Mars Attacks!

So, I am working my way, very slowly, through Kim Stanley Robinson's triology of Martian novels. I read Red Mars last summer, and just finished Green Mars during the trip to California. (I said it was slowly!) In my head I worked up an interesting post about landscape tourism and the allure of space travel, but then I did a lot of exciting things like take 4 kids here and here and here and 2 kids here, twice, all the while stuffing all of our faces with as much Asian and Mexican food and fancy gourmet pizza and brioche knots as would possibly fit. So most of my brilliant Robinson insights got a little dislodged.

Being back in the Bay Area gave me a strange sense of dislocation, which I tried to explain as a kind of a geographical phantom limb syndrome. I always had this kind of idea that our old house was still there waiting for us, with all the things we used to have in it waiting too. Without knowing it, I kept finding myself driving back to it at night or routing myself to any destination along the path I would have taken if I had been traveling from what once was my home. Confusing to write about, confusing to experience, and maybe stranger still to feel like the two years of my life post-California, which have been full of many good things, could so easily vanish as if they never existed. Some days back in Missouri, in my real current life with my real responsibilities, have helped me see that reading Robinson was at least partly responsible for this. Green Mars is the tipping point in the triology where space settlers and new immigrants turn into honest-to-goodness Martians of several generations standing; "You Can Never Go Back" (to Earth, that is) becomes the catch-phrase of the planet's independence movement and inevitable revolution. And the debate shifts from "Should we live on Mars?" which was the focus in the first one, to "What is our life on Mars going to be like?" Bound up in the transition from traveler to resident is a host of other questions of course; most centrally, what does and what should the land of Mars do for us? Provide valuable minerals, extra prison space, room to pursue marginalized cultural traditions or form new kinds of societies, or material for scientific inquiry? What about give us shelter, food, breathable air? As might be expected, the characters run the gamut in their answers to these questions, and Robinson's greatest weakness is probably that there are so many characters that he can't quite get beyond the mouthpiece method of character development. (And it's apparently impossible for him to create female characters that are not either shrewish sex-fiends or silent earth mothers--two sides of the same coin, basically).

Yet there's so much here that's fascinating. Even if Robinson doesn't quite make clear what a new, Martian society founded on a ecopoetic environmentalism and alternative economic system might look like, the steps of thinking through the practical and theoretical processes of getting there are immensely compelling to me. (Yes, I was the geek in junior high social studies who loved the extra credit project of designing a utopia.) As Firefly has most recently shown us, space fiction is frontier fiction, but Robinson takes more time than most to write about the hard parts of making the unknown into the known.

In keeping with my standard rhetorical model of blog posting, it ought to be time now for my turn back to the personal. But Missouri is not Mars, by any stretch of the imagination, and no matter how hostile the terrain might seem, it supports a lot more than bioengineered lichen. There are some comparisons, though. I saw the Bay Area real estate prices, and the preschool prices, and the gas prices, and the food prices, and the traffic. (Did I mention the traffic?). I know, I can never go back. Tell that to my phantom limb, though.