Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“The Harvard solution,” John repeated, savoring the phrase. “Long ago Harvard’s administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight-A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it.” “Couldn’t have that,” John said. Maya rolled her eyes. “You two must have gone to trade schools, eh?” “The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way—” “Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades—”

When Maya was unhappy it was like Ella Fitzgerald singing a blues,

There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate.

I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal. I died as animal and I was human. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die human, To soar with angels blessed above. And when I sacrifice my angel soul I shall become what no mind ever conceived.

Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids, and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long! The size of it, Nadia! The size!”

Millions of Arkadys stared bug-eyed at millions of John.

So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody.