alt Hacker NewsI read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology [1], a series which "chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars," years ago.
The first book, Red Mars, contains a debate between the reds, led by a scientist arguing for preserving Mars, and, basically, everyone else, who want to terraform and settle it. The reds are, throughout the book and frankly the series, a collection of extremists. They won't compromise. They blow cool stuff up. They're borderline terrorists, only outdone in the second book (Green Mars) by the Earth corporations that want to fuck up terraforming to maintain control. The only thing I remember being more annoying than the reds in Red Mars were the pages-long descriptions of the fucking escarpments and other geology.
Aside: I love Hemingway and get bored with Steinbeck. Reflecting on this, again years later, I realised they both do the same thing: expand on the banal. For Hemingway, the scenes I most love involve food and drink. Steinbeck, on the other hand, zooms in on the California landscape. I grew up in California, in part–it may be too familiar.
Anyway, the last book in Robinson's series, Blue Mars, is set after terraforming is done. It should be a celebration. And yet, I can't remember any significant plot points. (There was a cool low-g race.) I didn't even realise how boring and immemorable it was until well after I'd read it.
And then it hit me. It's boring because it's Steinbeck. The escarpments are gone. The burning sunrises near the polar ice caps. Gone. The boring stuff from Red Mars? I remember it. The visuals are vivid. They were tedious to digest. But they stuck and they're beautiful. By Blue Mars, however, the setting became ordinary. The idea–doing normal things on Mars–is novel. But the thing itself is not. Robinson turned Mars into a Steinbeck setting.
As I said, I read the trilogy years ago. Then, I lived in New York. I was a technological maximalist. Now, I live in Wyoming and would describe myself as a conditional optimist.
We have the tools to make a better future. But we have a tendency to be thoughtless with new tools. One of the most tragic ways we do that is by succeeding in developing and deploying technologies (autonomous deep-sea submersibles are cool!) that, in the end, homogenise the places, people and things that motivated us to reach out in the start.