, and I have to say: Every time I do so, I'm impressed by KSR's incredible ability to give depth to characters and events both by describing them from different angles. Each of his many narrators (Unless I've forgotten one, Maya, John, Frank, Sax, Ann, Nadia, Arkady, Omniscient, Michel, Art, Nirgal, and Zo) is a completely developed person of their own, and the first hundred seems to me to represent a set of archetypes. As Sax says to Michel towards the end of Blue Mars, perhaps there are not just "four humors", but rather over a hundred, just like there are not four elements, but 118. I wonder if this is not perhaps an oblique reference to the First Hundred. Certainly each of them that we meet is unique in their own way: Sax is the ultimate in detached rationality, while Maya is his opposite in her emotional intensity. Frank is the hard-edged realist, so wrapped up in what is that he can never see what could be, while John is so wrapped up in ideas that he fails to see the world around him. Nadia's simple, calm focus on progress makes her feel almost like a non-personal narrator, while Arkady is the little voice in our heads asking us how we can make the world better.

Speaking of personality types, in my reading this time I gave more attention to what Michel calls the Semantic Rectangle, and what Wikipedia calls the Greimas Semiotic Square, than I had in the past. The basic idea is that for any concept, one can distinguish its absence from its opposite, so to speak. The example given in the book is the concept of "Allowed": Something can be allowed or not allowed, and taboo or not taboo. One can then draw another square around the first one, tilted at 45 degrees, and at the corners of this square place things that are a combination of each of the two nearest squares.

Michel also does this with personality types, and the two he picks are "Extroversion/Introversion" and "Stabile/Labile". While the former pair is fairly well known to most people, the latter refers to emotional stability or lack thereof. In putting the 45 degree square around it, he derives what he calls the four temperaments:

Phlegmatic - Introverted and Stabile (I myself fall into this category, as well as characters such as Sax)
Melancholic - Introverted and Labile (Michel states that he is as well)
Choleric - Extroverted and Labile (Frank and Maya, among others)
Sanguine - Extroverted and Stabile (John and Nirgal, perhaps Nadia)

I've found these to actually be rather helpful when thinking of the world around me.

Of course I can't possibly touch on any significant fraction of the many, many ideas that KSR addresses in this trilogy, but I would like to note that perhaps the only thing I can really criticize him on is that he has technology progressing too slowly, in my opinion. It seems to me that the technology at the end of the novel (Past 2200!) is simply not as advanced as it ought to be. But then, having said that, it's his future history. And his vision is certainly both farther and clearer than any other author I've ever encountered.

Overall, these three novels remain my top three favorites of all time (If pressed, I suppose I would order them Red, Green, Blue in order of preference; But really each is a masterwork unto itself and this preference does not reflect any fall-off in quality but rather a preference for the simple, the comprehensible, and perhaps I am influenced by the characters themselves, who always hearken back to the early days in Underhill) I can't help but wonder at his seamless treatment of memory, for example; Reading the novels in sequence, one's confusion about the precise order of events happening centuries past in the novel's chronology seems perfectly in sync with that of the characters themselves. My emotional involvement in the characters was such that (having read these books before) I was anxious for what would happen to them many pages in advance of the actual occurrence.

What does everyone else think of these novels? Any particular favorite ideas or parts within?

GW Johnson · 2014-06-19 14:10:15

Hi Josh:

I read them too, several years ago now. Thought it was very good. Would have to re-read before commenting, memory fades with time, especially for an old guy like me.

Technological progress is very non-uniform. It goes in spurts separated by stagnation. Like all the other forms of evolution.

Example: between 1903 and 1944 we went from the very first controllable powered airplane flights at all, to 500 mph combat jets (ME-262) that were very capable and effective doing their missions (shooting down bombers over Germany).

However, between 1970 and 2014, very little aviation progress has been made. Some of the very same planes (B-747's) are still flying, and the newer ones are but variations on that same 500 mph design. The few things of much greater capability that did fly (SR-71) fly no longer. The fighters might dash at Mach 2, but they cruise subsonic (500 mph).

I fear things like the Mars trilogy and Star Trek/Star Wars overestimate the actual advance of technology over long times. The example of 20th century aviation certainly suggests long periods of stagnation. Our very first 500 mph transports date to 1953 (DeHavilland Comet).

