Subject: GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

From: [email-masked] ()
Date: 04 Mar 94 03:37:16 GMT

GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson
         Bantam Spectra, ISBN 0-553-37335-8, 1994, 535pp, US$12.95.
                     A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		      Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper

     This is the second book of Robinson's "Mars" trilogy.  The first was
last year's Hugo-nominated RED MARS, and the series will be finished with
the upcoming BLUE MARS.  (I should mention again that while Robinson's
novella "Green Mars" appears to take place in the same future history as
this series, it is not a part of this novel.)

     GREEN MARS, it must be said, suffers from the same flaws and
difficulties as most middle-of-a-trilogy novels.  It does not start at the
beginning, nor does it go through to the end.  While RED MARS can be read as
a stand-alone novel, GREEN MARS cannot.  You must know what happened in RED
MARS for GREEN MARS to make any sense or have any meaning.  (I would really
have appreciated a brief glossary of major characters and political groups-
-my memory of the details of RED MARS has faded over the intervening year.)

     There is also (to my tastes) far too much technical discussion of
terraforming and areology, particularly in the first half of the book.  For
example, on page 148 Robinson writes: "The surface of the glacier appeared
to be extremely broken, as the literature had suggested--mixed with regolith
during the flooding, and shot through with trapped carbonation bubbles.
Rocks and boulders caught on the surface had melted the ice underneath them
and then it had refrozen around them, in a daily cycle that had left them
all about two-thirds submerged.  All the seracs, standing above the surface
of the glacier like titanic dolmens, were on close inspection found to be
deeply pitted." (By the way, a regolith is a layer of loose rock material
resting on bedrock, a serac is a large mass of ice broken off the main body
of a glacier and remaining behind in a crevasse after glacial movement or
melting, and a dolmen is a prehistoric megalithic [large stone] structure
consisting of two or more upright stones with a capstone, typically forming
a chamber (which doesn't actually sound like what the seracs would look
like, but what the heck).  All definitions courtesy of the AMERICAN HERITAGE
DICTIONARY.) I could be wrong, but I also think that the discussions on
pages 175 through 187 and elsewhere of the poisonousness effects of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere are confusing it with carbon monoxide.  While
inhaling large amounts of carbon dioxide can cause death by suffocation, it
is not poisonous in the usual sense of the word, and it is not clear to me
that in an atmosphere with a certain percentage of oxygen it matters whether
the remainder is nitrogen or carbon dioxide, at least as far as human
respiration goes.  (Though the atmospheric pressure would be important--
consider the possible side-effects of nitrogen to deep-sea divers.)

     This may all seem terrible technical and nit-picky, but the book lends
itself to that so well that is should be somewhat expected.

     It is only in the second half of GREEN MARS that Robinson returns in
force to the political and historical aspects of the series.  While one may
argue that he key event that triggers the "phase change" of GREEN MAR's
final chapter is totally arbitrary, there's no denying that historical
triggers often are.  Still, I have to reserve final judgement on GREEN MARS
until BLUE MARS concludes the series, and then see if GREEN MARS serves its
purpose in the overall picture.  That is the only way to view this book and
much as I want to see Kim Stanley Robinson finally get a Hugo, it makes no
sense to look at this as a possibility.  (I mention this because this had a
British edition in 1993, and hence would be eligible for the Hugo awards for
last year, to be given at Conadian this September.  I note this just to
clarify its eligibility for anyone who does want to nominate it.)

%T      Green Mars
%A      Kim Stanley Robinson
%C      New York
%D      March 15, 1994
%I      Bantam Spectra
%O      hardback, US$22.95/trade paperback, US$12.95
%G      ISBN 0-553-09640-0/ISBN 0-553-37335-8
%P      535pp
%S      Mars
%V      2

-- 
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | [email-masked] / [email-masked]

"Remember, high-tech means breaks down next week, while cutting edge means
breaks down this afternoon.  -Bruce Sterling