Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
There are some heartfelt reflections and character moments that come out of this novel, and the theme of humanity becoming something else by interacting with different places and having more time to live is interesting. But the story is, like the lives of its characters, too long, too passive and self-absorbed with introspection.
The conclusion of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is sprawling and slow: giving us multiple character vignettes across a full century of Martian development. It starts immediately after Green Mars and shows us the aftermath of the successful second revolution that gives Mars its independence from Earth. The Martians build a government, a cooperative communist economy springs up and the terraforming concludes with blue oceans, breathable air and terran wildlife across the face of the planet.
After the unifying force of corporate oppression is lifted by (mostly) non-violent resistance, cooperative effort, democratic decision, and a very timely natural disaster on earth Mars is now the leader of the two-planet system and their technology and aid provide the momentum for humanity to accelerate their expansion to the asteroids and other planatiods in the Sol system. The viewpoint characters in this chapter of the trilogy don’t change much. We only have one memorable addition (Zo Boone) but she doesn’t do anything other than model a hedonistic nihilistic response to the world and then disappears, but we continue to have removals as the older first colonists start to die. After the needs of living underground and resisting the corporations are gone the characters go their separate ways, with their goals accomplished and the corporations defeated, the characters we have come to be interested in all fade into the background. Instead of being given viewpoint characters who take action we are see the world through the eyes of those who acted in the past as they watch other characters take action to change the world. As such the narrative is slow, meandering and directionless.
The story seems to be about the different characters trying to figure out what ‘Mars’ means for them as they disperse and no longer have to fight for their identity against Earth. But as they do this all the characters lose their personalities and take on a melancholic air at the loss of identity as they blend together in a vague mess of sorrow and people around them die, for the most part they don’t attempt to take action and they just wait to die.
The most interesting parts were the glimpses we were given of other worlds, but this is made less enjoyable by the way these encounters are used to deepen the angst and dissatisfaction of the viewpoint characters. Maya, Michel and Nirgal take a trip to earth where Michel descends into sorrowful nostalgia, Maya (not a viewpoint at this point) talks to the UN and arranges diplomatic stuff off stage, and Nirgal tries to find the Martian mother-figure and cult-leader Hiroko who disappeared during the revolution. Ann and Zo travel to the Jovian Moons and Uranus where Ann laments the terraforming efforts that ‘destroy’ the natural effects of the past and Zo does what her mother wants her to do and manipulates the colonists to back Jackie’s plans to unify the system against Earth. We also get to see Mercury through Zo’s eyes and are given a flyby of Venus. This expansion of what we are looking at is interesting and the glimpses we get at how people are solving the different problems of their different surroundings are very interesting, but it still feels like a loss of scope from a narrative direction.
I can appreciate that the characters are all looking for something, losing their connection to their past and trying to come to terms with their existance now that their primary goal is accomplished, and the novel conveys that feeling to the reader. But at the same time we lose our connection to their past which is the story that we were interested in and are forced to sit through chapters of existential malaise and tedium as we wait for someone to try to do something about it.
The culmination of this story isn’t a major political event, or change in Earth-Mars relations, though there is one of those building in the background that is resolved tangentially. Fittingly for the existential enemy that the characters are facing, the climax for the trilogy is when Saxifrage Russell, the great terraforming genius who started the process of turning Mars into a physically livable place when he arrived with the first hundred, expands his polymath scientific abilities into the realm of brain function and tries to come up with a drug that will help the recipients of the longevity treatments revisit their past memories which have been lost through the centuries and re-gain their connection to who they used to be, making Mars into a mentally livable place.