I was expecting back in 1970 to see most airline transport aircraft capable of flying single-stage to orbit by now, 40+ years later. Boy, was I ever disappointed.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2014-06-19 14:13:14)

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-19 14:45:37

How many centuries does it take to terraform Mars in the Novel. As for single stage, everyone was waiting around for NASA to do it and it didn't. NASA does a lot of basic research and development ad then leaves it on the table with no follow through, perhaps its up to others to pick up the pieces and make something out of it. It takes a while to come to that realization.

louis · 2014-06-19 18:55:53

GW Johnson wrote:

Hi Josh:
I read them too, several years ago now. Thought it was very good. Would have to re-read before commenting, memory fades with time, especially for an old guy like me.
Technological progress is very non-uniform. It goes in spurts separated by stagnation. Like all the other forms of evolution.
Example: between 1903 and 1944 we went from the very first controllable powered airplane flights at all, to 500 mph combat jets (ME-262) that were very capable and effective doing their missions (shooting down bombers over Germany).
However, between 1970 and 2014, very little aviation progress has been made. Some of the very same planes (B-747's) are still flying, and the newer ones are but variations on that same 500 mph design. The few things of much greater capability that did fly (SR-71) fly no longer. The fighters might dash at Mach 2, but they cruise subsonic (500 mph).
I fear things like the Mars trilogy and Star Trek/Star Wars overestimate the actual advance of technology over long times. The example of 20th century aviation certainly suggests long periods of stagnation. Our very first 500 mph transports date to 1953 (DeHavilland Comet).
I was expecting back in 1970 to see most airline transport aircraft capable of flying single-stage to orbit by now, 40+ years later. Boy, was I ever disappointed.
GW

I was always struck by how many changes - and how profound - my Grandmother saw. When she was a young child, they still had stage coaches making the journey from London to North Wales. And yet in that first half century of the 20th century she saw the advent of cars, planes, radio, film, TV, antibiotics, electricity in the home, colour photography. Cultural changes were equally marked - going from an era when a woman wouldn't leave home without her hat and with her hair pinned up, to the era of the swinging sixties. She also witnessed total war on two occasions.

In contrast, the changes I have seen have been fairly pedestrian...with the single exception I would say of the internet. We have more TV now, for instance, but I had TV when I was a kid. If anything with the demise of Concorde, plane technology has declined somewhat. Trains aren't really that much faster in the UK than the Pullmans of my youth (though that is a UK observation). It now takes you longer to get from London to Brighton by car than it did in the 1950s!

However, I think we are heading into another era of radical change with robotisation, space tourism and colonisation, and brain-computer interfaces (very dangerous in my view BTW).

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-21 18:59:23

Firstly, Tom: Terraforming begins in approximately 2030 (M-2?) and could be said to be complete in about the year 2200, so 170 years.

GW and Louis,

One thing to remember (And perhaps the only thing Ray Kurzweil has convincingly proved) is that even though growth in any given sector or technology is logistic (e.g. it tails off in the long run), the overall trend of technological growth can still be exponential. In this case, the growth has shifted from the automotive and aviative fields (Related, in any case) to computational, nanotechnology, and microbiological fields. Growth is uneven, yes, but we're hardly in a recess.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-26 15:30:40

I just read 2312, also by KSR, and I've got to say that I found the novel profoundly disappointing. Not because of any failure in writing, per se, more because I felt like I expected more. Firstly, I was left wondering (perhaps hoping is a better word) that the world in which the book was set was the same as the Mars Trilogy. The general themes in that world-- longevity treatments, terraformed Mars, communal organization, the replacement of capitalism, overpopulated Earth, and even a city on Mercury called Terminator that works in just the same way as Terminator as described in Blue Mars. I think that he was trying to place the book in the Uncanny Valley, which is itself a theme in the book: As someone who is a great fan of the Mars Trilogy, the similarity-but-difference of the world in which this novel is set is somewhat distressing. It's the same reason why I've never read The Martians cover to cover: When I see a "Roger Clayborne", and when the Mars Project is "cancelled", it feels like the hundreds of years that I've gone through with these characters have been taken from me.

The second disappointment of the novel comes from its villains. Without revealing any spoilers, the narrators in the novel are usually at the very fringes of the action, rather than the center of it. This gives you an understanding or a knowledge of what's happening without having real feelings about it. This is reflective of real life in many ways, but does not make a very compelling novel. In fact, but for the

I did appreciate that he felt the need to make New Jersey just as bad then, and in fact for the same reasons, as it is now. On the whole, I'd say it's very well written and thought out, but not the most enjoyable read.

Terraformer · 2014-06-27 02:28:04

Chris Christie didn't die before the longevity treatments?

