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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
3.5 stars... I had high expectations of this book because some friends had liked it, but I was very disappointed. 4 stars feels a bit generous given my general sentiment. I finished it mainly because I wanted to see what I might be missing. But the unending descriptions of Mars and the structures just really bored me. It took me a while to finish because I just wasn't all that interested in some of the details the author laid out. The characters were really well formed, and I connected deeply with the first 100 and all that they set out to do. That was the other thing that drove me to finish a book that I struggled to pay attention...I wanted to see how their efforts "ended" (at the end of the book) and how the ideas of revolution would play out on Mars. It was a neat thought experiment to colonize Mars and work through the politics and logistics of settlements and government. I think that's why I went ahead with the 4th star. The core plot, characters, and storyline were good. I think I just didn't love the writing style. Probably won't read the other 2 books because I just have too many other amazing authors to check out :D
Plus de trois mois après avoir commencé Red Mars, et interrompu aussitôt mes lectures pour cause d'emploi du temps et de temps de cerveau entièrement occupés par mon année intense de formation, je peux enfin retrouver un semblant de vie… Aussitôt reprise, la lecture de cet excellent premier tome d'une trilogie s'achève. C'est dire si j'étais assoiffée d'évasion mais surtout, impossible de lâcher la « bataille » pour Mars.
Cela faisait des années (probablement une bonne décennie) que je ne m'étais pas plongée dans un bon gros tome de science-fiction et c'était la première fois, si l'on ne compte pas Dune, que je me lançais dans la croisée des genres Sci-fi et environnement.
Robinson écrit très bien et rend ce premier tome bourré de science très accessible. Les personnages principaux, au départ une centaine de scientifiques transportant leur expérimentation commencée en Antarctique sur Mars, sont riches et très variés de par leur nationalités, et donc au-delà des sciences, apportant des points de vue culturels multiples, mais aussi leurs points de vue sur ce que doit être la colonisation de Mars. Aux antipodes, ceux qui souhaitent la laisser intacte (l'émerveillement devant une nature qui paraît si hostile et stérile comparée à celle de la Terre) et ceux qui y voient une mine inépuisables de ressources pour une Terre surexploitée et surpeuplée, dirigée par les transnationales (la prochaine étape de nos multinationales?), rendant inefficace l'ONU, etc.
Une belle utopie rattrapée par la colonisation humaine, ou plutôt l'exploitation humaine (des ressources et des humains pensant y trouver une seconde chance ou un moyen rapide de s'enrichir et de vivre confortablement sur Terre à leur retour), et rapidement théâtre d'affrontement entre premiers colons (parmi lesquels une partie de nos premiers scientifiques) et les forces Terriennes.
L'aventure a été pleine de rebondissements, de trahisons, de découvertes… et elle se termine dans la destruction et la possibilité d'un nouveau départ.
Un livre très réaliste où l'on peut à la fois voir se profiler un avenir possible et les convictions de l'auteur, très intéressant et malgré tout très positif dans sa colonisation de Mars.
J'ai hésité quelques secondes, regardant amoureusement la belle pile de livres qui m'attend, maintenant que ma formation est terminée et que je n'ai plus que mes élèves sur lesquels me concentrer… non, je n'interromprai pas l'aventure. Je me lance dans Green Mars !
Cela faisait des années (probablement une bonne décennie) que je ne m'étais pas plongée dans un bon gros tome de science-fiction et c'était la première fois, si l'on ne compte pas Dune, que je me lançais dans la croisée des genres Sci-fi et environnement.
Robinson écrit très bien et rend ce premier tome bourré de science très accessible. Les personnages principaux, au départ une centaine de scientifiques transportant leur expérimentation commencée en Antarctique sur Mars, sont riches et très variés de par leur nationalités, et donc au-delà des sciences, apportant des points de vue culturels multiples, mais aussi leurs points de vue sur ce que doit être la colonisation de Mars. Aux antipodes, ceux qui souhaitent la laisser intacte (l'émerveillement devant une nature qui paraît si hostile et stérile comparée à celle de la Terre) et ceux qui y voient une mine inépuisables de ressources pour une Terre surexploitée et surpeuplée, dirigée par les transnationales (la prochaine étape de nos multinationales?), rendant inefficace l'ONU, etc.
