Moving Mars - Greg Bear - Final thoughts

I loved Moving Mars.  It's a gripping science fiction novel, about the settlers on Mars, and how they grow up and break away from Earth.  It's much more than that, though. I posted earlier about my first thoughts while reading it, and I've had over a week to let it settle in my mind.  Moving Mars is about the people who settle there, and how Mars changes them. It's much like how settlers here in North America or Australia must have felt - and their descendants.  Because the settlement on Mars is 70 years old, when they face the stuggle they have with examining if they should stay with earth, and what right they have to be a world in their own right, it's like remembering our history - how the US colonists fought to not pay extra tax to England, about 150 years after the first settlers arrived.  When does a colony become a self-sufficient country or world?  In Moving Mars, we get to experience first hand the changes that Mars goes through, through the eyes of Casseia Majumdar, and through all the characters around her, especially Charles Franklin, who makes the scientific breakthrough in thinking and physics, that leads Earth to struggle with Mars for control of that power.  It was unputdownable. 

I loved how Casseia travels back to Earth early on, so we get to see how Earth has changed.  I was fascinated by the way Bear shows that economics and the hidden few that control the economic system, eventually paved the way for the different continents to come together in a power base, so there were several groupings that decided how the world would function as a unit as man moved into space - first the moon, and then Mars, were colonized.  People are the same, though how they connect has been changed by social networking - there is a very cool party scene that Casseia experiences while on Earth, that I could see the new generation coming up, wanting to create between their social plug-ins and desire to connect with as many people as possible, in many different ways.  It was fascinating.

I enjoyed the advances in science and technology that Bear explains made moving into space possible, and how life was possible on Mars - the physical contraints, and why they tunneled into Mars to live, rather than just living on the surface.  Most of all though, I enjoyed the idea of the thinkers, the super computers that eventually evolve to having a personality made when a person joins with them - goes into them, in a sense. The blending of human creativity with all that is known to exist, makes for an interesting way to see one possible future for the computers and internet and the vast possible ways we could interface together.  What do we do with knowledge?  Where can we go with it?  In Moving Mars, it eventually becomes possible to break down the smallest particle, to its essence, with thought - the space in the center of the smallest photon, is empty, surrounded by the energy charge that makes it positive or negative.  Out of this, the photon moves towards or from the photons surrounding it, and so we have the physical structure of life.  Once Charles is able to think his way to that structure, and with the help of a Thinker, join his mind to moving the photon, then moving in space becomes possible. I won't say any more, because I don't want to give away what he does, and why, though I will say that it was powerful to read, and very thought-provoking.  I also have to apologize if I got any of the science wrong, I'm sure I got a term in there wrong somewhere!

I read this for Carl's Sci Fi Experience, and also as part of my personal challenge to read more Hugo and Nebula winning science fiction. Moving Mars won the Nebula Award, and deservedly so.

We have 3 days left, and I have two more books to review for Carl's Sci Fi challenge.  If I'm lucky, I will have another one to add in time.  However, I am going to be continuing my science fiction reading this year.  I am participating in the Grandmaster Challenge at World's End blog, and I am having a ball finding new books and authors to read. 

I also am finding I am piling up other books to read very soon - The Morville Hours, and finish reading some books I started before Christmas, like The Most Beautiful Villages in England, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.  And, of course, Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge will be starting very soon (I hope!), and I have several books out from the library already that fall into this fantasy/dark fantasy area. 

Finally, for a brief time:
Plus, I finally broke down and requested a book from our library, that it not currently being published and no copies are floating around:  The Winds of Marble Arch, the collected short stories of Connie Willis.  It finally came into my house yesterday.  I have it for a maximum of three renewals, and then I have to let this dear book (I already love it) out of my hands again.  I won't read it all in time for Carl's challenge, but it will fit into the Grandmaster reading challenge.  I love it because I have read a few short stories by Connie, and I know fabulous ideas await me.  Of course the very best news would be that Subterranean Press finally announces they are publishing the announced but never seen soft cover edition of Winds of Marble Arch.  Not yet. Sometimes, despite all our advances, other things get in the way of getting a book published.