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-27 10:28:07

Hah. Chris Christie is just a symptom of a larger (if you can believe that) problem. The bigger problem being that New Jersey is a swath of suburbs between New York and Philadelphia with all the social ills of the cities it's sandwiched between and none of the redeeming factors that a city itself has.

Relevant: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ … 62dv5UU_IU

Politico wrote:

Think of New Jersey and what comes to mind is the distilled essence of every tragic choice made in this country since the mid-20th century: namely, the fiasco of suburban sprawl and the miserable sclerosis of its diminishing returns—a whole state composed of places no longer worth caring about.

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-27 10:52:11

JoshNH4H wrote:

Hah. Chris Christie is just a symptom of a larger (if you can believe that) problem. The bigger problem being that New Jersey is a swath of suburbs between New York and Philadelphia with all the social ills of the cities it's sandwiched between and none of the redeeming factors that a city itself has.
Relevant: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ … 62dv5UU_IU
Politico wrote:
Think of New Jersey and what comes to mind is the distilled essence of every tragic choice made in this country since the mid-20th century: namely, the fiasco of suburban sprawl and the miserable sclerosis of its diminishing returns—a whole state composed of places no longer worth caring about.

Are you saying the more crowded the better? So what if we turned the whole Earth into one Giant city, would that be a good thing? Imagine every time you stepped outside your apartment the streets and corridors were packed with people, and to walk anywhere, you'd have to say, "excuse me, pardon me, excuse me" multiple times.

Terraformer · 2014-06-27 11:41:07

Er what?

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-27 19:57:13

Jeez, Tom, aren't you from New York State?

My point, basically, is that New Jersey sucks because it's got a bunch of people and no culture worth speaking of. Having a bunch of people in one place has its downsides, especially if things are disorganized (see: Atlanta metro during that pitiful little snowstorm they had), but this can be more than made up for if said collection of people has institutions and culture worth putting up with them for. New Jersey doesn't have this. Am I really explaining to a New Yorker why you don't want to live in the Dirty Jerz*?

*Yes, people actually call it that

Tom Kalbfus · 2014-06-28 15:31:37

Well I don't like large cities period, and for me, its better to have "small" cities like Newark than large cities like New York City, I like Danbury, Connecticut even better, it is a metropolis of 70,000 people, that is about 7 Stanford Toruses worth of people, it has plenty of parkland, plenty of trees, and its possible to go somewhere without major traffic jams to any place that is popular.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-28 17:35:10

Big cities aren't for everyone, sure. And life trends right now suggest that cities are for younger people who move to suburbs to start a family. I don't think that's my path, but to each their own.

I contest your claim, however, that it is better to live in Newark (Assuming you mean Newark, NJ) than New York City. No matter what you're looking for, New York has more and better of it than Newark. Let's start with population density. Newark has a density of 4,421 people per square kilometer, and New York 10,725 people per square kilometer. The population of Newark is spread out pretty evenly across the city. However, the 5 boroughs have very different population densities, ranging from 27,346 people/km^2 (Manhattan) to 3,132 people/km^2 (Staten Island). Unlike Newark, New York has forms of public transportation that are not limited by traffic, and also unlike Newark its roads are not congested to the point of a standstill because of people trying to go somewhere else. Yes, it's true that you can't get very far with a 20 minute drive in NYC, especially depending on the time of day, but Newark is almost as bad, and meanwhile if you live in Manhattan a 20 minute walk can take you to more places than it's possible to even imagine. This website suggests that the city has at least 42,293 places where you can go out and grab a bite to eat (about one for every 200 people, which would correspond to about 350 places in Danbury. I've never been to Danbury, but I'd be surprised if there were 350 restaurants in its downtown, if it has one).

Meanwhile, the murder rate in Newark is 10 times higher than New York City (That's neither exaggeration nor error), and all sorts of crime are similar. New York City has more and better parks, and even has camping grounds. It is so big that in its variety it is even better at being Not New York City than Newark (Gotcha, Staten Island).

To quote Kim Stanley Robinson, who was talking about Mars and Earth during Nirgal's visit to Switzerland in Blue Mars, but actually much the same thing applies to New York and Newark:

KSR wrote:

The primeval lanscape of ice and rock restabilized out of the pulsing bars of black and white and neon green. The white and the green; and this was the white. The blank world of the inanimate universe. This place had precisely the same import as the primal Martian landscape. Just as big as it was on Mars, yes, and even bigger, because of the distant horizons, and the crushing gravity; and steeper; and whiter; and windier, ka, it pierced so chill through his parka, even windier, even colder--ah God, like a wind lancing through his heart: the sudden knowledge that Earth was so vast that in its variety it had regions that even out-Marsed Mars itself--that among all the ways it was greater, it was greater even at being Martian.

