What /Red/Green/Blue Mars/ means to me.
It's time for my every-few-years reread of Stan Robinson's masterwork, and lo, there is a Reddit thread about it. It's full of people whining that it's too long and they couldn't finish it.
I may have got a bit carried away in my reply...
- - - - -
Having RTTEOTT, I am *appalled* by the amount of negative comments. As it happens, a few days ago, I started rereading the trilogy. I reread them every few years and have done since they came out. This will be my 5th or 6th time through - I lose count. I downloaded ebooks of them because my original paperbacks are starting to become tattered and frayed from all the rereadings.
Every time, they are fresh and new. Every time, I discover new things in them. Many of the characters feel like personal friends now, from Sax Russel, Nadia Chernyshevski, Arkady Bodganov, Nirgal and Michel Duval; or people that I might not get on with, but know well, such as Anne Clayborne; or people I might dislike but admire for their work, like John Boone and Frank Chalmers; or people I think I would dislike or just couldn't deal with, such as Maya Toitovna or Phyllis Boyle.
I almost feel like I know Underhill and Burroughs and Echus Overlook and Sheffield. It feels like I've been there. It feels like *I've* driven through Noctis Labyrinthus into Marineris, gone down into Hellas and Argyre, driven a rover up Olympus to crater Pt or gazed at the great marching barchan dunes of the vastitas borealis. When I study maps of Mars, I look at it in terms of the places I know - Elysium, Cairo, Vishniac, Low Point. I always come away disappointed that they are not there.
The only stuff I've reread more than R/G/B Mars is Douglas Adams and some early Terry Pratchett (notably the pre-Discworld SF).
R/G/B Mars is possibly *the* defining SF masterpiece of the 1990s - an era which also saw the bulk of Iain M Banks' SF work, saw the début of Ken Macleod, arguably the finest works of Ian McDonald and many other truly great works.
They are perhaps not the most accessible novels. They are long and dense. I wish I could believe that the 3 redditors who called it "dry" were punning on Mars' aridity but I don't think they were.
It's also one of the best-structured trilogies I've ever read. The colours set the themes: the first book is about technology, about learning to live on the red planet, building to a crescendo of suffering, pain and destruction.
The second book is about bringing the planet to life, about the turmoil and torment and damage and disruption that this would inevitably cause, about the revolutions and the struggle for independence.
But then, when you've done that, when you've explored Mars from pole to pole, made it real, filled it with people drawn in such detail that I could pick them out of an identity parade, and then painted it: thawed it, filled it with life, embodied Hiroko Ai's /viriditas/ and performed the great ecopoesis and brought the Red Planet to life, gone through the areophany, then where?
And that is the triumphant conclusion: because whereas Red to Green is the obvious step, it's what a hundred SF writers have done before, Stan Robinson comes up with the astonishing hat trick. When Mars is alive, a living world, when Sax' great dream has come true, then what?
Well, it's a world. It's a whole planet, and even when it has seas and an ocean - and a canal at last, of course, Schiaparelli and more to the point Lowell vindicated at last! - /then/ Robinson comes back and asks: OK. What now? This is not a bit of set-dressing. This is a world, a planet, filled with millions of people. It has factions, it has parties, it has politics. Book 1 has interpersonal dynamics, and what readers still in their 20s might not realise yet, it has the pacing of real life. You look away and suddenly a decade has passed and the whole world has changed around you. People die. People make mistakes, they fuck up, and they get back up and they go on. So /yes/ the story jumps but life jumps like that too once you're not a kid any more.
Book 2 is about growth.
And then comes Blue Mars. OK, so, they did it, it's alive now. So what?
Well, so what is that now, Mars has to mature, like a person: it has to break away from its parent, leave home. It has to shake off the shackles of UNOMA and UNTA and stand alone, be its own place. And that means a government, a constitution, a system of politics.
I hate politics. You know how you can tell when a politician is lying? Their lips move.
But it's a necessary evil. If you have lots of people, you need to have it. It happens, like death. It is part of the group dynamics of being human beings. And Book 3 doesn't shy away from that, it rubs your face in it and it makes you care. The great conference in Dorsa Brevia is the best-written political scene that SF has ever had, and I daresay, that literature has ever had. It is dull, it goes on too long, but that is *real*, that is how it is, it is representational. And it is made real, with Art Randolph running around trying to record it all and Nadia reluctantly taking on the /really/ big construction job of her life, that of making a world into a nation, a state, a land.
And the wonderful conclusion - the round-Mars runners, the swimmers, the sailboats, *sailboats!* On the *ocean* on *Mars*! /Nobody/ has ever had the guts to do that, but Stan Robinson did.
Screw Bradbury and his Chronicles, dull spacey hippy druggie stuff that they were. Bugger Burroughs and his red-skinned big-boobed princesses. I'm sorry, but even the great Ian McDonald and his /Desolation Road/ with its Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar don't compare to this. They are mere vignettes, snapshots. Robinson paints the big picture, the birth of a whole world, the biggest picture it is possible to see, and he paints it warts and all and it's beautiful.
It is, overall, the most astoundingly beautiful book I have ever read, or, I think, that I ever will read. Many have moved me, from /Eon/ to /Ringworld/, or what-might-have-beens such as /The Difference Engine/, or excited me such as /Snow Crash/ or /The Diamond Age, or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer./
But they are all small things indeed next to the sweep, the majesty, the awe, of Mars and the great areophany.
