Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is one of my favorite science fiction movies of the last five years, and his follow-up, Elysium, is probably the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, and I’m glad to see that the first trailer for it doesn’t contain any signs I should contain my enthusiasm:

One of the things that I think the best dystopian fiction gets at is the idea that technological advancements will not be distributed equitably or universally, and in fact, that technology may be used to provide an escape hatch for the most privileged people in society. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the anti-aging treatment that’s developed by Mars’ first settlers goes to the wealthiest people, who are often associated with multi-national corporations, first, while the much larger and poorer segments of the population are denied it. In Alaya Dawn Johnson’s excellent young adult novel The Summer Prince, the main characters live in a society that’s physically stratified, the most powerful living on the highest levels of an enclosed dwelling, and the least on the lowest levels, which are most affected by both sewage and the results of agricultural production. This was something that actually struck me particularly strongly on my trip, which was my first experience with resort travel, a system that, from your pickup at the airport by a preassigned shuttle, to the huge gates you pass through on the way to your actual hotel, is designed to make sure you have as little contact with the actual country you’re visiting as possible.

Given that Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and that his family migrated to Vancouver to get away from South Africa’s extremely high crime rates, it makes sense that he’s particularly attuned both to physical separate by class and race, and the possibility of exit from a system that seems to have failed. It was that awareness that make District 9, in which a stalled alien spaceship united black and white South Africans, who joined together to ghettoize the lost extraterrestrials in a township system like the one that was once used to restrict the movement of black South Africans, such a smart and moving piece of science fiction. In that movie, someone went from the privileged side of the divide to the underprivileged one and discovered that he couldn’t go back again, that there are strict rules for who you have to be to live in a comparative paradise. It looks like Elysium is flipping that divide in having Matt Damon crash the gates of a heaven near to earth, surprising the residents of that gated community with his capacity to get inside. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets there.

The amazing men and women of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration landed the Curiosity rover on Mars last night. But the piece of writing that perhaps best encapsulates the wild joy at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and the meaning of their accomplishment, was published almost 20 years before, on January 1, 1993. I hope everyone will forgive me quoting Kim Stanley Robinson’s introduction to Red Mars, the first of his masterful trilogy about the colonization of the Red Planet, at length here, because it’s the most powerful meditation on the meaning of Mars that I know, and it’s so strikingly applicable here (and make it worth it by going out and buying the book if my repeated proselytization for it hasn’t convinced you already). Robinson wrote:

Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis—they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah—stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

In Robinson’s vision, we sent the first colonizing mission to Mars in 2026. President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposes cutting NASA’s planetary science budget from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion and ending the U.S. partnership with the E.U. to send probes to Mars on two planned missions in 2016 and 2018—this year, the Jet Propulsion Lab’s open house was marked by a bake sale to call attention to the proposed cuts. What the scientists at JPL did last night was a critical part of our future in space not simply because they did something extremely difficult that will advance our understanding of the planet that’s fascinated so many of us so deeply and for so long, but because they helped keep the dream alive at all, reminding of what it’s like to watch the future arrive, and how cheap it is to purchase in comparison to what we spend to maintain conflicts and policies that mire us in the past.

In the years I’ve been working as a professional critic, I’ve never been as excited for a follow-up to a directorial debut as I have been for whatever Niell Blomkamp decided to do after District 9, his story of a South Africa in which white and black citizens have united to enforce apartheid on a group of stranded aliens they’ve herded into townships, which for my money was both the smartest alien invasion movie and one of the most shattering love stories in years. I’d heard rumbles that his subsequent feature, Elysium, would follow up on some of the same themes, and according to the first reported plot summary, it sounds like that’s the case:

In the year 2159 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard the government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

In between this and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim (In Time did this too, but less well) I’m very, very excited for the fact that a new crop of sci-fi movies that recognize that mobility is something that gets more valuable as society gets more stratified. Immigration reform gets treated like a poor people’s cause, in some limited cases, like it’s a gay cause—lack of mobility from one country to the next becomes a magnifying factor of the joblesseness and violence people face in Mexico, or the second-class treatment by the federal government of marriages between same-sex couples. But the ability to move across borders, and to do so free from harassment isn’t something we should take for granted. I’ve always loved fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which recognizes that restricting mobility and immigration is a way of reinforcing inequality. I’m choosing to believe that two big-budget science fiction movies on one of my favorite themes is my reward for fighting sexism.

I was reading through Annalee Newitz’s piece in last month’s Smithsonian about Neal Stephenson’s efforts to create a more optimistic science fiction in the wake after reading Emily Nussbaum’s piece on Community and Doctor Who in the New Yorker, and the combination struck me. The thing that I’m most interested in seeing in my science fiction right now is not solely new technology, and not solely explorations of what relationships might look like in the future: I’m interested in explorations of what our relationships to our new technology are going to be like.