I hope you have a week filled with good reading ahead also!

thoughts on a new/old love affair with science fiction

I am finding myself in a puzzling place. Puzzling because I feel like I've been caught up in a love affair, except it's not with a person, but with books.  Specifically, I mean science fiction.  It's kind of like the nerdy guy who you were afraid to like in high school in case you got typecast along with him (and sorry, we all know this happens, high school is a terrifying place for being anything other than cool).  You flirted with him, read some Heinlein and Asimov so you could share some conversation, partake of little jokes, but in the end your heart wasn't in it because the science was too far above what you could imagine at the time.  So you said good bye to the cute, intelligent guy, a little sadly.  Zoom ahead 30 years.  All of a sudden, life on earth seems limited.  Is this all there is?  you ask yourself once more.  And suddenly, there he is, now an established professor/director of dark star studies/renowned physicist:  even if you still don't quite understand everything he says, suddenly he is COOL.  The beauties in high school had it wrong.  Jocks are now plump and have head traumas, so they can't always talk clearly (just joking, kind of, sporty guys.).  Now, the misfit chess club guy who loved maths is the one who has lots to talk about. He is the epitome of everything that could be, that is fun, that is exciting, that is out there and not limited by gravity.  Welcome to my new crush, the science fiction novel.

How badly do I have it?  This is what I brought home from the library on Thursday:

I had gone in for the Bond Girl book, and look what I came out with:  all science fiction novels.
The Collapsium - Will McCarthy - (in the future, death is unlocked.  But, even without death, rivals remain, and two rivals in spacetime exploration must put aside to save the universe from destruction)
Lear's Daughters - Marjorie B. Kellogg - (environmental disaster on earth, a planet in the universe that might hold the key to earth's survival, only the race that is indigenous to the planet claims twin goddesses rule and the planet is their battlefield.  It's more interesting than this, trust me!!!)
Terraforming Earth - Jack Williamson - for my Grandmaster Challenge author this month.  After a meteor crashes into earth, one space ship flees to the moon.  After generations pass, they return to Earth when it is ready again for life.  But how have they changed?  sounds very interesting)
Rainbow's End - Vernor Vinge -  (A look at the future of the web, and featuring Mr Rabbit, a mysterious friend of the character's granddaughter. who could resist this?)
Bond Girl- Erin Duffy (I requested this from the library, a brand new novel about the stock market crash in 2008, from the point of view of a woman who starts from the bottom.  Fluffy and fun, though not sure if she can muscle her way through all these science fiction heavy thinkers)

 No deal is too good to resist:
But that's not all.  Last night I went to Chapters to see what their two-for-one deal consisted of.  ALL pocketbooks qualified, mass market size.  I had the whole store to range through, and this is what I picked: 

Red Bones - Ann Cleeves (I read book one, Raven Black,  over Christmas, have yet to do my review,  and have broken down and bought this one because I can't find book 2, White Nights, anywhere.  Excellent first book in the series set in Shetland, featuring Jimmy Perez)

The Day Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko (I read book one, Day Watch, last year from the library, based on Memory's review.  I really enjoyed it, vampires in modern Russia, with magic and sorcerers.  So cool!  I can't find book one to buy, so finally bought book two to continue the series)
The Atrocity Files - Charles Stross (Bride of the Book God brought this author to my attention, but my real attention got hooked on the description:  office clerk fights Lovecraft monsters in the cubicles.  Hey, this could be my office on some days!  Must read it)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - NK Jemisin -on everyone's best of fantasy lists last year.  A first novel) - nominated for a World Fantasy Award last year.
A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge (for my Grandmasters challenge, but also, this story looks fabulous:" two children are survivors of a crash on a world with a medieval, lupine race."  This book had me at lupine.) Hugo winner
The Engines of God - Jack McDevitt - (first in the Priscilla Hutchins series.  Chindi, third in this series, is considered among the best among recent scifi novels.  I wanted to begin with the first one, also considered highly.  It keeps coming with references to Rendezvous with Rama quotes, so good thing I bought Rendezvous already.  Plus: a female pilot, star of a series that has won the Hugo.  Science fiction has come a long way, baby!)
And then, just because I came across it on the Worlds Without End listings,
The Vampire Tapestry - Suzy McKee Charnas - a vampire novel that I haven't read!  one that was nominated for a Nebula!!  When I saw it on the shelf, I grabbed it, and it might be the only thing that might lure me away from the pure science guy.  Temporarily at least).
3 science fiction, 1 mystery, 1 fantasy, 1 horror.  Um, see the trend?  Am I hooked?

