book review: green mars

Green Mars is the sequel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. They’re books about Mars! Green Mars was good in its discussion of how a new world trying to become free might act. The politics between the various factions in play on the planet feel much more realistic than something in which people rise up in a monolithic block. So for its depictions of politics, I like the book.

What I don’t like is how distant I felt from everything. Part of that comes from the varying POV characters, but a huge part of it is the timescale the book covers. See, in the first book they also invented a life-extension treatment for humans that basically means they won’t die from natural causes. It means that the characters in this book are mostly members of the first 100 on Mars and by the end they’re well into their second centuries of life. Even the kids we meet at the beginning of this book are 70 by the end. I found connecting with these characters hard when we’d gloss over so much of their lives with “and then she spent a decade working on aquifers.”

I get that terraforming is a long process and as a writer you want to keep your characters in the mix, but I’m more interested in what someone who only had twenty years might have to contribute. The longevity thing is the disruptive technology in this book much more than the terraforming is. It makes it more alien and science fictional which is good, but I think I’d settle for a smaller scale story that made more of a connection with the characters.

Desolation Road remains my gold standard for Mars novels even though it has a bit more “indistinguishable from magic” style technology.

book review: cyberabad days

Cyberabad Days is a collection of short stories set in the world of Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. That world is a 21st century where India has fragmented into mini-states banning or making huge amounts of money on aeais and genetic engineering and drought (and cricket).

The collection is good for getting into the details of how some of the weirder aspects of the world worked than you can really get into in the middle of a novel. Setting up other characters who are marrying aeais while the Water War happens is a great way to make the world feel deeper. The final story in the book is about one of the hugely-long-lived Brahmin gengineered children and it’s the only story that really moves the world past the big events that happen in the novel. I think it was my favourite story because of that, though “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” was te kind of complete little tale that I enjoy.

If you wanted to see if you’d like River of Gods (which is a pretty big fat book) you wouldn’t do too badly to read one or two of these stories, but don’t read “Vishnu and the Circus of Cats” because that will kind of mess up a lot of reveals from the novel. And for the record, my favourite Ian McDonald book is still Desolation Road.

book review: red mars

Photo Credit: Mars, once by kevin dooley, on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4410885928/ shared under a cc-by-2.0 license

I’m one of those people who loves a good frontier story. The idea of going somewhere new and pushing the edges of what the people you know have seen appeals to me. I’ve also heard that idea being described as a Western-centric colonialist/racist perspective so yeah, there are problematic issues there. But the beauty of science fiction is getting to do some of that bold infinitive splitting in places where there are not cultures to feel superior to. Which brings us to Mars.

I love a good Mars story. Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road, and Kage Baker’s The Empress of Mars are the two I can see on my shelves, but I’ve got my own Douglas Quaid thing going. Which makes it weird I’d never read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I have now begun.

The first novel, Red Mars, begins with a murder once a colony on Mars has been established, then it jumps back in time to show us the trip from Earth and the training the First Hundred went through, then the work of starting a colony and the politics of science. Eventually the story takes us past the opening murder into greater politics and dust-storms and mysticism. The whole book spans decades (they also develop longevity treatments on Mars, while Earth is tearing itself down in overpopulated war).

We read about these decades through the perspectives of a bunch of the first settlers, and their perspectives are all very different. What I really liked about the book was that the political choices were real and taken seriously and not very much was solved easily. Getting into these characters’ heads made a difference and it was very clear how few villains there were, just people trying to make life work in a cold harsh place.

One of the things I found disorienting was some of the 1990sishness of it. There was still an assumption that in the 2040s the important nations would be the Americans and the Russians. There’s literally one Asian person in the first 100 colonists, and she becomes a mystic orgy saint pretty quickly. Hm. Maybe that’s not such a typical ’90s thing. There’s definitely a bunch of otherization going on with the Sufis and Bedouin that feature in parts of the story, which does get in the way of some of my pure enjoyment (this is a problem that Ian McDonald’s Mars books don’t have, FYI).

The science in the book was intriguing. Robinson really delved into what it would take to make Mars habitable and how that changes the unspoiled nature of a lifeless rock. That geology (sorry, areology) has purpose beyond being fit for people and commercial interests.

Very good book, though I’ll wait a while to read the next ones. I like to make this kind of story last.

book review: the empress of mars

I loved Kage Baker’s The Empress of Mars. It’s about a bunch of plucky frontier-people who’ve been abandoned by the British Ares Company on Mars to figure their own shit out since Mars is obviously not profitable. It’s a story of building community and fighting off higher powers, and the importance of beer and having a good lawyer.

These kinds of Mars as the frontier stories (see Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road for my absolute favourite) are really enjoyable to me. There’s a character in this story who’s filled with romantic ideals of cowboys and I feel pretty much exactly the same as him, but with spacesuits instead of horses.

book review: brasyl

Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is a sf book set in Brazil. It’s about quantum physics and reality television and admonishing fallen priests and about making the best of the universe we’ve got even if it’s not the only one. Like most of his work, I enjoyed it. Not as much as Desolation Road, but enough.

One thing I realized reading this was how much the idea of a doppelganger fucking with your life scares me. The idea that people wouldn’t know who was me and who wasn’t just set me on edge and I needed to move on to one of the other timelines. Which is convenient because the book takes place in 2006, 2032 and 1732 with different characters in each part of the story. They each came back regularly, in the same order which was a bit less interesting than how McDonald’s played his ensemble casts in other books, but whatever.

A good William Gibson-ish read, with an ending that I can’t determine if it filled me with existential dread.

book review: ares express

Ian McDonald’s Ares Express is sort of a sequel to Desolation Road. I say sort of because it’s set in the same world (Mars) but only has one character that’s in both books. While Desolation Road was all about these little stories being piled up on each other, Ares Express has a plot. A big ol’ saving the world kind of plot.

The main character, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, is getting trapped into a marriage she doesn’t want so she takes off and uncovers a villain trying to destroy the world, to remake it for and by humans instead of machines. Her grandmother goes chasing after her. Through the story they meet a bunch of people and get help and Sweetness is very conscious of being in a Story, which is a tiny bit tiresome, but whatever.

The thing I felt was least satisfying about it was all the backstory given to the circus people. Once you’re about two thirds of the way into the book, Grandmother Taal is dealing with these people and we have to sit through all these explanations of where they came from that just bog the story down. If it was earlier, it wouldn’t be so frustrating but it felt so extraneous for what were minor but necessary characters. It kind of feels like they had a bigger role in the book earlier but got scrunched down to what they were.

That was really my only gripe. There was loads of awesome stuff like playing cards for years of your life and anarchist artists who were very good with explosives, and comedians as the saviours of humanity, and children being used as furniture and lots of mirrors and plunging headlong into things.

I think I prefer Desolation Road, because of its non-plottiness, but I was happy to go back to Mars in this one.

book review: desolation road

Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road is so goddamned good. It’s the story of a town on Mars (though it’s not called Mars but Ares) out in the middle of the desert. We read about the town being formed by one person stumbling upon an oasis and then welcoming the stragglers who show up on the train. It’s sort of like a western, with that whole trains to the frontier aspect.

The thing about the book that makes it so great is how it feels more like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie book than Kim Stanley Robinson. The characters have that kind of magicalness to them, that storybooklandish kind of feel. One of the town’s early residents is Persis Tatterdemalion who crashes her plane there and won’t leave unless she can fly out. There are angels and intelligent trains and a ghost that unravels a murder and identical triplets who love the same woman and war and saints and robots and strikes and the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe has Ever Known and a man who makes people bleed with his sarcasm.

Probably my favourite book I’ve read so far this year.