NOT using the
panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose,
CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)),
I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF
DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation
is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes
reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend
of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
When
I traveled in Nigeria, Cameroun, and Liberia, I had a suitcase that I had to
carry with me EVERYWHERE. As such, I couldn’t really pack many books for those
long trips between villages and cities.
I
picked up books at Mission Station book exchanges and I made sure they were BIG
books because I only rarely made it into the Stations and had to keep my books
few…because they were far between. I read Nevil Shute’s ON THE BEACH for the
first time; Alex Haley’s ROOTS; Colleen McCullough THE THORN BIRDS; MM Kaye’s
THE FAR PAVILIONS and a dozen other books both classical and romantic. I
brought James Michener’s CHESAPEAKE with me and then traded it for THE COVENANT
and eventually CENTENNIAL. I found James Clavell’s SHŌGUN
as well, and read several others I’ve long forgotten.
Of
course, long before this, I’d read Frank Herbert’s DUNE (Trivia: What
publishing coming originally bought DUNE and published it in novel form?*) and
drowned in the world of the dune seas.
So
why the foray into such an eclectic menagerie of novels?
In
each one, the author made sure that the world was a character in the novel; in
fact, while I can only remember a few of the names of main characters, I can remember
the worlds they inhabited with brilliant clarity (Paul Muad’dib alone stands
out, but he was a central character that persists through six books, all of
which I’ve read.)
The
Mars of Robinson’s books is also a central character in all three of its iterations,
Red, Green, and Blue. If the planet were not exactly as it is, the characters
themselves wouldn’t make any sense at all. You can’t take the First Hundred
from RED and transplant them exactly as they are at that time and place into
BLUE. The fact is that they are in
the third book, but they are not only vastly changed, they are fractured,
confused, and are brilliantly illustrated by the one of the First Hundred
visiting the Uranian moon, Miranda. They are and they are not the same
character, as changed by the land as the land has been changed by them.
The
same can be said for the other books. After the first chapter in CENTENNIAL,
Michener backtracks to the formation of the Earth. Really?!? How bizarre. Why
would he possibly do that? He did it because the landscape of Colorado is
intimately tied to the behavior of the characters. The land creates the characters
who reflect the characteristics of the land; the two are inextricably linked.
I
read a negative review of Robinson’s BLUE MARS: “All of [the] people [in BLUE
MARS], all of them, they need to sit down and read some fiction, and realize
that every issue does not need to be argued in the key of shrill. Other than
that, this book skims over decades and decades, occasionally alighting, but it
really is a bird's eye view that swoops down to individual characters every
once in a while. There were sections I enjoyed a great deal, sections that
drove me to distraction, and some that just bored it. It's such a mishmash, and
I don't know how to put it all together.” (http://smorgasbook.blogspot.com/2016/03/blue-mars-by-kim-stanley-robinson.html)
I
think Megan Baxter missed the point. None of Robinson’s books are about people
alone. Just as SHŌGUN is definitely about a European who is shipwrecked on the
shores of Japan, the land that created the Japanese is far more important than
he is. The story would have been meaningless if the Shogunate culture of Japan
and their way of thinking had developed any other way – it was the island of
Japan that created a people who were so different from the Europeans that when
he is allowed to visit his former crew members, “Blackthorne is astonished at
how far he had ventured from the standard 'European' way of life (which he now
sees to be filthy, vulgar, and ignorant), and he is actually disgusted by them.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dgun_(novel))
One
of the elderly survivors of the First Hundred named Maya expresses a similar
disgust with her old colleagues: “Maybe the final survivor of the First Hundred
wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway. New friends, a new life – wasn’t that what
she was searching for not? So that these sad old faces were just a hindrance to
her?” (Part 12 It Goes So Fast, section six)
Again,
Maya was created by the world and like the First Hundred, she has been
repeatedly shaped by the changing world, from Red to Green to Blue. She would
not be the character she is if she had lived this long on Earth – or on Miranda
or on Mercury.
A
quick observation is that one of the reasons that Jackie, another one of the
First Hundred, is so “irritating” is that she refuses to left the world shape
her. She travels from Mars to Earth to Jupiter to Mercury to Uranus, all the while
professing that it is Mars that changed her while refusing to change at all,
remaining the same woman the entire time, resisting the influence of not only
the worlds, but of the people. I suppose that, were I to be forced to, I would say
that she (of all the characters) is drawn to be the Sun; the center of
everything, immovable, virtually ageless and the only thing in the Solar System
that will not change in the lifetimes of even the most life-extended Human.
At
any rate, like the other books, Robinson’s are as much about the planet Mars – not
even so much an inanimate object, but as a literal character with moods, a will,
and a script with things to “say” – and its effect on the main characters. I
don’t know if there’s a specific genre for them , but I would propose Living
Landscape Novels.
RED,
GREEN, AND BLUE MARS would be in that genre, keeping company with Pulitzer
Prize, Nebula and Hugo award-winning books as well as those that have sold
millions of copies, been made into movies, television mini-series (sometimes
remade), radio plays, and served as defining works for many of their authors.
While
I can’t say, “I loved it!”, I can say that I won’t forget it any time soon.
Answer: * Chilton’s,
“…currently publishes hundreds of automobile repair manuals that cover
thousands of models.”
Image: http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/sites/default/files/M3_Blue%20Mars.jpg,
https://thelastmetroid.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/dune-cover.jpg,
https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/283275019017_/The-Covenant-Centennial-by-James-Michener-2.jpg
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