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Genesis
In Genesis , the UN appoints Chance Van Riebeck to lead a scientific survey of Mars. Using theories derived from the Gaia Hypothesis, his team clandestinely introduces genetically tailored bacteria into the Martian environment to begin transforming the planet into one habitable by human beings.
Earth is under the theocratic rule of the Ecotheist Movement, which divides human beings from the rest of nature. The Ecotheists regard all human interference with nature as evil; therefore, they consider the transformation of Mars to be a criminal act. So they capture Chance and his followers and put them on trial, which leads to war between the Martian colonists and Earth.
To complete their terraforming project, the colonists must locate the secret Lima Codex, which contains a genetic inventory of all Earthly lifeforms. The Codex is hidden somewhere on Earth, and their agents must hunt it down before the Ecotheists find it first.
The colonists, desperate for independence, threaten to drop a moonlet on the Earth, which would annihilate the planet. To save Earth, the Ecotheists agree to a truce that they have no intention of honoring--for they are plotting a sneak attack that will destroy both the colonists and the Codex.
Genesis is an ambitious tale filled with visionary ideas; peopled with prophets, fanatics, traitors, and tortured heroes; and taut with conflicts that mirror the moral issues we face today.
Originally published in 1988, Genesis was the first major work of fiction that addressed the idea of terraforming Mars. It not only suggested the idea, but provided a feasible solution for doing so. During its initial publication, Genesis was on the list of recommended reading at NASA, and has since gone on to enjoy a type of cult status. Its acknowledged list of admirers includes such literary luminaries as Brian Aldiss, Amy Clampitt, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas M. Disch, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, James Merrill. It is with great pride that Ilium Press brings this influential and prescient work back into print.
Praise for Frederick Turner's poetry "The poem inspires us to go back to the epics of the past, whose roots it shows us to be so much alive after all." - Amy Clampitt
"Vivid, effortless narration ... This is a grand, glowing poem. ... A thousand bravos!" - James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize winning poet
"Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality." - Richard Tillinghast
"Myth, religious parable, and science fiction are genetically recombined into lyrical new forms of being. Turner has taken up the most ancient challenges of the poet, delivering work as intellectually charged as formally challenging." - Paul Lake
"Frederick Turner is a polymath as well as a poet and I love his work. I have his extraordinary poem Genesis in a place of honor next to those of Homer, Virgil, and Milton."
- Martyn J. Fogg, President, British Interplanetary Society
"Turner reclaims for poetry its antique privilege of heroic action, its right and, perhaps, primal compulsion to tell a story more sharply, with more economy than can that later idiom which is prose." --George Steiner
"Fluent and full of surprises...its sustained narrative is an enviable achievement..." - Irving Feldman
"...verse narrative of great power." - Guy Davenport
"The epic poem...has historically enjoyed a greater ability to convey a culture's character and spirit through language. Turner uses the strengths of the epic form to good effect. His poems describe and mythologize futures which are more than just extrapolations of our present. He's written good science fiction while creating and presenting a possible future in a way that a novel could not have accomplished. It's good poetry, too." - Dani Zweig
Earth is under the theocratic rule of the Ecotheist Movement, which divides human beings from the rest of nature. The Ecotheists regard all human interference with nature as evil; therefore, they consider the transformation of Mars to be a criminal act. So they capture Chance and his followers and put them on trial, which leads to war between the Martian colonists and Earth.
To complete their terraforming project, the colonists must locate the secret Lima Codex, which contains a genetic inventory of all Earthly lifeforms. The Codex is hidden somewhere on Earth, and their agents must hunt it down before the Ecotheists find it first.
The colonists, desperate for independence, threaten to drop a moonlet on the Earth, which would annihilate the planet. To save Earth, the Ecotheists agree to a truce that they have no intention of honoring--for they are plotting a sneak attack that will destroy both the colonists and the Codex.
