Proust on Mercury and other issues in coming to terms with 2312

About a quarter of the way through Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 two of the major characters, after a catastrophe, find themselves in a section of what is essentially a grand maintenance tunnel running underneath (approximately) the entire equator of Mercury. Above them the long, deadly day has just begun; and just to their west the catastrophe has made the tunnel impassible. And so their choices are either to wait where they are for the eighty-eight Earth days it will take for Mercury's night to return and make rescue possible, or to walk east nearly half of Mercury's circumference--about two thousand kilometers, we're told--to meet the night and be rescued earlier. Despite Mercury's gravity, only a little over a third of Earth's, this is not a trivial amount of walking.

"We walk a day's worth, eat, sleep a night, then walk again. Set a daily schedule. If we hiked for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, that would be a lot, but it would save even more days.... [My AI] says twelve-hour days of walking would shorten our time down here by around forty-five days. That's enough for me.

"Well," Wahram said. "That's a lot of walking."

"I know, but what are you going to do? Sit here for over twice as long?"

"No," he said slowly. "I guess not."

Although really it would not be so very long. A rereading of Proust and O'Brian, a few times through the Ring cycle; his little wristpad was very well stocked.

Though the lengthy episode of walking that follows (in which Wahram does not in fact read Proust, though he does whistle the symphonies of Beethoven) is often excellent, it strikes me what a marvelous novel that might be: the long trudge underground, twelve hours a day, pausing periodically to allow the next section of tunnel to fill with breathable air ("It's like turning on the lights"), reading In Search of Lost Time.* The harrowing environment and the trudging would set the tone for the character's (and the reader's) feelings about Proust; the reading would set the tone for the character's (and the reader's) feelings about the environment and the trudging. Much could be made of the contradictions between Proust's thinking, generated by the experience of living on the open face of one's native planet in its natural atmosphere at 1 g, and the characters', enclosed within an artificial underground environment painstakingly regulated to be just barely survivable, at .38 g. Periodically while walking, and certainly when they stop to eat, there could be conversation. Perhaps things would be dreamed. The text of the novel would maybe even consist almost as much of extracts from Proust's as of "original material." (I've often daydreamed of writing a novel that would consist at least as much of some one other novel as of my own writing.) The other character(s) would no doubt be involved in their own pursuits, which might come into view from time to time. And above all they would be walking, walking, walking, the same every day, nearly without event.

*Which, full disclosure, I still have not yet read, though completely coincidentally I have a first approach to Swann's Way almost next on my list. Speaking of which, yes, I've noticed that 2312's central character is named Swan. I've also noticed that there's a character named Jean Genette. I won't be discussing either of these names, because who cares.

It is one of Robinson's strengths and simultaneously one of his weaknesses that he continually offers up these tantalizing notions that would serve excellently as novels of stasis. In 2312 just in the pages prior to the ones quoted above a woman spends days traveling from one planet to another in a hollowed-out asteroid that is deliberately kept at near-zero g and in complete darkness, passing the time uncomfortably in sensory deprivation hallucinations and conversations with her implanted AI about the various related but very different ways the word aporia has been used by different thinkers in different times; a man spends five days being smuggled up from Earth in a space elevator (hence constantly, gradually losing g until he reaches freefall in orbit) sealed into a spacesuit inside a box full of soil and worms for export; and a man on another hollowed-asteroid vessel (this one with earthlike conditions, called a "terrarium") traveling between planets tries to find the best "pseudoiterative," the balance between routine and surprise, with which to fill the days. Proust on Mercury would no doubt be the best of these potential novels, but all are intriguing to one degree or another.

Of course long periods of stasis must be a facet of any story involving multiple trips between different locations in the solar system, or at least any such story which, like Robinson's, cares to present such travel in a way which pays respect to physical law and at least remotely plausible technological possibility. To his considerable credit, Robinson does not pass over such periods in silence; the authorial eye does not look away in distaste with a "meanwhile" or a "five days later," or if it does it at least makes clear that there could be something to look at. And much in the structure of 2312--particularly the non-narrative sections: the breaks in which Robinson infodumps various aspects of scientific fact or socioeconomic speculation or what have you, the "Extracts" from imagined future texts, the "Lists" (of named craters on Mercury, of mind-altering substances and practices, of types of biomes...)--encourages one to stop the onrushing flow of narrative and consider what has passed by in that flow, including these periods of stasis. (This aspect of 2312's structure is admirably discussed by L. Timmel Duchamp in her Strange Horizons review, which examines many of the best aspects of the novel.)

At the same time, though, the narrative does rush on. As Wahram considers a re-read of Proust, an entire city is burning over him in the direct Mercurian sunlight, a result of the same catastrophe that forced the characters underground; and those same characters do not rest but start walking immediately, on to the next event. Robinson's novels are packed with such world-shattering devastations (one thinks of the climax of Red Mars, with its almost absurd concatenation of catastrophes: floods, cities incinerated, space elevator collapsing...) that seem to contradict with the quieter aspects (the Mars trilogy, after all, consists mainly of people wandering around talking--or not--with other people). In a way I want this to be a complaint, to say that the action-packed sequences get in the way of the more contemplative, to me far more interesting, bulk of the novels. And to a certain extent this is true: the knowledge that big and loud things are going to happen encourages even those of us with an interest in the small and quiet to get impatient, to turn the pages faster: "Yes, yes, she's floating in the dark, but what's going to happen when she gets there?" But the contradiction is also a strength; to return to Mars, perhaps the best thing about that trilogy is that despite all the early (and occasionally continuing) pyrotechnics it never does particularly "get there." One could say that Red Mars contains all of the "plot," whereas Green Mars and Blue Mars consist in their different ways of "...and yet life continues." Much of what is strong in 2312 too is in the way the small and the quiet can overwhelm the big and the loud: a city burns and we go into the tunnels for a month; a spaceship explodes and we float in space for days (it's no "Kaleidoscope," but the resonances are there). But where the trilogy had the freedom simply to go on and go on until it stopped, 2312 does not. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which will be mentioned below, but it is primarily because it has, like far, far too much sf, hitched itself to the structure of the mystery story--which must, by its very nature, "get there."