And I understand that many people don't get it. But that's OK. Some people just are poor sad crippled little souls, unable to appreciate beauty and great art. That's how life is. It's OK, there are lots of good books with rayguns and rocket ships in for them.
I may have got a bit carried away in my reply...
- - - - -
Having RTTEOTT, I am *appalled* by the amount of negative comments. As it happens, a few days ago, I started rereading the trilogy. I reread them every few years and have done since they came out. This will be my 5th or 6th time through - I lose count. I downloaded ebooks of them because my original paperbacks are starting to become tattered and frayed from all the rereadings.
Every time, they are fresh and new. Every time, I discover new things in them. Many of the characters feel like personal friends now, from Sax Russel, Nadia Chernyshevski, Arkady Bodganov, Nirgal and Michel Duval; or people that I might not get on with, but know well, such as Anne Clayborne; or people I might dislike but admire for their work, like John Boone and Frank Chalmers; or people I think I would dislike or just couldn't deal with, such as Maya Toitovna or Phyllis Boyle.
I almost feel like I know Underhill and Burroughs and Echus Overlook and Sheffield. It feels like I've been there. It feels like *I've* driven through Noctis Labyrinthus into Marineris, gone down into Hellas and Argyre, driven a rover up Olympus to crater Pt or gazed at the great marching barchan dunes of the vastitas borealis. When I study maps of Mars, I look at it in terms of the places I know - Elysium, Cairo, Vishniac, Low Point. I always come away disappointed that they are not there.
The only stuff I've reread more than R/G/B Mars is Douglas Adams and some early Terry Pratchett (notably the pre-Discworld SF).
R/G/B Mars is possibly *the* defining SF masterpiece of the 1990s - an era which also saw the bulk of Iain M Banks' SF work, saw the début of Ken Macleod, arguably the finest works of Ian McDonald and many other truly great works.
They are perhaps not the most accessible novels. They are long and dense. I wish I could believe that the 3 redditors who called it "dry" were punning on Mars' aridity but I don't think they were.
It's also one of the best-structured trilogies I've ever read. The colours set the themes: the first book is about technology, about learning to live on the red planet, building to a crescendo of suffering, pain and destruction.
The second book is about bringing the planet to life, about the turmoil and torment and damage and disruption that this would inevitably cause, about the revolutions and the struggle for independence.
But then, when you've done that, when you've explored Mars from pole to pole, made it real, filled it with people drawn in such detail that I could pick them out of an identity parade, and then painted it: thawed it, filled it with life, embodied Hiroko Ai's /viriditas/ and performed the great ecopoesis and brought the Red Planet to life, gone through the areophany, then where?
And that is the triumphant conclusion: because whereas Red to Green is the obvious step, it's what a hundred SF writers have done before, Stan Robinson comes up with the astonishing hat trick. When Mars is alive, a living world, when Sax' great dream has come true, then what?
Well, it's a world. It's a whole planet, and even when it has seas and an ocean - and a canal at last, of course, Schiaparelli and more to the point Lowell vindicated at last! - /then/ Robinson comes back and asks: OK. What now? This is not a bit of set-dressing. This is a world, a planet, filled with millions of people. It has factions, it has parties, it has politics. Book 1 has interpersonal dynamics, and what readers still in their 20s might not realise yet, it has the pacing of real life. You look away and suddenly a decade has passed and the whole world has changed around you. People die. People make mistakes, they fuck up, and they get back up and they go on. So /yes/ the story jumps but life jumps like that too once you're not a kid any more.
Book 2 is about growth.
And then comes Blue Mars. OK, so, they did it, it's alive now. So what?
Well, so what is that now, Mars has to mature, like a person: it has to break away from its parent, leave home. It has to shake off the shackles of UNOMA and UNTA and stand alone, be its own place. And that means a government, a constitution, a system of politics.
I hate politics. You know how you can tell when a politician is lying? Their lips move.
But it's a necessary evil. If you have lots of people, you need to have it. It happens, like death. It is part of the group dynamics of being human beings. And Book 3 doesn't shy away from that, it rubs your face in it and it makes you care. The great conference in Dorsa Brevia is the best-written political scene that SF has ever had, and I daresay, that literature has ever had. It is dull, it goes on too long, but that is *real*, that is how it is, it is representational. And it is made real, with Art Randolph running around trying to record it all and Nadia reluctantly taking on the /really/ big construction job of her life, that of making a world into a nation, a state, a land.
And the wonderful conclusion - the round-Mars runners, the swimmers, the sailboats, *sailboats!* On the *ocean* on *Mars*! /Nobody/ has ever had the guts to do that, but Stan Robinson did.
Screw Bradbury and his Chronicles, dull spacey hippy druggie stuff that they were. Bugger Burroughs and his red-skinned big-boobed princesses. I'm sorry, but even the great Ian McDonald and his /Desolation Road/ with its Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar don't compare to this. They are mere vignettes, snapshots. Robinson paints the big picture, the birth of a whole world, the biggest picture it is possible to see, and he paints it warts and all and it's beautiful.
It is, overall, the most astoundingly beautiful book I have ever read, or, I think, that I ever will read. Many have moved me, from /Eon/ to /Ringworld/, or what-might-have-beens such as /The Difference Engine/, or excited me such as /Snow Crash/ or /The Diamond Age, or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer./
But they are all small things indeed next to the sweep, the majesty, the awe, of Mars and the great areophany.
And I understand that many people don't get it. But that's OK. Some people just are poor sad crippled little souls, unable to appreciate beauty and great art. That's how life is. It's OK, there are lots of good books with rayguns and rocket ships in for them.