Genesis is an ambitious tale filled with visionary ideas; peopled with prophets, fanatics, traitors, and tortured heroes; and taut with conflicts that mirror the moral issues we face today.
Originally published in 1988, Genesis was the first major work of fiction that addressed the idea of terraforming Mars. It not only suggested the idea, but provided a feasible solution for doing so. During its initial publication, Genesis was on the list of recommended reading at NASA, and has since gone on to enjoy a type of cult status. Its acknowledged list of admirers includes such literary luminaries as Brian Aldiss, Amy Clampitt, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas M. Disch, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, James Merrill. It is with great pride that Ilium Press brings this influential and prescient work back into print.
Praise for Frederick Turner's poetry "The poem inspires us to go back to the epics of the past, whose roots it shows us to be so much alive after all." - Amy Clampitt
"Vivid, effortless narration ... This is a grand, glowing poem. ... A thousand bravos!" - James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize winning poet
"Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality." - Richard Tillinghast
"Myth, religious parable, and science fiction are genetically recombined into lyrical new forms of being. Turner has taken up the most ancient challenges of the poet, delivering work as intellectually charged as formally challenging." - Paul Lake
"Frederick Turner is a polymath as well as a poet and I love his work. I have his extraordinary poem Genesis in a place of honor next to those of Homer, Virgil, and Milton."
- Martyn J. Fogg, President, British Interplanetary Society
"Turner reclaims for poetry its antique privilege of heroic action, its right and, perhaps, primal compulsion to tell a story more sharply, with more economy than can that later idiom which is prose." --George Steiner
"Fluent and full of surprises...its sustained narrative is an enviable achievement..." - Irving Feldman
"...verse narrative of great power." - Guy Davenport
"The epic poem...has historically enjoyed a greater ability to convey a culture's character and spirit through language. Turner uses the strengths of the epic form to good effect. His poems describe and mythologize futures which are more than just extrapolations of our present. He's written good science fiction while creating and presenting a possible future in a way that a novel could not have accomplished. It's good poetry, too." - Dani Zweig
303 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1988
About the author
Frederick Turner
19 books4 followersLibrarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (equivalent to a PhD) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (equivalent to a PhD) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 17, 2025
What is it: a science-fiction epic poem more about being a science-fiction epic poem than about the claimed subject of terraforming Mars.
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Why 4 stars: much of what I could say about Frederick Turner's Genesis would repeat what I've already said in my review of his earlier sci-fi epic poem, The New World. Turner's poetry reads like a poet enamored with poetry. That is to the benefit of the work, because Turner's command of his references across a range of epic poems gives him fruitful raw material from which to shape his own epics. And his own skill is sufficiently capable to shape frequently good verse across 10,000 lines of poetry. But it is also to the detriment, because Turner's so focused on craft, and foregrounds that same focus for the reader so often, that the experience of reading Genesis (at least, my experience of reading it) was overwhelmed by artificiality of layer upon layer, choice after choice, prioritizing form and allusion and style over persuasion or connection or purpose.
The best way I can sum this up is to say that there are almost no characters in Genesis that seem like human beings. They seem, instead, like the figures in neoclassical paintings. They have been wrought with extraordinary care to imitate a past art form in an attempt to bear forward for a new audience an old ideal that originated in the classical roots of that art. The characters in Turner's poems don't read as persons, not even really as characters, but as archetypes fulfilling a function. They take actions that are necessary, their appearance is what the symbolism requires, their words are almost universally the voice of how ancient tongues have been translated in contemporary English, their arcs are only what the requirements of classical thematic structures permit.
To cleave so fully to that craft is impressive. I said it of The New World as well. It is genuinely impressive to so carefully imitate a form, to be so committed to a certain aesthetic.
And it is meaningful to Turner, that much is clear. I mentioned this in the prior review as well, that Turner's entire worldview orbits around the core principle that beauty is the only, ultimate meaningful thing. And his understanding of what is beautiful entails very specific metric rhythms and structural patterns and stylistic conventions that are drawn from examples in past poetic art that he considers (or has even attempted to scientifically evaluate as) the most beautiful.