While I personally am a great fan of large cities, and most especially a fan of the city [New York, for the uninitiated :P], I can understand that there are people who prefer suburbs or rural areas. But saying that you prefer Newark to New York... surely that's going too far? Newark is a perfect example of a place that has all the problems of a big city and none of the benefits. In fact, the greatest thing Newark has to commend to it is that it's just twenty minutes from Manhattan via train.

Terraformer · 2014-06-29 02:52:25

Well, I like cities that I can walk out of within half an hour. That means small, with no sprawling suburbs around them. Lancaster, Lancashire and Exeter, Devon are the ones I have in mind. I'm not really a fan of London.

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-29 09:13:26

To each their own. I don't know that there's any American city like that, at least not one with more than thirty or forty thousand people.

Terraformer · 2014-06-29 09:29:51

Probably not. Americans like their sprawl.

The great thing about such cities, is that they don't really need much public transport because they're walkable, and people living there don't have to use a car to go for a walk that's not in an urban landscape - yet, at the same time they're big enough to support a dozen cafes, a museum, a cinema...

Last edited by Terraformer (2014-06-29 09:32:57)

JoshNH4H · 2014-06-29 09:40:18

Sure, personally I'm no fan of sprawl and I think most cities would be better off if, instead of the population density declining gradually into suburbs and then rural areas, they simply stopped. But American policies encourage suburbs, and now here we are.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-02-08 12:09:44

JoshNH4H wrote:

Sure, personally I'm no fan of sprawl and I think most cities would be better off if, instead of the population density declining gradually into suburbs and then rural areas, they simply stopped. But American policies encourage suburbs, and now here we are.

Okay, who gets to be a farmer and who does not? Imagine a farm right across the street from a city full of 100-story sky scrappers, the middle of the road is the city limits, on the city side of the road is a sidewalk, and the farm side of the road is just a ditch for runoff. The farmer sits on his tractor chewing a piece of straw while crowds on the other side of the road push and shove each other as they file to get on the subway to work. The farmer shouts to all those people on the other side of the road, "Suckers, you live in those cramped apartments pushing and shoving each other and paying through the roof for them, while I get to live on my 250 acre farm right here! Haw haw haw! All I have to do is grow some crops No nonfarmers allowed! He he he, I'm special, I'm better than you city suckers! I get more land while you push and shove each other to get more room!"

th?id=HN.608024506075974324&w=288&h=188&c=7&rs=1&qlt=90&o=4&pid=1.7

Terraformer · 2015-02-08 14:35:15

What? Have you ever actually been outside of the US, Tom? Scratch that, have you ever been outside of New York? Non-American lifestyles aren't as you seem to think they are.

Here in the UK, we have something called greenbelt, which is land around towns and cities on which people aren't allowed to build. It has caused some problems with affordable housing in the cities, but there are a lot of reasons for the lack of affordable housing here, and I would say that it's by no means the biggest. But we don't have the problems you seem to expect we'd have as a result of our cities tending to terminate quite sharply. Though, I'm basing those on fairly small cities, 100-200k in population; still, with good rail links, you can have a large population fairly close together, with green space in between. It's actually quite nice to be able to walk from the town centre into the countryside within half an hour. If that was a circle, it would have a surface area of just over 3 square miles, about 2500 acres. If you have a population of 200k, that's 50 sq.m per person. Which sounds small, but you *are* in a city, and a European city with people who don't see a micro house as being one with a footprint below... well, 50 sq.m. If you want populations bigger than that... well, if you build a decent train service you can link it to another settlement 10 miles away. Having a population of a million people who are at most 20 minutes travel away from each other really isn't impractical. Well, if you're being pedantic, yes. Okay, an hour, but only because we're including walking time.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-02-08 19:50:27

