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.

I’ve long lamented the fact that we’re probably not ever going to get a movie series or television show based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because it’s too big, and too deeply rooted in discussions of science, to translate for a mass audience. But it sounds like Neill Blomkamp’s post-District Nine project, Elysium, in addition to boasting a cast that includes Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, and Sharlto Copley, may be exploring some of the same things I’d hoped we’d get out of a Mars project. A viral teaser for the movie comes in the form of an advertisement for a fictional company called Armadyne advertising for folks who work in everything from “zero g welders, mega-structure engineers, quantum networkers” to “zero g coupling and multi-generational planning”.

This seems promising. Mars is a major character in the Mars trilogy, but all of the characters’ engagement with the particular planet they settled are shaped by the equipment they have to work with, the structures they build, and the dramatically longer perspective they have on the impact of their work and the events of their relationships. Those concepts can be usefully applied to places other than Mars and to situations other than colonization. I thought that overall, Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City was not a particularly successful novel, though I did think that the best parts of the book were the ones about the fleet of ships sent from Earth to start new colonies that showed how extreme longevity could do the opposite of what Robinson suggests in the Mars trilogy, making people increasingly detached from morality, the value of relationships, and the consequences of their actions.

I’m not particularly surprised that Blomkamp, of all directors, would make a movie that’s engaged with structural issues. District 9 is about how humanity fails to understand the structure of an alien society because it doesn’t really see that the structure is there at all. And human governments manage their sense that they’ve got an anarchic — and to them, disgusting — society in their midst try to quarantine it with techniques that haven’t really worked perfectly before. Blomkamp did something astonishing and original when he demonstrated what happens when a society’s sense of what is true and what is possible is profoundly disrupted. I’ll be excited to see him build a new one from scratch.

Spoilers through the first seven parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars in this post; if you want to spoil beyond that with references to any of the subsequent novels, please label your comments accordingly. I’ll post information about the next book club later today.

It’s incredibly easy to see Ann Clayborn as an extremist, someone with severe psychological problems (I’m always annoyed that Michel reveals that she was abused as a child, because it seems so incredibly simplistic and reductionist), someone who refuses to face reality. But I think Kim Stanley Robinson does something wise in ending Red Mars with the one person who can most genuinely mourn not just the people killed in Mars’ first war, but can grieve for Mars itself, for lost possibilities, for beauty that’s going to vanish. Terraforming is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have costs that are worth acknowledging.

The way Robinson makes this work is to show us that Ann knows who she is, what others think of her. “Some mistakes you can never make good,” Ann thinks after Coyote and Kasei save her little remaining band of the First Hundred after they become fugitivies. “Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy. Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever.” But it’s not just that Ann knows that she’s alone, that she knows that in this specific situation, with her vision of her planet dying and her son potentially dead, she’s behaving like a zombie. It’s that Robinson puts her grief in context, especially when Frank dies, in part because Ann falls asleep at the wheel. Whereas Ann’s initially withdrawn, immobile, unable to speak, Maya is, typically, volcanic in her reaction to her lover’s death: “Sax went over and dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by her side. ‘Here, Maya, do you want a sedative?’ And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, ‘No!’ she screamed, ‘they’re my feelings, they’re my men, do you think I’m a coward, do you think I would want to be a zombie like you!’ She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking sobs.” Ann’s grieving for a whole planet, not a single person, but Robinson forces her to keep moving, to keep loving Mars: he won’t let her, or her perspective, succuumb.
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Spoilers through the first seven parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars in this post; if you want to spoil beyond that, please label your comments accordingly. And for next week, let’s finish the novel.

It’s intriguing to consider why Kim Stanley Robinson tells certain parts of the story of Mars through certain people. Obviously, some members of the First Hundred are more involved with certain seminal events in Mars’ history than others—it wouldn’t make sense to have Vlad, for example, narrate the treaty negotiations with Mars that’s told from Frank’s perspective. When it comes to a more generalized event like the revolution, though, we could have come back to Maya’s perspective, or Ann’s, or gone into Sax’s head as his work is ruined, accelerated, becomes accident rather than design. But I think it’s fitting that as her work’s turned to instruments of murder, that the story returns to Nadia—and turns her from a creator into a destroyer.

At first, the revolution is a chance for Nadia to demonstrate her value all over again, and on a much larger scale than she did among the First Hundred. She, who built if not Mars, but the things that made it possible for people to survive on Mars, is now struggling to save the planet, harnessing not just her own capabilities but the raw material of Mars itself:

There were no robots on hand, but Nadia had found she could start an operation with as small a seed as her programs, a computer, and an air miner. That kind of spontaneous generation of machinery was another aspect of their power. It was slower, no doubt of that. Still, within a month these three components together would have conjured obedient beasts out of the sand: first the factories, then the assembly plants, then the construction robots themselves, vehicles as big and articulated as a city block, doing their work in their absence. It really was confounding, their new power.