But it leaves the experience... abstracted.
To my reading, the most affecting moments of Genesis are where Turner breaks from his form. The one character with the most striking poetic voice is the heroic hacker Ganesh who Turner chose to write with the same meter as the other characters but with vocabulary imitating casual, conversational dialogue in the 80s punk and tech subcultures. The one thematic arc in the poem that strikes me as the most deliberate inclusion is a foregrounding of a character cured of AIDS, relevant given when this poem was written and certain facets of its concluding arguments. There's even a strange section where Turner permits himself to comment on the virtues of science-fiction as a genre, which he admits is out-of-place but also admits mattered enough to him to keep in the poem regardless.
But for those small moments of insight into the reality of Turner and the context of the poem, the vast majority of these lines are designed to present for the reader an art object that stands apart from them, that has to be viewed at a distance, appreciated as beautiful with "oohs" and "ahhs" but not taken to hand, not wielded as a tool or applied as a system. So, when the final act of the poem, the final 2000 lines of verse, are spent expounding an entire philosophy of life, the universe, and everything, it's held so far from the reader, put on so high and elaborately decorated a pedestal, spoken in so lofty and overwrought a tongue, that it becomes completely unlivable. A more damning way to put it would be to say that the artistry pushes the philosophy into irrelevance.
Perhaps the saddest casualty of this is the poetic narrator Turner inserts into Genesis. The narrator, a character who is future even to the events of the poem and relating them as though his history but who at times is forced to be Turner's own mouthpiece in the poem, becomes a really awkward tension for the reader, a voice that isn't given enough body to become a meaningful perspective on its own, but is so obviously worn as a mask over Turner as to obscure what meaningful perspective Turner might have provided for himself. So when the final 200 lines of the poem focus on the act of writing poetry and insights into how the unlivable philosophy of the final act might be made livable, made relevant, in the writing of verse, I struggle to see even then the gem of insight obfuscated by a narrator who seems to exist more to imitate Homer or Virgil's self-editorializing commentary than to be the reality of a human compelled to communicate with other humans.
I've got one more poem by Turner to read, written three decades after these first two were penned, and I remain eager to read it because I trust it will be poetically remarkable. But that eagerness is tempered by expecting that it, like The New World and now like Genesis, may have little meaning that extends beyond the bounds of the shape of the words on the page.
----
You might also like: for an example of a novel-length poem accomplishing something I'd consider far more persuasive, affecting, and livable, I'd point to Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (my review of it here). If you're here because you want science-fiction that reads like ancient myth, then maybe you actually should be playing the game Destiny 2.
----
Why 4 stars: much of what I could say about Frederick Turner's Genesis would repeat what I've already said in my review of his earlier sci-fi epic poem, The New World. Turner's poetry reads like a poet enamored with poetry. That is to the benefit of the work, because Turner's command of his references across a range of epic poems gives him fruitful raw material from which to shape his own epics. And his own skill is sufficiently capable to shape frequently good verse across 10,000 lines of poetry. But it is also to the detriment, because Turner's so focused on craft, and foregrounds that same focus for the reader so often, that the experience of reading Genesis (at least, my experience of reading it) was overwhelmed by artificiality of layer upon layer, choice after choice, prioritizing form and allusion and style over persuasion or connection or purpose.
The best way I can sum this up is to say that there are almost no characters in Genesis that seem like human beings. They seem, instead, like the figures in neoclassical paintings. They have been wrought with extraordinary care to imitate a past art form in an attempt to bear forward for a new audience an old ideal that originated in the classical roots of that art. The characters in Turner's poems don't read as persons, not even really as characters, but as archetypes fulfilling a function. They take actions that are necessary, their appearance is what the symbolism requires, their words are almost universally the voice of how ancient tongues have been translated in contemporary English, their arcs are only what the requirements of classical thematic structures permit.
