Conference noted::sf

1224.0. "Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars" by MTWAIN::KLAES (Keep Looking Up) Wed May 25 1994 19:19

Article: 601
From: [email protected] (Bret Jolly)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: Review: _Red Mars_ by Kim Stanley Robinson
Date: 24 May 1994 08:16:03 GMT
Organization: UCLA Mathematics Department
Sender: [email protected] (Michael C. Berch)
 
                   Review: Red Mars
 
   The front matter of this book contains three pages of praise from
various reviewers.  Gregory Benford says:
 
	  If you're looking for a scientifically sophisticated story,
	  told with enormity[!] and grace, here it is.
 
   It does indeed have an enormity rivaling Judith Merril's infamous
lunar helicopter.  Some characters set off across the unterraformed
Mars in a dirigible loaded with windmills!  Here is KSR's description:
 
             Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a
          planetary model [?] built back in Germany by
          Friedrichshafen Noch Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so
          that it had just recently arrived.  It was called the
          _Arrowhead_, and it measured 120 meters across the
          wings, a hundred meters from front to back, and forty
          meters tall.  It had an internal ultralite frame, and
          turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these
          were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries
          were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper
          surface of the bag.  The pencil-shaped gondola extended
          most of the length of the underside, because most of it
          was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills [...]
 
   Ignoring KSR's peculiar notion of what a turboprop is, where was he
that day in grade school when they explained the law of buoyancy?
Evidently he was troubled by his intuition here, because he added an
`explanation' a few paragraphs later.
 
             It was remarkable, in fact, that they had not done
          anything like this before.  But flying on Mars was no
          easy thing, because of the thin atmosphere.  They were
          in the best solution: a dirigible as big and light as
          possible, filled with hydrogen, which in Martian air
          was not only not flammable, but also even lighter
          relative to its surroundings than it would have been on
          Earth.  Hydrogen and the latest in superlite materials
          gave them a lift to carry a cargo like their windmills,
          but with such a cargo aboard they were ludicrously sluggish.
 
   We are all abysmally ignorant about some things, but should anyone
this ignorant of science be writing ultrahard saifai?  And what of the
editors who let this slip by?  Did they all skip class on that same
fateful day in grade school?
 
   Well, you say, what of the rest of the book?  After all, if we
demanded that our ultrahard-saifai writers had a good general knowledge
of science, we wouldn't have much to read.  Unfortunately, and despite
its Nebula award, this book is a thoroughbred turkey.  KSR has written
some admirable stories, but I felt embarrassed for him all through this
book.
 
   It's a shame too, because he was clearly trying hard.  I could
imagine him at his word processor, surrounded by stacks of NASA SPs.
But he has no idea of what is technologically plausible.  For example,
when the 100 colonists arrive on Mars in 2027 they get their water by
*extracting it from the atmosphere*.
 
   A ways into the colonization, Mars is flooded with immigrants,
mainly from backward countries who are trying to relieve their
population pressures.  Did KSR think about this for five minutes?
 
   While the 100 colonists are colonizing Mars, their biologists
discover the secret of immortality in their spare time.
 
   KSR can create vivid, believable characters when he wants to (as in
_The Gold Coast_) but he didn't do it here.  Throughout the book the
characters give the impression that they are doing things not because
they want to, but because the author told them to.  The most appalling
example of this is a mild spoiler, so I save it to the end after a
spoiler warning and some control-Ls.
 
   A comparison with Pamela Sargent's Venus books forced itself upon
me.  Sargent wrote a saga of the terraforming of Venus, where KSR is
writing a saga of the terraforming of Mars.  Sargent is not that much
more knowledgeable than KSR, and when she figured out that terraforming
Venus was much harder than she'd thought at first, she fell back on
anti-gravity machines which marred a would-be ultrahard saifai.
Nonetheless, Sargent's saga is much better than KSR's.
 
   This is partly because her characters are more interesting and
believable, but largely because her future world is better thought out
and much more interesting than KSR's.  The Earthbound part of KSR's
future is pretty much boring extrapolation.  Sargent's future is exotic
and strange.  Sargent's future has a sensawunda that KSR's lacks.
 