Where once the sf mystery was a novelty (Isaac Asimov, for example, did it largely as a stunt in The Caves of Steel), it has by now become automatic, almost obligatory--which is a shame, because it never was a healthy trend. Even the handful of great sf stories that are mysteries (including Asimov's robot novels) are never great because of the mystery, always in spite of it. The temptation of the mystery for the sf writer is understandable; it is of course the ready-made set of genre tropes most easily adapted to sf's central aesthetic problem, exposition. What better way, the writer might think, to reveal to the reader the wondrous function of this world I've created than to place in it a mystery, the solving of which requires the slow unfolding of this very world? More grandly, some might argue that other of sf's major concerns, from "conceptual breakthrough" to "transcendence," are in terms of fictional structure nearly identical to the mystery story.

The problem, though, is that once one has dedicated oneself to the mystery structure, one must hit all of its "plot points"--most especially the concrete revelation of "the truth," always and only at the end--whether or not these points are what the work demands. This is of course not literally true; it is possible to write a book which points in the direction of the mystery story for a moment only to go elsewhere, or one that systematically and painstakingly avoids all of the plot points, as for example Paul Auster has done. It is far easier, however, for the mystery to overwhelm the writer's own needs, especially when, as is the case in most of these sf novels I'm complaining about (one thinks of frustratingly near-great novels like China Miéville's The City and the City as well as Psychic Werewolf, PI: Book #7 et al.), the choice seems not actually to have been made so much as to have been assumed reflexively. That is to say, the sf mystery story has become so prevalent as to be the invisible default.* This unfortunately seems to be the case with 2312, which even goes so far as to have an interplanetary police detective (yeah...) as a major character and coyly to place tendentious hints as to coming grand revelations throughout the otherwise strongly non-narrative sections. The intrigue--that is to say, not the specifics of the intrigue in this story but intrigue itself--feels simply trivial in the midst of the conceptual context in which Robinson has placed it. That he can create what he has here created but can only think to tell a police procedural--no matter how grand--within it,** is a failure of imagination not greater but certainly more painful than those of a thousand lesser writers.

*As with so much I blame this largely on the cyberpunks, who, I am increasingly certain, saw the startling vitality of so much of 70s sf and, knowing they could never hope to equal it (and threatened by its frequent assaults on white heterosexual male hegemony), retreated from its many promises in a panic. Their inexplicably successful self-branding as literary and political radicals has done incalculable damage to the sf field ever since. Good work was done in cyberpunk, and has been done since, but again: despite, not because of.
**I should note here that the police procedural is not in fact the central strand of the story, which is more directly focused a bit off of it (the better to heighten the mystery, no doubt). Nevertheless it shapes all of the events in the story, and its conclusion is the finale of the book.

This major failure seems to draw in its wake dozens more; that the novel climaxes both in a mass incarceration and a marriage (!) between two people of diametrically opposing sexes is indicative of the extent to which it pulls back from what it imagines. That both events are questioned as they happen in precisely these terms--that is to say, as reactionary, atavistic--only makes things worse. Far more serious, in ethical terms, are the problems Vandana Singh discusses in her excellent post about the novel's attitude of, essentially, "benevolent" colonialism. This attitude is of course an integral part of what you might call sf's original sin, the seemingly friendlier face of what Joanna Russ aptly describes as sf's "imperial American/engineering values." One often gets the impression in much of Robinson's work that he is attempting to face this sin directly and confront it, sometimes through its ironic portrayal, sometimes by positioning it as just one element of a much larger mosaic. If this is his goal, however (and that is an increasingly large "if"), he seems to be having a harder and harder time achieving it since the near (or at least nearer) success of the Mars trilogy. What once appeared as irony and complexity now appears as something much closer to--at best--naïveté.

As an example (if you still need one after reading Singh's post, that is), there is an episode in the third quarter of the novel in which Swan and Wahram lead what comes to be called the "Reanimation," in which among other things animals endangered or extinct on Earth are reintroduced in massive quantities from the terraria in space in which they have been preserved. Knowing the opposition they will face, Swan and Wahram do this largely unannounced, unilaterally, and whether or not they have secured approval from anyone on the Earth's surface. In the narration, hovering at the moment ambiguously near (but not quite in) Swan's thinking, we are told that their "leading of animal migrations across agricultural land," in particular, "was the biggest organized act of civil disobedience ever committed by spacers on Earth." No doubt this is intended to call to mind resonances from the Diggers and the mass trespass and other similar actions from Earth's real history of disobedience, but Robinson appears (and certainly Swan is) unaware of the extreme difference between the actions he is describing and real-world civil disobedience. The spacers are not a part of the community they are disrupting. The results may in fact be good (and conveniently the novel tells us they are, though I have severe doubts as to whether such a scheme would work at all even in the context the novel sets up), but regardless of result, what has really happened is not civil disobedience but incursion. The Diggers were taking back the land that they lived on and worked--the land that supported them and that they supported--whereas Robinson's spacers are the very people who have abdicated responsibility to the lands of the Earth. It is troubling at best to see them portrayed as the ones best suited to decide how to restore these lands (not to mention that they seem to be the only ones with any ideas about it, which is nonsense on its face).