To cleave so fully to that craft is impressive. I said it of The New World as well. It is genuinely impressive to so carefully imitate a form, to be so committed to a certain aesthetic.
And it is meaningful to Turner, that much is clear. I mentioned this in the prior review as well, that Turner's entire worldview orbits around the core principle that beauty is the only, ultimate meaningful thing. And his understanding of what is beautiful entails very specific metric rhythms and structural patterns and stylistic conventions that are drawn from examples in past poetic art that he considers (or has even attempted to scientifically evaluate as) the most beautiful.
But it leaves the experience... abstracted.
To my reading, the most affecting moments of Genesis are where Turner breaks from his form. The one character with the most striking poetic voice is the heroic hacker Ganesh who Turner chose to write with the same meter as the other characters but with vocabulary imitating casual, conversational dialogue in the 80s punk and tech subcultures. The one thematic arc in the poem that strikes me as the most deliberate inclusion is a foregrounding of a character cured of AIDS, relevant given when this poem was written and certain facets of its concluding arguments. There's even a strange section where Turner permits himself to comment on the virtues of science-fiction as a genre, which he admits is out-of-place but also admits mattered enough to him to keep in the poem regardless.
But for those small moments of insight into the reality of Turner and the context of the poem, the vast majority of these lines are designed to present for the reader an art object that stands apart from them, that has to be viewed at a distance, appreciated as beautiful with "oohs" and "ahhs" but not taken to hand, not wielded as a tool or applied as a system. So, when the final act of the poem, the final 2000 lines of verse, are spent expounding an entire philosophy of life, the universe, and everything, it's held so far from the reader, put on so high and elaborately decorated a pedestal, spoken in so lofty and overwrought a tongue, that it becomes completely unlivable. A more damning way to put it would be to say that the artistry pushes the philosophy into irrelevance.
Perhaps the saddest casualty of this is the poetic narrator Turner inserts into Genesis. The narrator, a character who is future even to the events of the poem and relating them as though his history but who at times is forced to be Turner's own mouthpiece in the poem, becomes a really awkward tension for the reader, a voice that isn't given enough body to become a meaningful perspective on its own, but is so obviously worn as a mask over Turner as to obscure what meaningful perspective Turner might have provided for himself. So when the final 200 lines of the poem focus on the act of writing poetry and insights into how the unlivable philosophy of the final act might be made livable, made relevant, in the writing of verse, I struggle to see even then the gem of insight obfuscated by a narrator who seems to exist more to imitate Homer or Virgil's self-editorializing commentary than to be the reality of a human compelled to communicate with other humans.
I've got one more poem by Turner to read, written three decades after these first two were penned, and I remain eager to read it because I trust it will be poetically remarkable. But that eagerness is tempered by expecting that it, like The New World and now like Genesis, may have little meaning that extends beyond the bounds of the shape of the words on the page.
----
You might also like: for an example of a novel-length poem accomplishing something I'd consider far more persuasive, affecting, and livable, I'd point to Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (my review of it here). If you're here because you want science-fiction that reads like ancient myth, then maybe you actually should be playing the game Destiny 2.
April 17, 2019
I wanted to like it
Let me start with this: the language is good. As an example of an epic poem Genesis does succeed.
Unfortunately, and this is a purely subjective matter, as entertainment I can't say that it does. Ultimately I found that I neither cared for the world created by Turner, nor the characters that inhabited it.
Let me start with this: the language is good. As an example of an epic poem Genesis does succeed.
Unfortunately, and this is a purely subjective matter, as entertainment I can't say that it does. Ultimately I found that I neither cared for the world created by Turner, nor the characters that inhabited it.
April 6, 2026
Truly incredible book. I know that the epic in blank verse has been out of fashion for the last two hundred years or however long it’s been, but it’s a shame. This should be a science fiction genre classic.
The first thing is that it’s a great read. Space battles, terraforming Mars, an ecoterrorist church that achieves terrestrial dominance, incest, suicide, ethnogenesis, computer science, karate, narratological hijinks, ambition, heroism, etc., etc. — it’s great.