Une belle utopie rattrapée par la colonisation humaine, ou plutôt l'exploitation humaine (des ressources et des humains pensant y trouver une seconde chance ou un moyen rapide de s'enrichir et de vivre confortablement sur Terre à leur retour), et rapidement théâtre d'affrontement entre premiers colons (parmi lesquels une partie de nos premiers scientifiques) et les forces Terriennes.
L'aventure a été pleine de rebondissements, de trahisons, de découvertes… et elle se termine dans la destruction et la possibilité d'un nouveau départ.
Un livre très réaliste où l'on peut à la fois voir se profiler un avenir possible et les convictions de l'auteur, très intéressant et malgré tout très positif dans sa colonisation de Mars.
J'ai hésité quelques secondes, regardant amoureusement la belle pile de livres qui m'attend, maintenant que ma formation est terminée et que je n'ai plus que mes élèves sur lesquels me concentrer… non, je n'interromprai pas l'aventure. Je me lance dans Green Mars !
Le coté colonisation et terraformation est vraiment sympa, mais les personnages sont un peu léger. On n'arrive ni a s'identifier, ni a s'attacher. Et même quand l'un d'eux décède, cela fait à peu près autant d'effet que si on nous disais qu'il est allé acheter du pain.
Du coup on manque d'implication dans l'histoire et quelques longueurs apparaissent.
C'est dommage, sans cela, il serait vraiment bien.
Du coup on manque d'implication dans l'histoire et quelques longueurs apparaissent.
C'est dommage, sans cela, il serait vraiment bien.
adventurous
dark
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I don’t quite know how I feel about this book. For the first two-thirds or so I was unimpressed by the plot, reminded of Ministry for the Future and its bland story interspersed by theoretical references. Red Mars was similar, until it wasn’t. I finished it wanting to read the sequel immediately. Perhaps it was the death of the old opeming up room for the new - characters, resistance and rebuild, and so on.
It landed in an odd place in terms of hard vs soft science-fiction. There was an obsession with geology, but a denial of how difficult it would actually be to colonise Mars. This was enabled by the dreaming up of the perfect technology for every possible threat of nature. I wonder if a book which more slowly found it’s way through the minefield, with all the accidents along the way, would have been more compelling, in its own way. However, this approach lets the author also embrace wide-ranging speculation about the “softer” aspects of colonisation. I ended up finding these elements more gripping. I wonder if more of a “pure” focus on that (aka, stripping out a whole lot of commentary on snowbows and sundogs) would have made it a more interesting read for the entire book, instesd of just the final third.
“… channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow.”
“They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always.
“Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious; they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.”
“It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.”
“And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos.”
Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted
And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into
that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness
In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going—it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Æv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind
I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being
You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he's a kind of literary figure really, a political construct
Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It's an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal
Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don't
Whenever scientists say they're Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement
eleven-year sunspot cycle
The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase. “Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.” “Couldn’t have that,” John said. Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?” “The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—” “Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades?” “—used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all
She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emotions
The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.
They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the higest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride
core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed, and so Mars has practically no magnetic field
But the one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge, a bulge eleven kilometers high, three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above its surroundings. This bulge caused many other features to appear: a system of radial fractures covering an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that would cover the United States coast to coast. The bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest, one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth's largest volcano. So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface of Mars
there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin
The planet was too small, too far from the sun. The atmosphere froze and fell to the ground. Carbon dioxide sublimed to form a thin new atmosphere, while oxygen bonded to rock, and turned it red
Sometimes intense artesian pressures built against these dams; and sometimes a meteor would hit, or a volcano appear, and the dam would burst apart and a whole underground sea would spew over the landscape, in enormous floods, floods ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi
eccentricities of Mars's orbit meant that the southern and northern hemispheres traded the cold and warm winters in a 51,000 years cycle, so that the dry ice cap and the water ice cap reversed poles
Each swing of this pendulum laid down a new stratum of sand, and the troughs of new dunes cut through older layers at an angle, until the sand around the poles lay in a stippled cross-hatching
The walkers were designed for the martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the terran atmosphere would have. This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars's minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have
Shikata ga nai," meaning there is no other choice
at perhelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice
tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend's life, you invade each other's lives in a sense, and of course that's impossible and it has to end, usually badly
Craters became rare, and the ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims: splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the impact
barchran dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall, and backs a kilometer wide; and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers long. As with so many other martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their terran analogs in the Sahara and Gobi
The little button sun sank under the black line to the west. Now the sky was a maroon dome, the high clouds the pink of moss campion. Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color that was picked up by the dune crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain
We obtain water to allow us to explore, we don't explore just to obtain water
We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces
Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally."
Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you're going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you're doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it—we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There's simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see—as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it's bad faith, and it's not science.
The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a concatenation of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.
Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation
the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out
flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, "I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We're one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshipping it with our attention
People didn't understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one's life
Extraversion-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence from many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concept. Not as a simple duality of course; one did not label a person plainly this or that, but rather placed them on a scale, rating them for such qualities as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on. These measurements had been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that exceeded chance by a huge amount
physiological investigations had revealed that extraversion was linked with resting states of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backwards to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extravert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion
Wenger's index of autonomic balance, which used seven different variables to determine whether an individual was dominated by the sympathetic or the parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic branch responds to outside stimuli and alerts the organism to action, so that individuals dominated by this branch were excitable; the parasympathetic branch, on the other hand, habituates the alerted organism to the stimulus, and restores it to homeostatic balance, so that individuals dominated by this branch were placid. Duffy had suggested calling these two classes of individuals labiles and stabiles, and this classification, while not as famous as extraversion and introversion, was just as solidly backed by empirical evidence, and just as useful in understanding varieties of temperament
Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry, which proposed that no simple dialectic was enough to indicate the true complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to acknowledge the real difference between something's opposite and its contrary; the concept "not-X" being not quite the same thing as "anti-X," as one saw immediately
there were extraverts who were excitable, and extraverts who were on an even keel; there were introverts who were quite emotional, and those who were not
For the northern combination, extraverted and stabile, was clearly what Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Trimestigus, Wundt, and Jung would have called sanguine; the western point, extraverted and labile, was choleric; in the east, introverted and stabile was phlegmatic; and in the south, introverted and labile was of course the very definition of the melancholic
Phlegmatics and melancholics would naturally not get along, both being introverted and quick to withdraw, and the stabile one put off by the unpredictability of the labile; so that they would withdraw from each other, like Sax and Ann
Melancholia as a failure of memory, an acute sensation of the irreality of the past, its non-existence. . . . He was a melancholic: withdrawn, out of control of his feelings, inclined to depression
A compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the difference?
Power wasn't a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence.
Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis
no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology
Both sides say they are in favor of nature, of course. One has to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture
The intense thereness of it—haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs—I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment.
It landed in an odd place in terms of hard vs soft science-fiction. There was an obsession with geology, but a denial of how difficult it would actually be to colonise Mars. This was enabled by the dreaming up of the perfect technology for every possible threat of nature. I wonder if a book which more slowly found it’s way through the minefield, with all the accidents along the way, would have been more compelling, in its own way. However, this approach lets the author also embrace wide-ranging speculation about the “softer” aspects of colonisation. I ended up finding these elements more gripping. I wonder if more of a “pure” focus on that (aka, stripping out a whole lot of commentary on snowbows and sundogs) would have made it a more interesting read for the entire book, instesd of just the final third.
“… channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow.”
“They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always.
“Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious; they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.”
“It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.”
“And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos.”
Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted
And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into
that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness
In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going—it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Æv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind
I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being
You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he's a kind of literary figure really, a political construct
Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It's an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal
Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don't
Whenever scientists say they're Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement
eleven-year sunspot cycle
The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase. “Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.” “Couldn’t have that,” John said. Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?” “The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—” “Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades?” “—used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all
She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emotions
The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.