In general 2312 sees a fracturing of what had once been a remarkably fruitful contradiction in Robinson's work, that of the conflicting urges towards what you might oversimplistically call artificiality and nature. Over and over in his work we find expressed a seeming certainty that a better way of life (though not utopia by any means) will be the almost inevitable attendant of leaving the Earth, mixed with an insistence that a life rooted in the Earth--living like the savanna primates he reminds us we are--is the most truly human. The loving portraits of the glories of terraforming contrast with the stark awareness that these same processes are what destroyed (or, for the reader, are destroying) the Earth, and also with the recognition of the right of land, even lifeless land, to remain what it is, untouched. In the Mars trilogy the different configurations of these contradictions were emblematized by the characters Sax, Ann, and Hiroko, respectively representing, roughly, heroic technologism, hands-off respect for place-as-it-is, and a mystic syncretism focused on the spread of life.* The trilogy proceeds to its end essentially through the "reconciliation" of Sax's and Ann's positions into a version of the absent Hiroko's, though of course by the end even of the first volume Ann's position is a wholly lost cause, as Mars will never again be as it was before the arrival of humanity. But throughout Ann serves as almost a voice of conscience, or at least a nagging memory of what's been lost forever in the midst of this humanity-triumphant, allowing us to feel the pain of this loss even in the midst of the victory of its opposite. Though by the end even she is forced to admit that she has lost and to contribute to the new order of things, it is her presence at all in the trilogy that allows it to be as beautiful a work as it is.

*Yes, the Japanese woman is the mystic. These problems have always been present in Robinson's work to one extent or another.

One of 2312's greatest failings is that it contains no Ann. Instead what we have is an array of mixtures of Sax and Hiroko in their most self-deluding faces: that is, a supposed love of the land that consists only in changing it to make it more humanly lovable. In the infodump chapter on Saturn's ice moon Iapetus, which has one hemisphere almost pure white and one almost pure black from the dust it passes through in its tidally locked orbit, Robinson, in authoritative-fact mode, describes "graffiti" people have drawn in the black side (called Cassini Regio) by clearing away the dust to reveal the white ice underneath. "Anytime you can easily make such a contrast in the landscape, people have written out their thoughts for the universe to read," we are told.

Later it was declared a mistake and a scandal, a moral stupidity, even a crime, in any case disgusting; and there were calls for the entirety of Cassini Regio to be reblacked. Someday it may happen, but don't hold your breath, for the truth is we are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us. All landscape art reminds us: we live in a tabula rasa, and must write on it.

It is perhaps a mistake to ascribe the opinions professed in these sections, the tendentious musts and the truth ises, to Robinson (and it would be interesting to see what Swan's AI, who frequently mocks Swan by dissecting her rhetorical devices, would make of the first blockquoted clause); all I can say is that as a reader of his novel I find very little else present in it to counter these propositions. The mention of the landscape art could have been a way to present such a counter, had he wished to: in a frankly silly conceit, Robinson has his spacers refer to all such artworks as "goldsworthies," after the artist Andy Goldsworthy.* I confess I am not particularly familiar with Goldsworthy's work, but it had been my impression that its defining characteristic is not so much that it is done on the landscape but that it is temporary: that it erodes or washes away or what have you, leaving no trace.

*They also refer to works of art using the body as medium as "abramovics," after Marina Abramović.

This aspect of leaving no trace seems largely to have been lost on Robinson, or when it does show up seems to be more incidental than essential. Towards the end, Swan finds herself in a terrarium described as a "classic New Englander" during its local October. We are treated to a lovely description of New England autumn foliage as seen coating the hollow interior of a cylinder (i.e., rather than curving down and away to the horizon the ground curves up and over until it becomes the "sky"), and then:

One day she took up leaves that had fallen and arranged them across a clearing so that they went from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green, in a smooth progression. This colored line on the land pleased her greatly, as did the wind that blew it away.

A lovely sentiment, but too little too late, I find. Too much of the novel has consisted of the line on the land, and Robinson too often has forgotten the wind. This forgetfulness, along with the absence of any equivalent to Mars's Ann, makes 2312 in comparison to the trilogy not just the less moral work but also the inferior.

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With this novel, Robinson has completed his transformation into, essentially, today's massively recomplicated Asimov. We find in them many of the same concerns: the effects of sheer size and complexity on human society taken as a whole; the threat of ecological collapse; the expansionist urges of humanity; the potentially antagonistic and/or symbiotic relationship between humans and artificial intelligences of our creation (sometimes with bodies and suites of behavior potentially indistinguishable from our own); the question of the possibility of frankly and precisely assessing one's own psychological makeup and that of one's culture; the sincere desire to figure out how to create the best possible conditions for everyone's life; and so on. We also find in them the same blind spots--and these blind spots, recomplicated, threaten to take over Robinson's work in a way they never did in Asimov's. Despite his often terribly moving awareness of many of its problems, Asimov was far too strongly wedded to technocracy truly to consider, or even seriously to represent, any real alternative to it--nor did he want to; his concern was to explore what was possible within it. Robinson is conscious enough of other possibilities that his increasing failure truly to engage with them is ultimately far more tragic.

I long for a Kim Stanley Robinson who has read, and internalized the lessons of, Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, and Vandana Shiva--for example. Such an internalization would, I suspect, allow him to find better answers to the questions that nag him...or, even better, to realize that it may not be his place to provide the answers--rather to keep the questions alive. Perhaps then--indeed to that very end--he might spend more time with Proust on Mercury. Until then, I'm afraid that all the--considerable!--beauty and greatness of his work will continue increasingly to buckle under the strain as the moral and aesthetic problems he has set himself become ever more insoluble.

Areotopia '99 (part three)

Aldiss, in the postscript, "How It All Began," which concludes White Mars:

Planets are environments with their own integrity.... The end result [of a terraforming project] could only be to turn Mars into a dreary suburb.... Mars must become a UN protectorate, and be treated as a 'planet for science', much as the Antarctic has been preserved--at least to a great extent--as unspoilt white wilderness. We are for a WHITE MARS!

Aldiss, in an interview with SFcrowsnest [all sic]:

"White Mars" was written because I felt the world needed a utopia whether they liked it or not.

In essence, it had been an ambition for years - nothing to do with Kim Robinson's trilogy. Setting it on a remote island had been done: see Thomas More and Aldous Huxley. I wanted a utopia to burst forth in the midst of Europe.

I tried Norway, which seemed a likely spot. But I feared that someone might nuke Norway if they tried it on. So Mars it had to be, There my utopia can be established: it's cooperate or perish on Mars.

The first thing to say is that his denial that his Mars is a response to Robinson's is simply unbelievable. I certainly believe that writing a utopia "had been an ambition for years"; anyone who has read Billion Year Spree knows that Aldiss worships that genre (it is amusing to note, incidentally, that for him "I wanted to write it" and "the world needed it" seem to be the same thing). But to issue a pamphlet stretching metaphors beyond the breaking point to allow for the use of the phrase "White Mars" one year after the conclusion of Robinson's "three colors" Mars trilogy, and then two years later to title the book that, is simply too provocative a move to be unmeaningful, particularly as the two main strands of Aldiss's novel--the question of whether or not to terraform, and the attempt to create a utopian society--are also the two main strands of Robinson's trilogy. If he is telling the truth, that his book has "nothing to do with Kim Robinson's trilogy"--or if he expected that people would not connect the two--then he is far more oblivious to the world outside of his own head than even I gave him credit for. As is, I think him merely disingenuous, or perhaps--and this would be to his credit--embarrassed.

To move on: I ask you to look at these two quotes, to compare them. I would not want to argue that a writer can have only one motivation in writing a particular book. But there is a huge contradiction here between, on the one hand, this apparent urge to defend Mars as a sovereign place, with a right to continue to exist as it is, against an imaginary version of Kim Stanley Robinson those who would try to change it, whoever they may be, and, on the other hand, this feeling that "the world needed a utopia," and, well, islands have been done, Norway's too close to stuff, I guess Mars'll do.

As far as Aldiss is concerned, if not for some logistical problems it might as well have been Norway. This book that takes place on Mars was written out of a desire to see a utopia "in the midst of Europe." Mars, as Mars, matters not a bit.

In fictional terms,* we can see that Aldiss's relationship to Mars is just as exploitative, just as disrespectful of its right to its Marsness, as that of the hypothetical terraformers--with the addition of the hypocrisy embodied in his issuing manifestos claiming precisely the contrary. Mind you, again speaking purely in fictional terms: exploitative urges, disrespect, and hypocrisy--and, especially, contradiction--are not necessarily bad things to serve as a foundation for writing. But they need to be acknowledged, explored. And Aldiss, as always, runs from contradiction, refuses to acknowledge negative aspects of himself, and tries to smooth everything over into homogeneity (itself a central part of the utopian urge, perhaps).

*The only ones, frankly, that can really mean anything when it comes to this kind of discussion--though when/if these fictions turn into reality, the attitudes laid out in fiction may well have an influence on how things go. Certainly it seems Aldiss thinks so.

A responsible writer, I think, would--must--explore this contradiction when faced with it. In fact, I don't think it's too far off to suggest that this is just what Robinson does in his "areotopia." It is at this point that Delany's comments on utopia may be illuminating, for it is precisely this fundamental aspect of sf which Aldiss does not seem to understand, which leaves him unable to read Robinson.

In the conflict between Robinson's Sax Russell, "green," and Ann Clayborne, "red," we can of course see the conflict between the believers in New Jerusalem (and, conversely, The Land of the Flies) and the believers in Arcadia (and, conversely, Brave New World)--sort of. On Mars, of course, The Land of the Flies (and Arcadia) is more properly The Land of the Thin, Cold, Poisonous Atmosphere, which complicates things immensely. Robinson, too, unlike Delany (or Auden), brings in ecological issues, which are of course of paramount concern; beyond that, the character of Hiroko Ai--so frequently off-stage, in hiding, missing, possibly dead--signals some of the ways in which Delany's four "mythic views of the world" play into one another, desiring as she does to usher in Arcadia by way of New Jerusalem.

It is not my desire to mechanically assign the four points of Delany's Audenian compass to elements of Robinson's trilogy.* Such assignments would be boring and pointless, and would ultimately fail in the face of the ever-increasing disjunctiveness of Robinson's symbolic structure.** For now, suffices to say that one of the values of Robinson's trilogy is that it is aware of the multiplex nature of reality and of experience, the multiplicity of perspectives, and of truths. As such, what political statements it includes (and it includes many) are infinitely more powerful, and infinitely more wise, than any of Aldiss's one-sided, top-down proclamations. One gets the sense that the issuing of such is not exactly what Aldiss intends to do, but his stodginess and elitism is such that he does not allow himself to complicate his narrative, or his own opinions, enough to allow for anything else.

*Though now it occurs to me to wonder what Robinson's character Michel Duval, so fond of his interlocking alchemical squares as ways of explaining the world and its people, might do with this particular framework.
**This particularly sfnal technique, so brilliantly utilized in the trilogy, of using characters with highly schematic symbolic aspects in extraordinarily disjunctive combination, will most definitely be a subject of later posts.

There is much more that could be said about these two works. I have not touched much on the role of women in either; neither is perfect, though Robinson (apart from his deeply problematic, near-sadistic treatment of the character Zo in Blue Mars) is vastly preferable, as he at least recognizes that the equality of women would result in an utterly transformed society (or perhaps, in certain very specific cases, vice versa). An almost hilariously telling passage in Aldiss is the one where he omits the phenomenology of pregnancy even more thoroughly than he omits the phenomenology of space, or of Mars:

I went to the hospital, where I had myself injected with some of Tom Jefferies's DNA. My womb was grateful for the benevolent gravity and I delivered my beautiful daughter Alpha without pain one day in 2067.

The entire experience of pregnancy takes place here in the space between a period and a capital M. After this, baby Alpha is simply on the scene, having no impact whatsoever on how Cang Hai leads her life--despite the absence of any system for raising children communally.

Meanwhile, a bizarre scene of near-rape is far more disturbing than Aldiss, who treats it almost as a digestif to conclude thirty straight pages of expository dialogue,* thinks it is.

*Another topic on which there will surely be more coming: massive unbroken sections of exposition are usually, to me, among the most thrilling parts of sf novels, and are indeed one of the wonderful things that the genre allows (or even encourages) which other genres do not: a sort of lyrical didacticism. Meanwhile, Aldiss, who spent a large portion of Billion Year Spree pooh-pooing the very notion of didacticism and ridiculing classic sf for its clunky exposition, engages here in some of the worst-handled, most utterly uninteresting, slogging, page-after-page-after-goddamn-page exposition I have ever read.