One of the things Emily praised about Doctor Who in its latest incarnation was its exploration of how a specific technology—time travel—affects characters’ relationships to each other, and enhances fears of abandonment, missed chances, and the need for profound patience with the people you love. Stephenson, Annalee writes, has a more concrete set of motivations:

“We have one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace and no holocaust,” Stephenson says. He and his collaborators want to avoid pessimistic thinking and magical technologies like the “hyperspace” engines common in movies like Star Wars. And, he adds, they’re “trying to get away from the hackerly mentality of playing around with existing systems, versus trying to create new things.”Stephenson’s greatest hope is that young engineers and scientists will absorb ideas from the stories and think, “If I start working on this right now, by the time I retire it might exist.”

I think what I’m curious about is a fusion of the two. Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312 is about precisely that dilemma: what happens when humans who are interconnected to their personal computing devices to the point of having them embedded in their bodies, discover that computing’s evolved to a higher level such that they aren’t sure they trust something they’re intimately connected to? What happens when they date someone or get involved in professional relationships where someone wants them to detach? These aren’t exactly new questions—Orson Scott Card posed a lot of them with his character Jane, a sentient expression of the internet, in Speaker for the Dead—but Robinson feels like he’s riffing off Siri, the Apple personal assistant that doesn’t work as well as we’re told it will, but that we’re supposed to want to like quite a bit.

And these aren’t the only technologies that pose those kinds of questions. Watching Star Trek a couple of years ago, I was struck watching Bones repeatedly stab Kirk with injections. I have a nut allergy, and my Epi-Pens are a source of both great comfort and anxiety to me. I’m glad they exist, but I’m terrified of actually having to jab myself with one, and I was both uncomfortable and fascinated to see Bones doing that repeatedly as if it was no big thing. I’d be curious to hear from long-time Trekkies in the audiences whether there are episodes of the show or movies I might have missed that address what it’s like to have medical technology that good. Do people take more risks? Do doctors overmedicate patients? Does it lead them into error? I feel like we have a lot of science fiction, whether it’s John Scalzi’s work or The Forever War that discusses how medical technology changes decision-making by soldiers. But from a doctor’s perspective, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a tool that powerful at your disposal, and I’d love to see a futuristic medical show that explores some of those questions. I’d totally watch a show about a futuristic Atul Gwande (or, who am I kidding, Shonda Rhimes 2032 show Space Mistresses).

Good gadget design or carefully thought-out rules are a first step towards good science fiction. But just putting those tools or those rules into action without meditating on them aren’t the only way to tell stories with them.

I know Kyle Buchanan is being sort of snarky in this post about why Mars movies have such a dismal track record at the box office, but I think there’s a tie between this sort of sentiment and our conversation from earlier in the week about the need for thoughtful science fiction. He writes:

Why are audiences so turned off by our planetary neighbor? They don’t seem to have the same hang-ups about the moon, which has factored into big hits like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Apollo 13 (as well as critically acclaimed movies like Moon), but that rock is movie-ready: Stories set there simply have to be told in romantic black-and-white. Meanwhile, setting your movie on red, red Mars is like staring into a Virtual Boy for two hours, and who wants that? (Evidently not John Carter director Andrew Stanton, whose Mars is more tan than red.) It helps, too, that the moon is such an ever-present presence in our lives, as well as a place that Americans have actually been. If NASA can’t motivate an administration to send a man to Mars, why should the average moviegoer get worked up about it?

Why should the average moviegoer get worked up over Mars movies if there’s absolutely no rationale for a movie to be set there? I have a fuller review of Disney’s sci-fi blockbuster John Carter coming tomorrow, but there is zero reason the events of that movie need to take place on Mars, which I assume is only the setting because Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the books on which the movie is based thought it was cool. Ditto on pretty much every other movie with a tie to Mars—it’s a little further away from the Moon, and we haven’t had human contact with it, so it’s easy to project ideas of wacky things onto it. But that doesn’t mean those wacky aliens or evil forces derive anything interesting or significant from the fact that they come from or are based on Mars.

By contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy works because there are very specific reasons for the characters to be going to Mars—an international consortium has decided it can viably made habitable (as a way to make it potentially mineable and a population escape hatch for Earth)—and a great deal of the novel’s plot is drawn from Mars-specific forces. The amount of radiation the characters are getting both drives them close together in protected habitats and encourages the experimentation that leads to a treatment to reverse aging. The religion that develops on Mars, the areophany, is specific to the planet. The political and philosophical debates are directly tied to how people feel about Mars’ geography and geological history. It’s really a shame that we can get an infinite number of failed and hugely spectacles set on Mars, but we can’t make a series or a television show out of a fully-realized, very smart Martian adventure that (other than some special effects work to show the Martian gravity) could be made pretty darn cheap.