It starts like this.
(Act I, scene i)
This is a bit of information about terraforming.
(Act V, scene ii)
In my amateur opinion the verse is very good.
I will take a cue from the narrator of the poem and not go on and on about philosophy, but: this work also contains small delicious doses of philosophy and religion. Is it “a Christian book”? It’s not telling, and I’m not telling either.
The first thing is that it’s a great read. Space battles, terraforming Mars, an ecoterrorist church that achieves terrestrial dominance, incest, suicide, ethnogenesis, computer science, karate, narratological hijinks, ambition, heroism, etc., etc. — it’s great.
It starts like this.
Listen! I must tell of the beginnings,
Of corpses buried in the walls of worlds,
Of how those men and women worth a story
Burn and consume the powers they're kindled by;
And how their acts, mortal and cast away,
Are crystalled in the melt of history,
But their live selves are lost and gone forever
To leave a safer and a duller age;
Of how only the silence of the holy
Can still the creaking agony of time;
How holiness is broken every spring
Bursting in laughter to the throat of years.
But. But it is so hard to do again
What at the first was playtime for the gods,
Nymph borne by goatfoot over a green stream;
It is a deposition now as heavy as
The unhelpful body of one loved and dead.
I am not any more—none of us is
Now in this place of cyphers we inhabit—
Worth those I sing, therefore the song the more
Should lift as if that past dawn were alive;
The very words twist into mockery
The story I must tell…
(Act I, scene i)
This is a bit of information about terraforming.
Consider the creation of the swan.
Whether we picture it in space or time
It owes its being to a hierarchy
Of other organisms. We must learn
To find the beauty in this web of lives,
This seething texture of dependency.
Inside the lungflesh of the leopard frog
That the swan preys on in certain habitats
There lives a nematode which is in turn
Parasitized by zygomycota.
The frogs prey on the ephemoptera
Which feed as larvae on the fungal growth
Of fecal matter from the waterbirds.
Mites populate the feathers of the swan;
Its colon swarms with microsymbiotes.
(Act V, scene ii)
In my amateur opinion the verse is very good.
I will take a cue from the narrator of the poem and not go on and on about philosophy, but: this work also contains small delicious doses of philosophy and religion. Is it “a Christian book”? It’s not telling, and I’m not telling either.
October 26, 2014
Epic poetry has not been popular for awhile now, although James Merrill, Stephen Vincent Benet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Hart Crane, and several other American poets have produced works that might not be traditional epics, but certainly are long and complex enough to be considered epic poems. Genesis by Frederick Turner is a master work that sets out to be a science fiction epic, and it succeeds in its ambitions.
What sets an epic poem apart from a long novel, of course, is its poetry. Turner tells an epic tale that sweeps from an earth bound into a theology that largely rejects man's footprint upon the earth and science to a massive effort to terraform Mars. A moonlet is divided in the process and sent as a weapon toward earth that is then used to provide the stuff of life for a barren Martian landscape. Murder, battles, dreams, desperation, suicide, choices, love, and violent and deep emotions both rage through the epic's lines.
This is not linear narrative where one event leads another to a climax and denouement. Rather, poetry and language jumble toward a story that is as large as the solar system itself.
One of the problems with the contemporary world is that we live in a twenty-four hour news loop. Every event is drawn into the ticking of the stock market update and tied into our ability to have a national economy that supports our way of living.
Obviously epic poetry runs counter to the moment by moment hysteria that such a world exhibits. It looks long into the song of existence and human character. Events elongate into patterns that explore the meaning of fate and self will and provide insight into the human condition and the environment that humanity inhabits and may one day inhabit.