There is much more, much more: the treatment of race (again far from perfect in either, again much more palatable in Robinson who, despite his occasional lapses in the direction of stereotypes such as the inscrutable Asian, at least doesn't include imagery playing on the threat of white women's defilement in a "How It All Began" statement); the treatment of capitalism (ideologically fairly sound, as far as I'm concerned, in both, though deeply naïve in Aldiss); of metaphysics and religion; of expansionism. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who's getting tired of this essay (unless of course I'm the only one reading it!), and anyway despite appearances it really is not my goal to just make an itemized list and check off "Robinson better, Robinson better" on each one.

Because while in fact Robinson's Mars trilogy is enormously better than White Mars on any axis along which you could care to compare them, the significance of this is not limited to a battle between two works. What we have here is a dramatic representation of many of the central problems of sfnal practice.

To be sure, vast swathes of contemporary sf refuses even to come anywhere near these issues, content to twaddle itself into big-selling irrelevance with Sexy Lady Space Cop Book #17 or the ongoing saga of a quirky cast of begoggled characters banging gears together in an all-white version of Victorian England in which women magically have never been oppressed (but sure are sexy!), but for that portion of the genre that is not content to do so, the problems which Robinson engages with, which Aldiss largely fails to engage with, must be acknowledged.

It's been so long now, and I'm writing this late enough at night, that I have no idea if I've succeeded in elucidating any of these problems. But hell, I've got a whole blog ahead of me if I haven't, right? If nothing else I hope these thousands of words have at least raised some points for later discussion.

P.S. Don't read White Mars.

Areotopia '99 (part two)

Last time, before I got sidetracked, I was talking about how the original impulse behind his wretched White Mars was supposedly a concern over the desire, fictional or not, to terraform Mars. He tells us directly that the pamphlet announcing his presidency of the cute little club APIUM (Association for the Protection and Integrity of an Unspoilt Mars) was "How It All Began."

But despite this supposedly foundational concern for Mars as a place--as an "environment with its own integrity"*--in his novel as actually written Aldiss does not treat it as such. Kim Stanley Robinson, you will remember, concludes his introduction to Red Mars by saying that, with the arrival of humans on that planet, it ceased to be an idea merely: "now it became a place." And as I examined cursorily in the last post, he takes this very seriously, dealing heavily in the fundamentally different nature of this place and in the consequences on it of human habitation and actions. Aldiss, however, true to the utopian tradition announced in his novel's second subtitle--but not true to the way that tradition has changed and expanded under the influence of genre sf--treats Mars as, precisely, "no place."

*In this quote I have changed the plural to the singular to fit the syntax.

An early indication of this (mis)treatment of Mars is Aldiss's complete and deliberate omission of what I call, perhaps goofily, "the phenomenology of space." Despite the intriguing move of having his future-science replace the term "space" with "matrix," acknowledging the important and wondrous fact that what we think of as empty vacuum is actually teeming with bizarre activity on the quantum-physical scale, Aldiss slaps his characters into cryosleep for the duration of the journey between the planets. This is not in itself a problem, and indeed he gestures toward some of the interesting possibilities raised by such a technique when he has his sometime-narrator Cang Hai go into psychiatric treatment for her overwhelming fear of going back into cryosleep, a state so near to death, as well as wondering if she is still in any meaningful way the same person now as the person who went into cryosleep. This is precisely the kind of powerful disjuncture sf is so adept at dealing with. We realize soon, however, that Aldiss is entirely uninterested in dealing with the consequences of his ideas, for just as he has used cryosleep as a convenience enabling him to ignore the experience of space travel, he uses Cang Hai's phobia not to explore the experience of cryosleep itself, but rather as a clumsy device for exposition, rushing us through the methodology (but again not the experience) of transit and introducing us to the psychological techniques of Aldiss's 21st century.

Lest I seem as dictatorial as Aldiss regarding what are suitable sfnal topics,* let me say that I raise these issues as problems only because Aldiss uses them to cheat: he is trying to chastise others for their insufficient respect for Mars as place while at the same time covering up some of the most significant features of it as a place: in this case, its distance from the Earth and all that is involved in reaching it. By having his characters go to sleep and wake up on Mars, he is no more dealing with its reality than Edgar Rice Burroughs did; no more treating it as a real place as opposed to a magical fairyland than L. Frank Baum did with Oz (this is not to criticize either Baum or Burroughs, both of whose goals lay elsewhere). He is in fact doing exactly what the writers of utopias have done for centuries: choosing a convenient place, far from England home and supposedly empty, and then filling it with his own prescriptions for what should be.

*One of the many aggravating moments in Billion Year Spree is when he proclaims that "the Frankenstein theme is more contemporary and more interesting than interstellar travel tales, since it takes us nearer the enigma of man [sic] and thus [sic] of life; just as interstellar travel can yield more interest than such power-fantasy themes as telepathy." This hierarchy, like most such absolutist statements, elides the difference between topic and treatment, and as a critical lens leaves us unable to see differences between works. Is Joanna Russ's And Chaos Died a power fantasy? Does Ben Bova's "Stars, Won't You Hide Me?" not take us near "the enigma of man"? Not to mention that the "themes" he discusses need not be either/ors (both of the works I have just named feature interstellar travel and telepathy, in different combination), or that "the Frankenstein theme" itself is in fact (among other things) a complex treatment of a power fantasy**--i.e., the ancient male desire to reproduce without the involvement of women, or that perhaps "the enigma of man" need not be the sole topic of every single word ever committed to paper.
**My footnotes tend to metastasize. I wish only to note that the term "power fantasy" is a common one in sf criticism, and that though I use it in the above in responding to Aldiss's use of it, I myself find it an almost entirely valueless term, one which tends to be used thoughtlessly to dismiss and conceal complexities that may be uncomfortable for the critic.

