Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.

Frank Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to himself, Now we’ll see what I can do with this planet.

Great. We start the book knowing Frank is a murderer.

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement,

Coriolis forces

Why your toilet flushes one way or the other, depending on if you live in the Northern or Southern hemisphere.

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

He reached out with a forefinger and tapped her between the breasts—a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”

Frank is loonie toons.

panmixia.”

There's a word you don't often hear at the dinner table.

Evolution is a matter of environment and

chance,

acting over millions of years. But history is a matter ...

ch...

acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, o...

History is Lam...

The idea that we pass down skills and knowledge to our young.

And so I say that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.”

A good place to start that may be here on Earth.

No Exit.”

Hell is other people.

palimpsest

Cool way to use the word.

“Royal Garden Blues.”

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band,

Bessie Smith

“Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice.

“The Sheik of Araby.”

“Especially given the crowd at base camp,” Ann said.

Ann seems a little...put off.

Arkady sighed. “Yeah yeah.” “Well, aren’t you?” “You damned liberals.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

"Love me, I'm a liberal" by Phil Ochs. Pronounced "oaks". Radical folk singer from the 60's. Check it out.

Nadia first heard of the expedition when Arkady skipped through the chambers to her and told her about it. “Sounds nice,” she said. “Want to come along?” he asked. “Why yes,” she said. Her ghost finger was tingling.

Robinson makes extensive use of dirigibles in his book, "Ministry of the Future". An amazing book and a future I want to live in.

Friedrichshafen Noch Einmal,

What a cool name.

So that afternoon they descended blind, and let the anchor drag until it hooked and held. The wind here was slower, but even so Nadia’s descent in the sling was harrowing. Down and down into rushing clouds of yellow dust, swinging back and forth…and there it was right under her boots, the ground! She hit and dragged to a halt. Once out of the sling she found herself leaning into the wind; thin as it was it still struck like blows, and her old feeling of hollowness was extreme.

Better watch out for static electricity.

Mother Russia! The church and the communists both had tried to eradicate the matriarchy that had preceded them, and all they had achieved was a flood of bitter emasculating scorn, a whole nation full of contemptuous russalkas and baba yagas and twenty-hour-a-day superwomen, living in a nearly parthenogenic culture of mothers, daughters, babushkas, granddaughters. Yet still necessarily absorbed in their relationships with men, desperately trying to find the lost father, the perfect mate. Or just a man who would pull his share of the load. Finding that great love, and then more often than not destroying it. Crazy!

This is a real thing. I've seen a dozen Russian women of all ages descend on some drunk man in the street and tear him apart like a flock of vultures, or better, harpies. The men are, generally, macho pricks or totally wussed out. I had a Russian teacher. She was convinced that Russia suffered from nation-wide mental illness. She was right.

giri?

Debt, or burden, of honor.

The canals had been sky areology, and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with the rigor of ground areology. Most collapsed under the weight of surface data, got tossed in the canal as they said.

There is some strong old time science fiction, written by guys like Robert Heinlein, that included the Canals that Percival Lowell was convinced that he had seen. Lowell fueled the imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs to create the hero John Carter of Mars. Nadia's joke earlier, about being a Princess of Mars was a Burroughs reference. Robert Heinlein so loved the idea of Timeless Martians ctiss-crosding their world with canals that he continued using the idea in his science fiction into the 1980's, long after we knew that Mars held no canals or, sadly, Martians.

Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned on Earth.

A wonderful way of thinking.

Bradbury Point.

If you not read Bradbury'sc"The Martian Chronicals" you are missing a treat. They are classic.

haecceity,”

Cool word!

“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

gnosis

Knowledge of a spiritual nature.

fana,

Earthly things.

baqa,

Abiding with god.

haqq.

A truth.

“It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”

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.”

Rumi Jalaluddin,”

An exceptional influence and source of Sufi culture, from the 12th century.

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.

“Whether it be of this world or of that,” she said, “your love will lead us yonder in the end.”

It bothers me to know that Frank will have John killed.

anastomosing

“Wrong! It’s not just the sun and some robots, it’s human time, a lot of it.

Human time. The most precious resource in the universe.

democracy versus capitalism

It always is.

“Syncretism

This is a word every American should know.

“Whether it be of this world or of that, Your love will lead us yonder at the last.”

Is it foreshadowing if we already know John is going to be assassinated?

And everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyan.

I've been waiting for the story of Big Man and Paul Bunyan on Mars.

It’s a matter of will, Frank Chalmers said to his face in the mirror.

Ugh. Back to Frank the Weasel.

Bareiss column, semicircular at top and bottom but with the half-circles rotated 180 degrees to each other.