I am reading Moving Mars right now.  It's by Greg Bear, and won the Nebula Award.  It's set in the future, in 2160, 2170, and future decades (I'm only 1/3 into the book, and Casseia is writing looking back on her life, so I don't know how far we go ahead yet). Earth has colonized the moon, and Mars, now.  Moon has folded back into earth's control, but Mars, Mars is fighting.  I think that Mars is so fixed in our psychology as the God of War, that any book or tv show that features it, by nature makes Mars fiesty and rebellious, wanting to be set free from Earth's control.  In Moving Mars, Mars has only been a colony for 100 years.  It takes 8 months to journey back to earth by space ship.  Bear carefully explains how all this is possible. I'm sure someone who understands how rocket fuel works, the physicality of life on Mars (with less gravity than earth and completely inhospitable) and about distances between stars and time, could figure out the care he's taken to get that part right.  What I am interested in, is the people.  Who went there to colonize?  How do they develop?  What happens when Earth wants something Mars has?  Which in this case, Mars does, and Mars and Earth are fighting over control of Mars and Mars's development. We see these events through the eyes of Casseia Majumbar, daughter of one of the founding families, who are called Binding Multiples, as the colony as it developed necessarily had different areas settled in, and no coherent government at first, just the heads of each family.  Mars still doesn't have a central government authority, and so when Earth tries to control Mars, the BM's are facing either takeover or fighting back.  Casseia's uncle is one of the men who steps forward to negotiate temporarily, and Casseia wins a place alongside him as an assistant.

So far I have been completely swept up in life on Mars, in the underground cities that have developed, in the warrens they name each of their main colony areas, and how Bear describes Mars, the alien desolate surface of Mars, where only water and extinct life forms are found.  It is thoroughly thought out and imagined, and I can almost feel the sense of growing up in unnatural daylight, because much of Mars' colonial life takes place under the surface. Casseia gets involved as the novel opens with the first university protests by the students when the university president takes away their right to attend school and closes the university temporarily, all because the Mars leader is afraid that any revolt to the proposed earth control of Mars will lead to revolt. She ironically creates the very situation she is afraid of.  Casseia is very young, 17 Earth years old, and  it is through her naivety and innocence that we initially see Mars, the revolution, Earth, and her first love, Charles Franklin, who takes another route to the future - he is a physicist, and wants to be a Thinker, which is learning how to think so far ahead, to perceive reality and time, that you can see the future and the past at once.  If you think of someone who might eventually end up living entirely in his mind and linking to a computer, you would have an idea of what the Mars colony wants to do, though Charles hasn't thought ahead enough to know what he would be giving up.  Such abilities are very rare, and highly prized, and Earth wants control of anything Mars develops in this area too.  Mars doesn't want to share, since Earth won't share their thinkers. And so, Casseia and her uncle fly, along with a little less than 100 others (because it is beyond expensive to fly from Mars to Earth, few can afford it) back to Earth, to hold off the coming changes Earth is going to try to force on the colony.

There are so many fascinating ideas in Moving Mars:  people have become Therapied, and those that did try to correct themselves, found themselves in control of the world's wealth, and those that did not choose to correct themselves, end up on the poor side of the economy.  Which is most of the population.  There are vids, and sims, where people can escape into almost alteranate reality without leaving their bodies.  There are enhancements, of beauty, intelligence, physical features, so that those who choose so, are no longer 'real' and imperfect, but unrealistically beautiful.  Casseia comments that no matter how enhanced someone is, it is no replacement for experience, and I think this is such a wise comment.  It applies to our world now, as well as the world of the future. We always want to be better, and one of the fun things about Moving Mars is, so far there has been no limits on fake experience - through Orianna, an enhanced Earth girl (Terran, called terrie for short), we see the extent to which the enhancements have taken Orianna far from any kind of normal life.  She has experienced simulated sex since she was 10.  She is beautiful, and smart, and physically perfect,
 gifted to learn any language possible (which is all the rage on Earth in the 2170s), and she has travelled both slowly by bike across parts of the world, as well as as far as her mind can take her.  It all seems unreal, both to Casseia and to us the reader, because life on Mars is much slower, cautious, and in realtime. With all our focus on the internet, video games, and looking ahead to how these could be used and expanded in the future, Greg Bear has made many astute guesses to how people will try to escape the limits of their life, as well as pointing out that nothing, but nothing, is better than experiencing it for real.  Real life, real pairings, real face-to-face relationships, are hard, though it is the only way people really grow. I find this so very interesting and certainly it's something I agree with, personally.  MSN, email, facebook - I look at them as quick ways to connect with someone, but the real connection, the satisfying soul connections we make, that we get from seeing someone's face and hearing the inflections in their speech, from occupying a space next to them, from being present and sharing that space and time - that's where we really are.  Where life is made, where we learn with the part of us that hungers for intimacy and connection. Casseia is so bad at this,but even at her young age she knows that no simulation (read msn conversation or online dating for our world now) is better than the real experience.  This really makes Moving Mars such a deeply felt and wise book for me,with these ideas and extrapolations about our future development set against the very real human need to touch, to feel, to kiss, to be near whom they love. 

So, I'm in love.  Excuse me, I have a journey from Mars to Earth to go join......

Among Others and some science fiction thoughts on reading science fiction

Among Others by Jo Walton is an extraordinary novel about a Welsh teenage girl who is sent to a boarding school in England after she runs away from home.  Her twin sister is dead as the result of a car accident which has left Morwenna crippled, able to walk, but never to run or move freely again.  Her mother is.......strange, her grandfather had a stroke, and the courts have deemed that Morwenna is better off with the father who abandoned the father shortly after the girls' birth, rather than force her back to live with her mother.  You would think this would make the book a downer to read, heavily depressing, but it doesn't.  Most of it is because Morwenna is so matter-of-fact about everything.  At one point while reading it I found myself dissatisfied with the lack of emotion she shows. Why isn't she grieving over the loss of her twin?  Why isn't she furious with her mother, who caused the accident that killed her sister? I realized that Morwenna is simply trying to survive the best way she knows how.  And her way is the same way I did, when I was a teenager and my life was in complete shambles - books.  Morwenna reads voraciously, almost anything she can find, and most particularly science fiction.  Morwenna reads to escape her life, of course, however she also reads  to explore different ideas - she's captured by what could be, by changing things, by possibility.  And this sense of discovery is what I love about science fiction so much.  Along the way of reading this novel, watching her discussing the books she was reading, I rediscovered something I had forgotten growing up:  how much I enjoy science fiction. In Among Others, Morwenna finds a book club at her local library, where they discuss science fiction.  One of the questions they ask each other one meeting is, Which would you rather meet, an elf or a Plutonion? I'll ask that now of you, Gentle Reader, and at the end of my post I'll tell you what Morwenna thinks it means, and what my answer was. 

. Among Others is much more than just a discourse on science fiction.  Plato, Mary Renault, and Susan Cooper (yes! The Dark is Rising is mentioned!) are some of the other books Morwenna reads. Elves feature, and they are imagined in a way that I really like.  I am happy that  fantasy feature here in this novel. It's not quite as large of course, because other than Lord Dunsany, Tolkein, Anne McCaffrey,  The Earthsea Trilogy by LeGuin, and  CS Lewis (all of whom Morwenna reads), there was no fantasy being written before1979, the year this book takes place in. It's significant that it's this year, since it's just before the 80's and the explosion of fantasy and science fiction as a viable genre of literature, with all the conventions and book tours and famous authors coming into the public sphere. During the novel Morwenna hears about conventions in the US, and that there is going to be one in Glasgow the next summer, and she plans to go. Her discovery of other people who read science fiction, and the chance to meet science fiction authors, blows her mind in the novel.  It's kind of refreshing to read about a character who is excited about the possibilities of the world, instead of the jaded youth who have seen and done it all that people our YA novels right now.  The fantasy element is important, because Morwenna can see elves.  It's part of her family, and something that interestingly is part of her nature, and not something that she fights against, as you would normally expect in a teen coming of age novel.  Instead, Morwenna must think her way through the repercussions of using magic, using her intelligence and reasoning.  She is very perceptive, which is why the period when I wondered if she was crazy, was so distressing - though it made sense, especially given that no one else can see the elves.  She is alone, among others.