To be sure, I am simplifying Aldiss's work a bit: for he does not treat Mars as entirely empty, and his condescension sarcasm irony leaves it questionable whether his prescriptions presented here are all really "his" prescriptions. Nevertheless, even these two counters to the tendency I am describing are explored no more thoroughly than the issues Aldiss raises, and abandons, with his "matrix" travel and cryosleep. No, though he nods from time to time in the direction of a more interesting novel, one likely far beyond his capability, the real novel he has written remains stuck tediously not on Mars qua Mars, but in any conveniently open location that can semi-plausibly be made to be isolated.

Perhaps its seems I am making too much of the omission of the interval between Earth and Mars. Fine, then: once we are on Mars, regardless of how we got there, what then?

The single most telling detail I can give you is that Aldiss presents us with colonists who have spent years on Mars returning to Earth and experiencing no difficulty with gravity--more, he presents us with people born on Mars traveling to Earth as adults with no such difficulty. (Compare Robinson, whose character Nirgal--an extraordinarily healthy endurance runner--is nearly killed by his trip to Earth.) This is no mere oversight; for the whole time we are on Mars, with the exception of a few moments that feel like afterthoughts, we are never made to feel the planet.

Obviously no book, being after all no more than a series of words laid on a series of pages, could literally make us "feel" Mars. And one could argue that Aldiss, by not even pretending to try to trick us into thinking we feel it, might be seen as in some ways less naïve than Robinson, perhaps contemporary sf's greatest poet of unusual kinesthetics, who goes to great lengths to achieve a Martian "reality effect." Were we not dealing with sf, I would likely agree. Sf is, however (in Darko Suvin's terms*), a literature of "cognitive estrangement." That is to say that in sf, unlike in for example the realist novel, when all is going well (which, admittedly, it often is not!) we are made to recognize consciously the fictional and metafictional processes which are going on, simply by their very nature; as Russ points out, in sf the most "real" elements become "the most bizarre and the least believable."

*I have my problems with Suvin, but they are a matter for a different essay. For the moment this framework of his is serviceable enough, so long as we remember that it is not a comprehensive definition of the field.

So it is that Robinson, by evoking so insistently the phenomenology of Martian existence, creates a more powerful and self-aware literary experience than Aldiss, so intent on evading this phenomenology (and others, as we saw before with space and will see again later) in favor of what he thinks are more "literary" effects. Thus, when Aldiss gives us his "Martian marathon" scene, it is sketched out cursorily on one page:

They had set an ingenious 6-kilometre course through the domes, parts of which involved them leaping from the roofs of four-storey buildings, equipped with wings to provide semi-flight in the light gravity...

Over 700 young people, men and women, together with a smattering of oldsters, were entered in the race...

Everyone not in the race turned out to watch. The music played. It proved an exciting occasion. First prize was a multi-legged dragon trophy, created in stone and painted by our sculptor, Benazir Bahudur, with less elaborate versions for runners who came in second and third.

The winner was the particle physicist Jimmy Gonzales Dust. He finished in 1,154 seconds. He was young and good-looking, with a rather cheeky air about him; he was very quick with his answers. At a modest banquet held in his honour, he was reported to have made a remarkable speech.

The elision of events in Aldiss's novel is a frequent enough device that it surely was a deliberate choice. Again, in a non-sfnal context replacing the event with the sentences "The music played. It proved an exciting occasion" might be in itself an exciting artistic choice, denying the usual fictional pleasures of action with flat, affectless* non-action that forcibly reminds us that we are reading a fiction, not witnessing an event. But this is sf. We are given the wings and told of the semi-flight, yes, but by not giving us these wings in action all Aldiss has done is taken what would have been a scene of powerful estrangement and domesticated it, allowing us--and, one feels, himself--to pretend there is nothing unusual about it: we have, in our lives, heard music play; we have experienced exciting occasions; nothing more is happening here.

*And it is possible too that Aldiss here intends to convey the affectless nature of his narrator, at this moment the utopian Tom Jeffries. I cannot be certain, though, because I was unable to tell if he was in fact meant to be affectless; nor, indeed, was I able to discern any significant stylistic or other substantial difference between the sections narrated by him and those narrated by Cang Hai. I often had to flip back to the table of contents, which tells you who narrates which chapters, to remind myself of whose section I was reading.

Again, compare Robinson, who also gives us a sort of Martian Olympics (though unlike Aldiss's one-time event, Robinson's are ongoing--and, again unlike Aldiss's, not competitive in any significant or permanent sense):

The pole vault was Maya's favorite, it amazed her...the bounding yet controlled sprint, the precise planting of the extremely long pole as it jounced forward, the leap, the pull, the vault itself, feet pointing at the sky; then the catapulted flight into space, body upside down as the jumper shot above the flexing pole, and up, and up; then the neat twist over the bar (or not), and the long fall onto an airgel pad...

Shot puts still looked heavy, their throwing awkward. Javelins flew forever. High jumpers were only able to clear four meters, to Maya and Michel's surprise. Long jumpers, twenty meters; which was a most amazing sight, the jumpers flailing their limbs through a leap that lasted four or five seconds, and crossed a big part of the field.

Elsewhere, multiple places, Robinson describes, stunningly, the different movement of water, whether in a pool splashed by swimmers or in an ocean whipped by wind, under significantly lesser gravity than that to which we are accustomed. All of this powerfully evocative description (and much more like it) of things that simply, in Delany's terms, have not happened (no human has ever long-jumped twenty meters on Mars or anywhere else!) contributes to what might be described as a sort of sense of wonder, that classic but so widely misunderstood sfnal effect, on a quotidian scale. There will surely be essays here in the future on just what it is that I think sense of wonder consists in and of, but for now it is enough to say that all of this deals in precisely that fluctuating suspension of disbelief Russ describes, pulling us in and distancing us both alternately and simultaneously in a way that Aldiss's omissions never could.