One thing I’ve always liked about the Alien franchise is that it’s part of that subgenre of science fiction that’s concerned with the rise of corporate power. The Mars novels may be my favorite example of this, but work in the space tends to assume that the future might not be so shiny and happy after all, and plots get kicked off not when utopia is shattered, but when something threatens to upend what fragile balance we’ve achieved. So I’m pretty curious to see if the research team in Prometheus, for which we finally, oh joy, have a trailer, turn out to be independent or corporate-funded. Skewing results for the sake of pleasing your backers could make for some really nice tension.

Seeing that Barack Obama snapped up Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Brave New World, and Room for himself and Frost for his daughter, here are four alternative recommendations for what the First Family might consider reading on their summer vacation — and what it might mean for the rest of the country.

1. Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen. Need motivation to defend the idea that government should enforce labor laws, and that the rich and powerful shouldn’t be allowed to run amok, particularly at the expense of their communities? But still want some good, old-fashioned Spanish Moss-draped intrigue? Matthiessen’s brutal, beautiful story about a Florida planter who terrorizes his community in the state’s frontier years and the people who team up to kill him when his abuses go too far is a haunting reminder of the lawlessness of the American past.

2. Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. So the administration might not have funded that paper about possible first contact — or have much interest in space exploration period. But if you’re going to read slightly dated science fiction, and want to think about the implications of growing corporate power and an aging population that’s going to consume resources a younger generation initially thought would be available to them (see: entitlement reform), you could do worse than to start Kim Stanley Robinson’s seminal trilogy.

3. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. If you’re looking for creepy domestic tales and could use a little motivation to push back against the conservative war on women (thanks for the free birth control though, we appreciate it!), this dystopian classic hits up all sorts of issues, from sexual freedom to the dangers of a stratified class system.

4. Trickster’s Choice, Tamora Pierce. Want to talk insurgencies and your decision-making process in Afghanistan over the vacation dinner table with Sasha? Hook her up with the first of Tamora Pierce’s duology about what it takes to build a movement that can defeat an established government — she won’t need much of a reminder that there’s a difference between feminist spymasters and the Taliban. And at least she won’t be reading Flowers in the Attic.

NPR probably doesn’t get enough credit for it, but I’ve always been impressed by the way the organization rebranded itself. Making NPR one of the central destinations for legitimate streaming of new albums and early, comprehensive interviews on new music has been a terrific way to position the organization on the leading edge of cultural consumption — it’s both servicey and makes NPR content more likely to get read. So I’m not surprised, but I am glad, to see that NPR’s ahead of its competitors in another important area: giving due praise to science fiction and fantasy.

This summer, NPR’s trying to identify the 100 best science fiction and fantasy novels out there. I think there’s a debate to be had about combining the genres, but I’m not going to throw down and have it here, especially since they’re establishing at least some guidelines by excluding paranormal romance and YA, with the promise that they’ll devote next summer to the latter. Instead, I’d say get over there and get in comments. This is a nice chance at high — or at least medium — culture acknowledgement of a genre that’s fighting hard for its legitimacy. I want this list to end up as strong as possible so everyone has to recognize. Off the top of my head, though I reserve the right to revise this later, I’d probably say Red Mars, Ender’s Game, The Mists of Avalon, Season of Mists (I am a sucker for anything Miltonian), and Cryptonomicon, if that counts.

The rules for book clubs are the same as for recaps: there will be spoilers through the first two sections of Red Mars in this book club in this post and in comments, so venture there at your peril if you’re concerned about that. If you want to spoil beyond those two sections in comments, go ahead, but label spoilers as such. All set?

Kim Stanley Robinson has to do an incredible a amount of heavy lifting in the first two sections of Red Mars: introduce a huge cast of characters and the loves and animosities that will bind and divide them for decades, provide background context on the rationale and support for the settlement, and lay out a number of very complex political debates. Fortunately, he has two central metaphors that wrap up all of those problems: escape velocity and terraforming.

On a technical level, achieving escape velocity and starting their trip to Mars is the easiest part of the mission. As a metaphor, it raises a larger, perhaps unanswerable, question. As Robinson puts it “What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.” Whether or not to terraform — to deliberately alter Mars’ atmosphere in order to make the air breathable and soil arable — is a more immediately relevant question, and one that the characters will battle over fiercely, even as they start experimenting with things like architecture and their approach to work assignments.
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