I really enjoyed Among Others, very much.  It's well-written, well-researched historically (walkmans are just coming on the market in 1979 in the book), and despite the reserve of Morwenna, there are times when it is extremely moving as well.  The ending is particularly good, as Morwenna faces what she fears most.  I haven't written about the idea of her mother being a witch, which Morwenna talks about through the book, and how she thinks she is like her mother, because it seemed an odd fit to me.  At one point I wondered if Morwenna herself was crazy and had imagined everything in her past. I didn't want Morwenna to be an unreliable narrator because that would have been too easy to do.  I'm happy to report that she isn't crazy.  I don't want to say any more, because the ending and what she does is truly remarkable and powerful, and I really liked it. Walton has made fantasy and science fiction fit together, and that's remarkable also..  I love the use of books to illustrate what Morwenna is going through, and how she uses books to find her way to her own future.  I love that her love of books brings her together with her father, her grandfather, her new friends at the bookclub, and eventually her first boyfriend.

The novel is set in Wales and in England.  For anyone who knows anything of these two countries, Wales is not and never will be English.  Morwenna (and her twin sister Morganna) are the product of a mixed heritage, Welsh, English, and eventually she discovers other cultures in her background.  Her boarding school is in England, so Morwenna goes from her childhood idyll in Wales, running free among the hills, to being tightly monitored in an English boarding school, where she faces racism for being from a poor family and not from England. Among Others is a layered title, playing on science fiction idea of being a stranger in a strange land, of being not like those around you, of being Welsh when everyone around you is English, of having your mother crazy but no one protecting you, of losing a sibling, one who knows you better than most, and that sense of aloneness that comes with all these things. Morwenna has no one to talk to, no one she trusts, in this strange new place, so the novel is told from a diary perspective over one year. Among Others is also about how Morwenna has to learn to live among others without her twin, the person who finished her thoughts, and discovering that she and her twin were not the same person and she would have to live her own life after all. It's quite a clever novel, and I liked it.

By the way, to Morwenna's question:  would I rather meet an elf or a Plutonion?  I would rather, always, meet an elf.  Especially an elf like in Lord of the Rings. I always wanted to sail away with them at the end of LotR.  I thought and always have thought, they were beautiful and powerful and courageous, like the very best we could aspire to be. Not the faerie, who are completely different, and frightening (and should be), just the LotR elves.  The point of the question is, to meet an elf or to meet a Plutonion is to meet the past or embrace the future.  Maybe the Plutonion is wandering around here already on earth, among us.....that wouldn't be so bad, right? And this sense of discovery is what I love about science fiction so much.  Along the way of reading this novel, watching her discussing the books she was reading, I rediscovered something I had forgotten growing up:  how much I enjoy science fiction.

Reading science fiction leads to.....
So, on to my science fiction thoughts: reading Among Others awoke those memories of possibility in me, that I remember from the science fiction conventions I went to in the 1980's, from the authors I heard talk, from the buzz of so many people coming together to discuss books and ideas and what they loved.  It reminded me that the reason I join Carl's Sci fi experience very year is to read science fiction more often.  I always pick fantasy first out of a choice of fantasy and science fiction, because I find myths and fantasy easier to relate to imaginatively......but I am a person of contradictions, as we all are, and I have always looked up at the stars and wondered what's out there.  I desperately wanted to be an astronomer but couldn't do the math. You, my Gentle Reader, know of my love for so many things science fiction - Dr Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Fringe, X-files, Firefly, etc.  Reading science fiction though, has sort of lurked at the corner of my life for the past several years (ok, truthfully, at least a decade), the neglected genre that I mostly read for Connie Willis.  I think that over the years, because I couldn't keep up with the science end of things, I let my enjoyment of science fiction slide until I was barely reading any at all.  I felt like an imposter when I talked about science fiction because I couldn't understand the truth of the science behind it, when realistically, I never read it for the science, I read it to know what was possible for us to do as people of earth.  That's what I miss, imagining the future that is possible, that fantasy doesn't give me.   Lately I've been wandering through the science fiction and fantasy aisles, looking for something new to read.  I have been trying to find a copy of Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space to buy for well over a year, and it's not available (not out of print, just not available).  It's one of the classics of the new space opera science fiction story that I find interesting.