One of the amazing aspects of Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars is its detailed, voluminous descriptions of how Mars could actually be terraformed. Turner is obviously a scientist and mathematician as well as a poet. That this book exists in contemporary literature is miraculous in a poetry world that emphasizes free verse and images of moments in individual people's lives. It echoes into the great literature of Kazantzakis, Virgil, Homer, Chaucer, Beowulf, and the national epics of so many places around the world. Not everyone will find this an "easy read," but those who are willing to experience poetry in a profound, disciplined way are going to find magic and the truth of the human spirit in these lines.
May Federick Turner be long honored for an epic achievement.
What sets an epic poem apart from a long novel, of course, is its poetry. Turner tells an epic tale that sweeps from an earth bound into a theology that largely rejects man's footprint upon the earth and science to a massive effort to terraform Mars. A moonlet is divided in the process and sent as a weapon toward earth that is then used to provide the stuff of life for a barren Martian landscape. Murder, battles, dreams, desperation, suicide, choices, love, and violent and deep emotions both rage through the epic's lines.
This is not linear narrative where one event leads another to a climax and denouement. Rather, poetry and language jumble toward a story that is as large as the solar system itself.
One of the problems with the contemporary world is that we live in a twenty-four hour news loop. Every event is drawn into the ticking of the stock market update and tied into our ability to have a national economy that supports our way of living.
Obviously epic poetry runs counter to the moment by moment hysteria that such a world exhibits. It looks long into the song of existence and human character. Events elongate into patterns that explore the meaning of fate and self will and provide insight into the human condition and the environment that humanity inhabits and may one day inhabit.
One of the amazing aspects of Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars is its detailed, voluminous descriptions of how Mars could actually be terraformed. Turner is obviously a scientist and mathematician as well as a poet. That this book exists in contemporary literature is miraculous in a poetry world that emphasizes free verse and images of moments in individual people's lives. It echoes into the great literature of Kazantzakis, Virgil, Homer, Chaucer, Beowulf, and the national epics of so many places around the world. Not everyone will find this an "easy read," but those who are willing to experience poetry in a profound, disciplined way are going to find magic and the truth of the human spirit in these lines.
May Federick Turner be long honored for an epic achievement.
June 14, 2014
On an artistic level, this book is an amazing accomplishment. Writing a novel in metered poetic form is not a task often undertaken, for a reason. But Turner carries it off both as a poem and as a novel. Fitting for an epic poem, the characters are are outsized and Heinleinian, both in their virtues and their their their shortcomings. But they are all distinct, interesting personalities. Also fitting for the form, Turner weaves in monologues on morality, justice, nature, and philosophy. More astonishing is how Turner nails the science. He gets right everything known about Mars at the time the book was written (1988), and does a thoroughly believable job laying out the terraforming effort. In iambic pentameter. Incredible.
December 18, 2008
It's got everything that an epic poem needs: love and war, tragedy and betrayal, death and renewal, and a grand stage for a great story. It's also science fiction--which is something you don't see very often in poetry--about terraforming Mars. Though the story is a bit too fantastic in places to be plausible, and the ending gets a little sidetracked with hippie metaphysics, it's a glorious read that expresses the values, anxieties, and dreams of its culture, just like any epic poem should.
August 25, 2014
I had the pleasure of learning from Professor Turner as an undergrad student at UTD, and I have to say that perhaps no one else could make this work so well, with such a perfect balance between the beauty of verse and the brilliance of hard SF. As a "universal scholar" Turner succeeds spectacularly in creating an elegant modern epic poem that is rich in both the classic epic and modern science fiction traditions.
February 1, 2019
I never knew that Science Fiction could be so beautiful.
More people should be reading Turner. I expect that he'll be regarded as a great poet hundreds of years from now when many other popular authors have long been forgotten.
More people should be reading Turner. I expect that he'll be regarded as a great poet hundreds of years from now when many other popular authors have long been forgotten.
November 27, 2008
Turner's second sci-fi epic poem, and a brilliant work. The terraformers of Mars, to protect their lives and living, must declare independence from Earth and its Leftist Ecotheist government.
January 1, 2012
A glimpse of the future - Dr. Turner is an exceptional professor and writer.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews