Ethan Casey's Blog - Posts Tagged "science-fiction"

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Blue Mars is the concluding volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's fantastic Mars trilogy, among the best science-fiction novels I've ever read, and I've read many. There's little point in being prescriptive, but ideally science fiction should be at once speculative and realistic, in the sense that it addresses what-if questions through extrapolation: What if human society were like this instead of like that? What if this or that technological or historical contingency were different? What if (to cite the example at hand) a century or so from now human beings succeeded in colonizing Mars, taking human nature and politics there with them, and meanwhile leaving behind on Earth all the same old familiar self-inflicted problems such as war, overpopulation, and global warming?

Robinson's Mars trilogy addresses that big question in a big, sweeping way over a total of nearly 2,000 pages, blending speculative but informed disquisitions on physics, geology, evolutionary biology, and the potential for "terraforming" lifeless planets, with individual and collective stories of the "First Hundred" colonists, their children and grandchildren, and later immigrants from an increasingly troubled, flooded, and overcrowded Earth.

Robinson brings it all to a very satisfying and hopeful, yet appropriately open-ended, conclusion at the end of Blue Mars. The trilogy as a whole is a mighty feat of scientific erudition, leavened generously with often profound human insight: "They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition."

A major theme, prominent enough to be tantamount to the trilogy's main subject, is the power and meaning, if any, of the passage of time. Thanks to something called the gerontological treatment, many of the First Hundred, and many others, end up living as long as 230 years. Near the end of Blue Mars, one of them reflects:

"So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future - his life - what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color. A thread of thought lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely there; was there nothing that could hold to?"



View all my reviews