When I continue, it will be to discuss why it is that Mars is, despite Aldiss's insistence to the contrary, so much not a place, so much not itself, in White Mars. It will hopefully also be the last part of this essay, which I never intended to spend so much time on.

Areotopia '99: White Mars by Brian W. Aldiss via Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (part one)

Kim Stanley Robinson begins his remarkable Mars trilogy with that favorite sfnal device, the all-italics passage which places itself somewhere, undefined, outside the story proper. Such italicized passages will recur, covering drastically varied ground, at regular intervals throughout the entire trilogy, but this first one functions distinctly as an introduction.

It covers "the history of Mars in the human mind" (greatly compressed, naturally, and just as naturally including and eliding based on easily-deducible conceptual prejudices), from its likely prehistoric significance as one of the brightest lights in the sky (and one of those with the oddest behavior, periodically reversing direction), to Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell's canals, to the Martian civilizations of early sf, to the thrilling but lifeless revelations of Mariner and Viking, through all of which

...Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning--a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.

With this one deft move, Robinson places himself dually in the tradition of sf--beyond even the immediate familiarity to the sf reader of the typographical convention. First, he invokes, if not by name, a great bulk of that tradition by referring to "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," which naturally calls to mind everyone from H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Stanley G. Weinbaum to Leigh Brackett to Ray Bradbury...some of whose names, among others, we have just seen if we have examined the map of Mars in the early stages of its settlement which occupies the pages before this introduction. Second, with that statement, "it became a place," Robinson engages explicitly with an aspect of sf noted in some of the more perceptive comments from sf criticism (with which Robinson, himself an occasional critic, is surely familiar). I'm thinking now particularly of those of Joanna Russ:

Mundane, realistic fiction often carries its meaning behind the action, underneath the action, underneath the ostensible action. Science fiction cancels this process by making what is usually a literary metaphor into a literal identity.

and Mark Rose:

In realistic fiction, setting tends to be primarily a context for the portrayal of character... The phenomenon of landscape as hero is particularly common in science fiction, where the truly active element of the story is frequently neither character nor plot but the world the writer creates.

By engaging with these ideas so directly, Robinson is signalling his awareness of both the traditions and the metatraditions in which he is working.

(The Russ quote is from her introduction to To Write Like a Woman; she has written about this issue elsewhere but I chose this for its brevity. The Rose is from his introduction to Science Fiction: A Collection of Essays, a volume he edited and which has value beyond its intended introductory purpose by virtue of Rose's interesting comments in his introduction.)

If by his "now it became a place" Robinson both places himself within the sf tradition and pretends to remove himself from it (by claiming to be telling the real, i.e. non-sfnal, story of Mars), then this is just all the more exciting--and he knows that, though we are already with him, we simultaneously don't buy it for a moment (which situation is itself reminiscent of Russ's observations about the shifting suspension of disbelief we encounter in reading sf). What we are reading is new and exciting, yes, but it knows what sf is, it knows that sf is literature, but of a different kind than most of what that word usually describes, and it knows that it is, itself, sf.

The case is different with Brian W. Aldiss, whose exhaustingly-betitled White Mars or, The Mind Set Free: A 21st Century Utopia (written "in collaboration with Roger Penrose") was published in 1999--three years after Blue Mars--and was surely intended to be read in the context of, as a response to, the prominence of Robinson's trilogy in the sfnal landscape of the 1990s (though Aldiss has weakly denied this, as we shall see later; I don't buy it for a second). In his usual fashion,* he has gone out of his way to make the dialogue in which he enters himself seem grudging, beneath him--and so despite responding directly to a work in the main line of the genre, Aldiss as always goes out of his way to place himself not in the tradition of sf but rather in the stodgy depths of what Russ has described** as "some 'respectable' tradition...whatever makes SF look harmless, ancient, respectable--and not itself."

*This and other similar judgments are largely based on my reading of the opinions Aldiss puts forward in his "history," which is not a history, of "science fiction," which is not science fiction, Billion Year Spree: a dreadful book, though with some useful concepts; it at least has the virtue of introducing the idea of Mary Shelley as a foundational influence on sf--a move Aldiss himself described later (alas, I cannot remember where, and I paraphrase) as "striking an unintentional blow for women's lib." Clearly.
**Not, to be clear, in reference to Aldiss. The quote is from a pithily damning letter to Science-Fiction Studies, published in 1973 under the title "Four Complaints."

Aldiss's novel, search engines suggest, was not well received, and it is perhaps uncharitable of me to add, more than a decade later, to the abuse. However, I do think that a consideration of the goals of these two works, Aldiss's and Robinson's, can perhaps be revelatory of some of the struggles of the genre, particularly in its contemporary aspect. I don't know if I'll be able to do any of this revealing, but I will try.

I don't feel it necessary to give synopses of these books. Both deal with the colonization of Mars in the relatively near future, and with the struggle of the settlers to establish--or not to establish--a just society on that planet. Both works, or at least their characters, are nakedly didactic. Beyond that, I will bring up details as they become relevant.

The last page of White Mars, which follows an utterly unnecessary "Appendix by Dr Laurence Lustgarten" (for real), laying out the fictional "United Nationalities Charter for the Settlement of Mars" that we've already seen essentially all of anyway, is another appendix, headed "How It All Began," with the subheading "APIUM: Association for the Protection and Integrity of an Unspoilt Mars." It is signed at the bottom

Brian W. Aldiss
President, APIUM
Pamphlet distributed January 1997
Green College, Oxford, England

"Plans are already afoot," it begins, enraptured with its own collegiate Britishness,* "to send human beings to Mars." This is in itself manifestly wonderful, Aldiss goes on to say, but there is "an assumption that the Red Planet can be turned into something resembling a colony, an inferior Earth." He goes on to argue against the terraforming of Mars, using lovely rape metaphors and following them up immediately by saying that the planet must "be treated as a 'planet for science', much as the Antarctic has been preserved--at least to a great extent--as unspoilt white wilderness. We are for a WHITE MARS!"** (Exclamation point, capitals, and racist implications original).