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Spoilers through the first six parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars in this post; if you want to spoil beyond that, please label your comments accordingly. And for next week, let’s read the section called “Senzeni Na.”

I.

After the heavy science and economics of the previous sections, “Guns Under the Table” feels like a real diversion, though a long-awaited one. Finally, we get to see Frank Chalmers from inside his own head for the first time since he engineered the murder of his oldest friend, his oldest enemy, the late John Boone. To a certain extent, Frank’s the Raskolnikov of the First Hundred, a murderer motivated by his commitment to shaping an ideal society who is unable to execute his grand plans, though in Frank’s case, there are larger forces against him than his own weakness (though that’s not an immaterial factor). But Frank’s also uniquely a product of American politics, and “Guns Under the Table” is a striking portrait of the emptiness of the politician.

I love the description of how Frank spent John’s first night on Mars in part because it’s such a typical DC scene. John Grisham could have written it in The Street Lawyer, if not for the Mars thing:

Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with Martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated. “Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.” “Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty-foot dunks easy.” “Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.” Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy D.C. summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning — “Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man.

That paragraph tells you everything you need to know about Frank and his limitations: even before he gets to Mars, he’s a hollow man, the limited creation of a system where there are only a few overvalued prizes to win. And it’s worse after he kills John, after he gets what he thinks is the position he wants, that of the most politically powerful American on Mars. In fact, the murder makes it worse, because it makes Frank’s whole life, not just his political work, a performance: “The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, ‘How I wish John were here now. We could use him.’ And then: ‘I miss him.’ This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.”
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There will be spoilers through the first five sections of Red Mars 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 sections in comments, go ahead, but label spoilers as such. The first part of this book club appears here, the second here. For next week, let’s read “Guns Under the Table.”

For all that I don’t particularly enjoy spending time in Michel’s and John’s heads, these are two sections of the book that I think do a lovely job of laying out the central debates of the novel: how much can we change Mars? How much can we change ourselves? And once we’ve established these capacities, or maybe even beforehand, how much should we alter the planet or ourselves and our societies? What’s valuable? What should we let go? And what sort of unintended consequences will result when we succeed at engineering one factor in a way that radically changes all of our calculations.

Not only does it pose these questions quite well, but in laying them out, upsets our understandings of who’s on what side, who is a radical, and who is a conservative. Is Ann a conservative because she’s the purest Red out there? Or is she a revolutionary for being willing to accomodate her whole life to the preservation of a harsh, originalist Mars? Is Hiroko a revolutionary for running off to create her own society? Or a conservative for essentially abandoning engagement with the wider Mars? Is Nadia the architect of a new society, or a homesick Siberian recreating the trees of her memories? Once the power to do actual alchemical work, or to radically reengineer human DNA becomes routine, is doing that work esoteric, and mysterious, and powerful? Or does radical change itself become routine? To deal with everything posed in these sections, I’m going to divide the discussion into three sections:
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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.

There will be spoilers through the first three sections of Red Mars 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 sections in comments, go ahead, but label spoilers as such. The first part of this book club appears here. For next week, let’s read “Homesick” and “Falling Into History.”

The first two sections of Red Mars have to do a lot of heavy lifting and they feel like it—not only are they outlining a lot of very complex political and scientific arguments, but you’ve got to look at them through Maya’s eyes, which is not always a pleasant or sympathetic place to sit. So in a sense, “The Crucible” is a relief as we shift from Maya to Nadia, probably my favorite character in the books, and from the craft of leadership to the tangibility of engineering and architecture. And in shifting from the world of ideas to the world of things, we actually get a much more powerful emotional sense of what’s at stake as the First Hundred try to decide whether they will begin aggressive efforts to change the Martian atmosphere and climate.

One of the things this section does beautifully is juxtapose the mechanical and the whimsical—it makes Nadia’s jazz habit a perfect metaphor for her experiences. It’s there from the moment Nadia starts unpacking the town that is hers to reassemble: “The tractor itself was a real pig, with 600 horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks…They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park—and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.” Those moments when Kim Stanley Robinson contrasts her tool kit to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, or when Nadia explain to Arkady that being on Mars is like Louis Armstrong finding his way to the Hot Five, are just so wonderful in a writerly sense—Nadia’s constantly improvising, and she can do it because of her solid technical background.
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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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