Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Defend a weak new neighbor to weaken the old powerful ones, as Machiavelli had said.

But of course there had to be more to it than that. They had to be alienated somehow, alienated and solitary enough not to care about leaving everyone they had known behind forever—and yet still connected and social enough to get along with all their new acquaintances in Wright Valley, with every member of the tiny village that the colony would become.

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. The die was cast.

Perihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higher. Southern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do near aphelion—so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.

That’s the difference between here and Earth, the age of the land goes from millions of years to billions.

“Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American Revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial

power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state—it’s all just a false analogy!” “Why do you say that?” Marian demanded. “What’s different?” “Well for one thing, we’re not living on land that can sustain us. And for another, we don’t have the means to revolt successfully!” “I disagree with both those points. You should talk to Arkady more about that.”

“We can talk all we want,” Marian said, “but that’s not going to change what they do.”

It may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages: we’re at a great distance, and we’re in possession.

Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.

Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it’s absurdly easy.”

You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!” “I’m sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies,” the man said with a grin. “Actually the analogy is in many ways a good one. We’re not just cogs in the machine here, we’re individual people, most of us ordinary, but there’s some real characters too—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.”

And they quickly found that losing the electronic information net was like losing one of their senses; Nadia kept glancing down at her wristpad, on which, until this breakdown, Arkady could have appeared

any second; on which any of the first hundred might have showed up, and declared themselves safe; and then she would look up from the little blank square at the land around her, suddenly so much bigger and wilder and emptier than it had ever been before.