*Have I mentioned yet that White Mars is "Dedicated to the Warden and Fellows of Green College, Oxford"? No, really, it is.
**In case you are wondering: no, Aldiss does not seem to be aware that while an unspoiled Antarctica is indeed primarily white, an unspoiled Mars is, well, not.

Please don't mistake me: I agree, to the extent that it is possible to agree with writing as grotesquely muddled in its form and premises as this. I think that, in the unlikely event that humans ever get to Mars, it would be a travesty to try to change it, to try to terraform it. When Aldiss says that "Planets are environments with their own integrity" and that the "end result" of terraforming "could only be to turn Mars into a dreary suburb, imitating the less attractive features of terrestrial cities," I think he's right, though my conception of what these "less attractive features" are is likely different from his.

Apart from Aldiss's genteel racism and misogyny, though, there is still much that bothers me about this pamphlet. The larger issue (larger than what follows in my essay, not larger than racism and misogyny) is that by implicitly positioning it as a blueprint for what he seems to think is the only responsible path, not just for the "real" future but for all sfnal futures, Aldiss seeks (as he has sought for all the six decades of his career) to severely impoverish the field in which he ostensibly works. This can perhaps be made more clear by focusing on the "smaller issue," the more specific one of Aldiss's obfuscated but nevertheless clear use of this pamphlet, and from there the whole novel, as a "response" to Robinson's trilogy (APIUM certainly couldn't have been a response to immediate real-world concerns; did anyone in 1997 seriously believe colonization of Mars was imminent?)--it was after all distributed one year after the publication of the last volume of the trilogy, and you can feel the moisture of Aldiss's sense of his own cleverness dripping of the page when he answers Robinson's Red Mars and Green Mars and Blue Mars with his own "WHITE MARS!".*

*Because of the way my life is arranged I do a lot of my reading in public, and let me tell you it was extremely embarrassing to be seen holding a book with those words plastered across the cover--far more embarrassing than to be seen with, say, this.

But the thing is, or one thing is anyway, that this idea he seems to have--that Robinson in his trilogy advocates for terraforming every bit as uncomplicatedly and every bit as irresponsibly as, say, Robert A. Heinlein advocates for war in Starship Troopers--is just utterly bizarre and, well, wrong. Beyond the fact that real-life terraforming, unlike war, is at best a vague long-distance possibility, this simply is not what Robinson has done. The debate and struggle between the "Greens," who want to terraform Mars and are led in different ways by the physicist Sax Russell and the environmental systems designer and mystic Hiroko Ai, and the "Reds," who think that Mars itself has a sovereign right to stay untouched and are led, unwillingly at first, by the geologist (or rather areologist) Ann Clayborne, is perhaps the animating force of the entire trilogy; a substantial chunk, perhaps the majority, of Blue Mars consists of Sax's attempts to understand Ann's perspective and then to apologize to her for what he's done to the planet--and then their combined attempts to reconcile what's been done, what can't be undone, to what would be ideal.

To be sure, Robinson devotes quite a lot of loving detail to the process of terraforming, to the changing landscapes: some of the most breathtaking passages in the trilogy deal with emerging beaches formed by the new oceans, or with the stages of the developing plant ecosystems (Sax, and I, were particularly taken with Martian krummholz), or with the way the colors of the sky change over time as the atmosphere thickens and its composition changes. Words associated with this process (subliming, katabatic wind, polynya...) become in the narration almost as much a magical incantation as the multilingual chant of the names of Mars in the Areophany, a central part of the Martian spirituality that grows up over the course of the novels, is for some of the characters. But, too, as perhaps indicated by the Areophany (which is shared in by many of the Greens and the Reds), he devotes similar loving attention to the alienness of Mars, its coldness, its lifelessness, its Marsness. Ann's trip to the pole with the engineer Nadia Cherneshevsky in the early days, say, and Nadia's horror on returning to the settlement, seeing for the first time the ugliness of what she had helped build, had considered neutral, is taken every bit as seriously as any of Sax's work:

"...plumes of smoke...billowing into a flat-topped mushroom cloud...the litter of frames, crates, tractors, cranes, spare-part dumps, garbage dumps...the big mounds of raw regolith next to the cement factory...It had the disordered, functional, ugly look of Vanino or Usman or any of the Stalinist heavy-industry cities in the Urals, or the oil camps of Yakut. They rolled through a good five kilometers of this devastation...Nadia too was shocked...this had all seemed perfectly normal before the trip, indeed had pleased her very much. Now she was slightly nauseated..."

The inevitable progression of the titles themselves, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, could be taken as a sort of triumphal manifest-destiny march of progress...or it could be taken as an inexorable descent into the ruination of the planet-as-it-was...or it could be taken simply as a value-free statement of what, sfnally speaking, happened. If we take the fact that the terraformers "win in the end" as a sign that Robinson wants to convince us that this is the way, we have read only one of the many stories Robinson has written us. The key is that Robinson, to the extent that he presents a judgment of the terraforming project at all, presents a judgment that is ambivalent.

But there is no room in Aldiss's black and white world for ambivalence.

He truly seems not to understand that books can do anything other than mechanically endorse their contents. Well, actually, that's not entirely true--Aldiss himself, if no one else ever, is allowed irony. Of course in his clumsy hands irony always turns into sarcasm, and even sarcasm turns out to be too refined and winds up as condescension. Aldiss does not write books: he deigns to write books. Consider the tiresome metacomments he relishes putting in the mouths of the characters in this work of utopian sf: "Predictions are for amusement only." "There we venture into the realms of science fiction. I can't comment on that." "All utopias have their sell-by dates, you know."

Anyway, the point is that if he interprets the Mars trilogy, as he seems to, as propagandistically agitating for the headlong colonization and terraforming of Mars, he has catastrophically misread Robinson's work. The problem is actually much more severe than that: for he has in fact catastrophically misread science fiction as a whole.

More on that, and other issues, surely to come.