Well if you like gardening and you live in a European city, what do you do? Do you become a farmer so you can live in the greenbelt? What about children playing in the streets and getting run over by cars? My idea of a city is something like Manhattan with skyscrapers sidewalks and a sea of strangers flowing past your door, there is very little parking that is free, and there is always plenty of cops to write you tickets, and the rules of the road are quite complicated, often things like "No Left Turn from 6am to 10am and from 4 pm to 7 pm", and you have to read the sign and then look at your watch to determine if you can park there, then you look at the sign to see what kind of vehicles can park there, it often says "Commercial Vehicles only" or if you are somewhere near the UN building it would say, "Diplomatic license plates only", or "NYPD vehicles only". And you have other such inconveniences such as Police blocking the road, whenever the President comes to visit. Most of what I do in New York City is either Drive or Park, and since I don't want to pay $20 or more to park I have to look out warily for police issuing tickets. Sometimes you have ticketing blitzs where a whole line of cop cars shows up and parks on your left to trap you against the curve so they can issue everyone a parking ticket, even places where their are parking meters are sometime illegal because you have to read the signs carefully to determine under what conditions those parking meters can be used, you might be wasting a quarter only to get a $300 parking ticket from the cops! I wouldn't want to be forced to live in a city, especially since I drive for a living!

Terraformer · 2015-02-09 03:15:36

Oh, that explains things - you've never lived a small city, only a megalopolis. New York isn't exactly representative of cities.

If you like gardening, you use your garden. Or you look into getting an allotment.

Again, *America is not the world*.

GW Johnson · 2015-02-10 09:21:13

"America is not the world" -- true enough. But stereotypes don't work either. America is a huge and diverse place. Not all Americans live in cities of various sizes. While a small percentage, a huge number of us live rural.

As I do, on an operating small cattle ranch. And further from "average", this is Texas, which really once was a whole 'nother country. And yet most of you by now know I have a heavy-duty aerospace engineering background with 2 decades industry experience.

For me living out here on the ranch, the nearest town is 5,000 people. The "big city" a bit further away is 200,000. If you count all the incorporated suburbs. It's a hundred miles (160 km) to any really big city areas. And yet that tiny town of 5000 is where Spacex does its testing.

So, how non-stereotypical is that?

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2015-02-10 09:23:09)

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-02-11 09:13:44

GW Johnson wrote:

"America is not the world" -- true enough. But stereotypes don't work either. America is a huge and diverse place. Not all Americans live in cities of various sizes. While a small percentage, a huge number of us live rural.
As I do, on an operating small cattle ranch. And further from "average", this is Texas, which really once was a whole 'nother country. And yet most of you by now know I have a heavy-duty aerospace engineering background with 2 decades industry experience.
For me living out here on the ranch, the nearest town is 5,000 people. The "big city" a bit further away is 200,000. If you count all the incorporated suburbs. It's a hundred miles (160 km) to any really big city areas. And yet that tiny town of 5000 is where Spacex does its testing.
So, how non-stereotypical is that?
GW

I think including extensive green space around a city denies many people a home and a yard, that is what Suburban sprawl is all about. I prefer green spaces in the center of cities, such as Central Park to green space around cities. I do not like too much concentration in cities or too much urban density. My ideal city would have a huge green space in the center. I am all for expanding Central Park to include all of Manhattan Island for instance, that way people could go to work in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. Manhattan would make a nice park, and I wouldn't have to drive through it or find parking spaces in it any more, all while being harassed by the Police with tickets and such. It is much easier to park in Brooklyn than in Manhattan, I know! There is much more space in the outer boroughs than in Manhattan, so why not make it a park? Seems like a good idea to me!

Terraformer · 2015-02-11 10:06:33

If you have a decent rail infrastructure, you don't need to expand the city itself, because people who work there can live a dozen or so miles away and still get into work quickly.

RobertDyck · 2015-02-11 12:16:16

Rail? On Mars? Are you serious? Mars has as much surface area as all dry land on Earth. You want to build a rail infrastructure from nothing on a planet that large? Are you nuts? Any reasonable system will not include any such infrastructure: no rails, no roads, no nothin'. Just rovers driving across undeveloped land, aircraft, and rockets. So no infrastructure for any thoroughfare.

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#1 2014-06-17 23:01:16

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy

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#4 2014-06-19 18:55:53

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#5 2014-06-21 18:59:23

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#6 2014-06-26 15:30:40

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#7 2014-06-27 02:28:04

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#8 2014-06-27 10:28:07

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#9 2014-06-27 10:52:11

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#10 2014-06-27 11:41:07

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#11 2014-06-27 19:57:13

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#12 2014-06-28 15:31:37

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#13 2014-06-28 17:35:10

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#14 2014-06-29 02:52:25

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#15 2014-06-29 09:13:26

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#16 2014-06-29 09:29:51

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#17 2014-06-29 09:40:18

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