They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the higest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride
core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed, and so Mars has practically no magnetic field
But the one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge, a bulge eleven kilometers high, three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above its surroundings. This bulge caused many other features to appear: a system of radial fractures covering an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that would cover the United States coast to coast. The bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest, one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth's largest volcano. So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface of Mars
there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin
The planet was too small, too far from the sun. The atmosphere froze and fell to the ground. Carbon dioxide sublimed to form a thin new atmosphere, while oxygen bonded to rock, and turned it red
Sometimes intense artesian pressures built against these dams; and sometimes a meteor would hit, or a volcano appear, and the dam would burst apart and a whole underground sea would spew over the landscape, in enormous floods, floods ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi
eccentricities of Mars's orbit meant that the southern and northern hemispheres traded the cold and warm winters in a 51,000 years cycle, so that the dry ice cap and the water ice cap reversed poles
Each swing of this pendulum laid down a new stratum of sand, and the troughs of new dunes cut through older layers at an angle, until the sand around the poles lay in a stippled cross-hatching
The walkers were designed for the martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the terran atmosphere would have. This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars's minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have
Shikata ga nai," meaning there is no other choice
at perhelion Mars is about forty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunlight. This fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequal. Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice
tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend's life, you invade each other's lives in a sense, and of course that's impossible and it has to end, usually badly
Craters became rare, and the ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims: splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the impact
barchran dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall, and backs a kilometer wide; and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers long. As with so many other martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their terran analogs in the Sahara and Gobi
The little button sun sank under the black line to the west. Now the sky was a maroon dome, the high clouds the pink of moss campion. Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color that was picked up by the dune crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain
We obtain water to allow us to explore, we don't explore just to obtain water
We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces
Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally."
Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you're going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you're doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it—we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There's simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see—as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it's bad faith, and it's not science.
The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a concatenation of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.
Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation
the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out
flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, "I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We're one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshipping it with our attention
People didn't understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one's life
Extraversion-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence from many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concept. Not as a simple duality of course; one did not label a person plainly this or that, but rather placed them on a scale, rating them for such qualities as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on. These measurements had been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that exceeded chance by a huge amount
physiological investigations had revealed that extraversion was linked with resting states of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backwards to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extravert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion
Wenger's index of autonomic balance, which used seven different variables to determine whether an individual was dominated by the sympathetic or the parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic branch responds to outside stimuli and alerts the organism to action, so that individuals dominated by this branch were excitable; the parasympathetic branch, on the other hand, habituates the alerted organism to the stimulus, and restores it to homeostatic balance, so that individuals dominated by this branch were placid. Duffy had suggested calling these two classes of individuals labiles and stabiles, and this classification, while not as famous as extraversion and introversion, was just as solidly backed by empirical evidence, and just as useful in understanding varieties of temperament
Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry, which proposed that no simple dialectic was enough to indicate the true complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to acknowledge the real difference between something's opposite and its contrary; the concept "not-X" being not quite the same thing as "anti-X," as one saw immediately
there were extraverts who were excitable, and extraverts who were on an even keel; there were introverts who were quite emotional, and those who were not
For the northern combination, extraverted and stabile, was clearly what Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Trimestigus, Wundt, and Jung would have called sanguine; the western point, extraverted and labile, was choleric; in the east, introverted and stabile was phlegmatic; and in the south, introverted and labile was of course the very definition of the melancholic
Phlegmatics and melancholics would naturally not get along, both being introverted and quick to withdraw, and the stabile one put off by the unpredictability of the labile; so that they would withdraw from each other, like Sax and Ann
Melancholia as a failure of memory, an acute sensation of the irreality of the past, its non-existence. . . . He was a melancholic: withdrawn, out of control of his feelings, inclined to depression
A compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the difference?
Power wasn't a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence.
Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis
no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology
Both sides say they are in favor of nature, of course. One has to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture
The intense thereness of it—haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs—I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment.
adventurous
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Ostensibly about colonizing and terraforming Mars, this is really a book about the group psychology of the first 100 settlers, but with enough speculative science involved to make it interesting even for hard sci-fi people who aren't so taken with character development. Each section is from the perspective of a different character, bringing in completely different personal dynamics and scientific background. I was warned that the story changes drastically about halfway through, and it does, but not in a way that alienated me. I might have even given this five stars, but it was a slow read, and two months later I haven't picked up the next book in the series yet.
Some parts were amazing, others not so much. Why no one has turned this into a TV series is astounding. Such great material.
Its probably fine? I just don't think I'm feeling any dudes right now. There are a lot of dudes. - If someone i trust recommends it, ill give it another shot. It's just a lot of trust to put into a man I've never heard of before. And that's my one rule.