Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.

there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.

Haha!

Sax said, “They feel we’re missing a spiritual dimension of life that earlier generations had, and they attempt to regain it using the same means.” He blinked in his owlish way, as if the problem were disposed of by being defined.

I'll admit, I didn't care for the book as a whole, but there are some good quotes.

With the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpless. This was illogical, but naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts.

Hiroko was an enigma to Maya. Aloof and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work, and her team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship.

Why does the book ascribe this kind of personality to the only asian character? I wish we could have had a chapter from her point of view!

“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”

She had thought about what to say, if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.

I like this because it's a call-back to the first chapter. I wish there had been more of that!

It occurred to her that they might never be so happy again. Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

They were going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of strangers.

This in regards to the first 100

“Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized! We’re going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It’s going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains….”

This is something I hoped would have a pay-off later! But no...

After that, they could begin to build in earnest. And here Nadia came into her own. She had had nothing to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation for her. But building things was her great talent, the nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia.

Nadia is the best.

While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut.

Mutual professional respect, a great maker of friendships.

Hiroko was never strange, except when she would say something Nadia didn’t know how to deal with, like, “Mars will tell us what it wants and then we’ll have to do it.” What could you say to something like that?

It was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.

“We’ll all say that. We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”

“Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning.

“I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention.”

They dropped several windmills per day, but the flight was giving them a stronger sense of the size of the planet, and the project began to seem like a joke, as if they flew over Antarctica and tried to melt the ice by setting down a number of camping stoves.

I'd like to see more of this too - the actual terraforming of Mars!

He snorted. “I could have had Maya! Oh my! I could have had the joy of Maya Katarina! Just like Frank and John!” He snorted, and they both laughed out loud. “How could I have passed on such joy! Silly me!” He giggled until she punched him.

Hiroko would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systems. The bioengineering group works with her most of the time, after all, and for some of them she’s like a guru, they almost worship her.

There's a lot of foreshadowing about Hiroko breaking off or starting a cult, but we don't really see much of what that actually looks like. It's a little frustrating.

Did conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikes? It was as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talking to. Or—was this better or worse?—as if you were engaged in telepathy.

There are a lot of interesting throw-away thoughts like this in the book.

It was ironic at best to think that he had used the results of a century’s psychological thinking, and some of the latest laboratory research in psychophysiology, not to mention a complicated apparatus from structuralist alchemy, all in order to reinvent the ancient system of the humours.

They nodded seriously. He wished he had Frank’s facility for languages—it would help to be able to communicate better with these people. They were hard to read; inscrutable and all that.

!!! (He's referring to a group of Japanese settlers.)

But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It’s sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they know. So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.”

Then without thinking about it he began to add to the flow of sound the names for Mars, muttering them in the rhythm of the chant as he understood it. “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.”

I'm slightly annoyed that "Mars" isn't included in this list. It implies that "Mars" is the true name, and the others alternates.

When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things—some clothes, a lectern, and that was it!

I personally found this a little hard to believe.

I mean how could you not like someone who was the first person on another planet walking out there and saying Well, here we are. It was impossible not to like him.

I don't like him...but I can see that he has good media presence. This is a cute line for a first landing on a new planet.

There is no such thing as an ugly woman. That’s what he thought. That is what he thought, why he slept with a different woman every night, and he didn’t care what they looked like. Or how old they were, he had to talk fast when they found him with that fifteen-year-old.

!!! (Case in point! This is almost on the same page as the above quote, describing the same man!)

Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”

“Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.

Had they?? I saw nothing to support that claim!

we’re going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee you. Also the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want.”

I got a little confused here. Did he mean John Moseby or Nathan Bedford Forrest? I've never heard of "Forrest Moseby". (And I'm really hoping he meant Moseby...Forrest is famous for being a prominent member of the KKK.)

“I suppose the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?”

What?? I don't understand the metaphor here...are they casting the Martians as equivalent to American slaves? Considering their goal is to secede from Earth, maybe they should be asking for a Lee...

He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.

Wow! Was the title of "Nemesis Games" by James S. A. Corey a reference to this?

Yeli was an expert flyer and Angela said she was too,

"Angela said she was" not "Angela was"...why? Is it because she's not one of the first 100 or because she's a woman?

The impact in the last half hour of the fall was so strong that everything far to north and south was flattened; people were saying that no one close enough actually to see the cable hit survived it, and most of the drone cameras had been smashed as well. For the final thousands of kilometers of the fall, there were no witnesses.

Wow!

How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?

They yanked open the outer lock doors and piled in, Sax and Ann and Simon in one, Nadia with Maya and Frank in the other,

What's kind of funny about this is that a few others of the first 100 were mentioned briefly as being with them earlier on, but they've been forgotten by this point. Even the author doesn't care that much about characters outside a handful!