   _Red Mars_ does have some interesting ideas in it, but these are all
to be found, to much better effect, in his excellent novelette _Green
Mars_, which has appeared in a Tor double.  This novelette should not
be confused with the *novel* _Green Mars_, which is a sequel to _Red
Mars_ and which is to be followed by _Blue Mars_.  (Librarians
everywhere will curse KSR's name for this!)  KSR has decided to expand
an excellent novelette into a bloated and stupid trilogy.  This was a
good business decision on his part, but a sad decision from the
viewpoint of those who love good saifai.
 
%A	Robinson, Kim Stanley 
%T	Red Mars
%I	Bantam Spectra
%C	New York
%D	February 1993 (paperback November 1993)
%G	ISBN 0-553-56073-5
%P	572pp
%O	paperback USD5.99, also in hardback and trade ppb.
 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
  MILD SPOILER WARNING
 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
  When the original 100 colonists arrived at Mars, a group of
political utopians split off and colonized Phobos.  Near the end of
the book it is revealed that, in their first year on Phobos, the
utopians hollowed it out and secretly turned it into a giant rocket.
Ignoring the problem of how they did this, *why* they did this remains
a mystery. 
 

Article: 683
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
From: [email protected] (Alan Wexelblat)
Subject: Review of Kim Stanley Robinson's THE GOLD COAST
Sender: [email protected] (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: The Internet
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 19:20:06 GMT
 
			THE GOLD COAST
			by Kim Stanley Robinson
    
		Review Copyright (c) 1994 Alan Wexelblat
 
Kim Robinson has been getting a lot of press lately, with all the
Mars-related books out.  I discovered I had a couple of his earlier novels
stashed away on my to-be-read shelves (which are huge; don't ask).  So I
picked one out and started working on it.
 
It's a thick book so it took me a while, but it certainly was worth the
effort.  I'm sorry I didn't do it earlier.  Robinson is a master at building
a complete, complex, believable future.  In this case, it's the "gold coast"
of southern California, specifically Orange County.  GOLD COAST looks at
this area, once considered a paradise on par with France's Mediterranean
coast, in a tough but realistically bleak future.  In this future, the
ongoing collapse is largely ignored by a population entranced by vast arrays
of computer-controlled freeways, McJobs and shoddy, crammed housing, and an
ever-growing array of escapist drugs.
 
Each of these is familiar tropes in SF writing, but Robinson manages to put
an unique spin on all of them: his highways, for example, are ubiquitous
electric-powered multilayered ribbons.  But they still have accidents, still
have massive traffic jams, still block out the sunlight for the people who
must live below them.  It's the 1939-Worlds-Fair dream reinterpreted through
the postmodern lens of the late Reagan era.  And the reinterpretation
strikes home.  Time and again I found myself nodding in agreement with the
author as he sketched out the likely future for southern Cali.  Even with
six years of aging, this book's predictions still seem realistic, a tough
job for any SF writer.
 
Robinson's other strength is his characters.  He gives us this future
through the eyes of four very real people.  Jim McPherson is a dreamer, a
man with no direction in his life other than *away* from the defense-
industry dronehood of his father's career.  Abe Bernard is a serious, hard-
working guy haunted by the ever-growing number of bodies he pulls from the
freeway wrecks in his EMT job.  Tashi Nakamura is a quiet individualist,
seeking his own path through the modern maelstrom, choosing his steps
carefully. And Sandy Chapman is a happy-go-lucky party guy and chemical
entrepreneur, making his living cooking up strange and fun new concoctions
to be "lidded."  Drugs are taken here by eyedropper -- direct access to the
brain and a rich blood supply (again, the familiar theme presented with an
interesting twist).
 
In further tribute to the author's talents, he manages to present Jim's
parents as realistic, sympathetic people with their own lives and
complexities.  It would have been very easy to stereotype them (the father
is an engineer for an SDI-related defense company, the mother a church lady)
and Robinson totally avoids that trap.
 
The plot is way too complex to summarize here.  Instead I'll just promise
you that Robinson has thought out his character's actions as carefully as
he's thought out their personalities.  In many ways this is a quest story,
with each of them (and some of the minor players as well) searching for
their true selves.  Some change, some don't, but each has the logical sense
we want from real people acting in real situations.  Oh, and the way he
manages to pull off the climax just has to be seen to be believed.  It
works, it ties things up neatly (but not tritely) and it left me with a real
admiration for Robinson's writing talents.
 
%A Robinson, Kim Stanley 
%T The Gold Coast
%I Tor SF
%C New York
%D 1988
%G ISBN 0-812-55239-3
%P 389pp
%O US$4.95