 So when Carl posted earlier this week about a new science fiction challenge, on Worlds Without End blog, I read it through curiously.  On the blog, laid out in easy to use format, is a booktracker program where you can input all the science fiction, horror, and fantasy you have ever read, and see how you are doing on reading the best of (or all anyone has written) in science fiction, fantasy and horror. Well, it was like a light bulb lit up for me!  I did the book tracker and realized that I have read a little of everything, but not lots of any one thing.  I'm pleased to note I have read some Hugo and Nebula winners, which I do try to keep track of.

So......*takes deep breath*

I have decided to join the Grand Masters Challenge, and read one classic science fiction novel by one of the Grand Masters, every month for a year. I'm excited.  I want to go back now and rediscover what's good and the best of it again.  Here's my chance to reconnect with the roots of science fiction, and  to read the best, and see if I can find some new favourites.

The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award reads like a who's who of science fiction:  Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Connie Willis, Jack Williamson, L Sprague De Camp, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Arther C Clarke, Clifford D Simak, Lester Del Rey, Frederick Pohl, Damon Knight, A. E Van Vogt, Jack Vance, Hal Clement, Brian Aldiss, Philip Jose Farmer, Poul Anderson, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, James E. Gunn

So far I've signed up to read -
-yes, Connie Willis was my first choice!  Luckily I have one new one to read, All Clear  :-)  because I've read everything else by her.
- Robert Silverberg (and Cath just reviewed a book by him on her blog, that was quite interesting),
- Ursula K LeGuin - at last! I can't believe I haven't read The Earthsea Trilogy yet.
- Isaac Asimov (who I grew up reading) - I honestly can't remember how many of the foundation books I've read, so I need to reread the first one and I, Robot (which I recall really liking when I first read it as a teenager), just to start catching up
- Anne McCaffrey (I have Dragonsinger sitting right here on my shelf.  Again, an unread classic...)
- Alfred Bester (if I can find it, The Stars My Destination is a classic)
-Poul Anderson (happily, I just picked up two by him, Hrolf Kroki's Saga and The Midsummer Tempest. Though technically these might qualify as fantasy, so I need to look more into what he's written)
- Arthur C Clarke (I want Rendezvous with Rama!  there must be something we can do to get these classics back in print)
- Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land is a possibility, though I want The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, I think)

By the way, I'm under the challenge on the site as bookgirl if you want to look at how I'm doing on the challenge.  I was still on painkillers for my knee and thus couldn't think  of a name when I signed up.  I think I  like it anyway!  I will keep you posted through here too, as we have to write 6 posts through the year on 6 of the 12 books we are reading. I'm feeling excited and a little challenged, since I haven't read most of the authors, and it's a feeling of discovery all over again.   So I'm eager to find what's new - and old and good - in science fiction again.

Even though it's counted as fantasy in my book section at Chapters bookstore here, I'm counting Among Others as science fiction because so much of the books it covers is science fiction literature up to 1979.  So this is my first book for Carl's Sci fi experience.

Among Others showed me, reminded me, that science fiction is about ideas.  People need connection and emotion to make that journey into the future possible.  How can we create the best possible future for future generations, if we can't imagine what it would be like? what kind of future do we want?  Where will we go?  Where could we go?  I loved Star Trek for that possibility, and I love Among Others for reminding me that science fiction literature is the home of the future for us.   This genre is a way we have of exploring what the human race is capable of, what we imagine we could do if we were freed to explore, and what we bring along with us everywhere in the galaxy we go.