Shikata Ga Nai: An Analysis of the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (Patreon)

Introduction

Введение
導入

مقدمة

On April 12th 1961, the Vostok 1, a ship launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, carried soviet air force pilot Yuri Gagarin up out of the atmosphere, through a complete orbit around the Earth to a greatest distance of 327 kilometres from the Earth’s surface. Gagarin, who had just turned 27 a month before, had just become the first human being to go to outer space (defined as over 100 km altitude). On the morning of the flight, according to some people’s stories,  Sergei Korolyov, the soviet engineer responsible for Sputnik 1 (the first man made Earth satellite), Sputnik 3 (which took the dog Laika to space), Luna 2 (the first manmade object to touch the moon’s surface) and now Vostok 1, had to personally reseal the hatch on the spacecraft. Korolyov was suffering intense anxiety in the buildup to the launch, as 12 of the previous 24 soviet launches had failed but Gagarin, apparently cool as a cucumber, asked for music to be played, and at 6:07am as he took off, declared “Poyekhali!” which means “here we go!” adding “see you soon friends!” Poyekhali became a soviet cultural catchphrase representing the spirit of the space race.

Orbiting the Earth once before landing again, Gagarin reached a top speed of just over 28,000 km per hour. Once home he became an international celebrity and left an indelible mark on human history. Gagarin would continue to enjoy celebrity status and an array of military promotions until 1968 when he died inside a… this one is going to be difficult for YouTube terms of service

In a speech on the morning of the launch, Gagarin said:

“Can you think of a task more difficult than the one assigned to me. It is not responsibility to a single person, or dozens of people, or even a collective. It is responsibility to all Soviet people, to all mankind, to its present and its future. And if I am nevertheless venturing on this flight, it is because I am a Communist, because I draw strength from unexampled exploits performed by my compatriots, Soviet men and women. I know that I shall muster all my will power the better to do the job.”

Even from this first step outside of our own atmosphere, the people’s history of space has been a persistent presence, a spectre haunting the history of space travel, we could say. Naturally, the shape of world power still warped the degree to which it was a representative people’s history. While Interkosmos took astronauts of Asian, African and Arabic origin into space for the first time, it was still ultimately a mostly white space program. Also the first woman in space was the 12th person in space, which doesn’t make total sense according to – I’m just running the numbers here and it seems like – yes it’s saying here that women are half of people? Incidentally the Americans put a man on the moon before letting a woman go to space, which I think is honestly pretty emblematic of something. Like yes, Valentina Tereshkova was the 12th person in space, but Sally Ride was the 120th. Is that a mathematical proof that while the soviet union was still misogynistic it was literally ten times more feminist than America? I’m not a scientist, I couldn’t possibly say.

Britain, if anyone was wondering, didn’t put a man into space first, but we didn’t put a woman into space first either - the first British astronaut Helen Sharman won a radio call in competition for a free seat on a Soviet spaceship launch. I’m not sure what that says about us as a country but I am going to start listening to the radio more.

A lot of the time when people think about the space race, they just think about the moon landing, and that really feels like an example of “history is written by the victors” because while landing a man on the moon is a big deal, a giant leap for mankind if you like, so is putting the first animal in space, the first person in space, the first man made object on the moon, conducting the first spacewalk, and the first interplanetary flight, the first hard and soft landings on Mars and Venus and all of those were done by the Soviet Union while the United States of America was still figuring out that women are just as capable of sitting still in a metal tube while a bunch of people fire them into space as men are.

I want to talk a little about why we should care about space

Space exploration has led to developments in science, which is obviously not an uncomplicated and unpolluted virtue, but not all of these developments have been beneficial only towards the end of further exploring space. For one, lots of medical research and development has been done on the ISS. For a handful of consumer product examples, wireless headphones, freeze dried food, long life tyres and memory foam were all developed because of space exploration. Personally, I feel like in the scientific arena the strongest argument against space exploration is that all the funding should be going to combating climate change instead, but even there it should be said that the views of Earth that space exploration has given us have been massively helpful in developing weather prediction systems that can help reduce the effects of climate disasters.

I suppose one way I would argue that we should care about space is that space is where we live. We have a right to it because we have looked up and imagined stories about shapes we see in the stars, pondered questions about the nature and meaning of existence for as long as we have been human, and that is something that connects us all. Even from as brightly lit a place as the middle of London, on a clear night you can look up and see the other planets in our solar system shining brightly down on us.

Early this year, when my girlfriend and I got our own telescope, the planets were all visible in the sky for a short time in something dubbed a “planetary parade” in one headline. Going out with the telescope one evening we got our first pictures of Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and a completely dogass picture of Mercury which is too small for us to see properly with our size of scope and the telescope needed collimating anyway. Saturn however, eluded us. We had been out the week before getting the telescope watching as the sunset let the lights of the planets drip sleepily into view. Venus, the 3rd brightest object in the sky after the sun & moon, was clear and bright, we waited with bated breath as Saturn blinked glacially into existence just below her - it was absolutely breathtaking in the way only the universe can be, but by the time we were back with our telescope Saturn had moved below the horizon and out of sight.

Teasing details out of the pictures has been a learning experience. In 7 years as a YouTuber this is the first time I’ve bothered to learn about ISO and shutter speed and so on and the first time I’ve really really wanted to get a better camera. Jupiter’s famous weather bands were the first detail we could make out, though they weren’t nearly as easy to see on camera as through the eyepiece. They’re so so very faint but it was unbelievably exciting.

Generally in astrophotography the way we get around not seeing very much of something is to take lots of photos of it at different exposures and then stack them together to pull out the details.

If you do this with a video, you can separate out the frames and put them through software to do it en masse automatically, though the downside here is how it tends to sort of beautify the outcome. She’s giving orb she’s giving smooth she’s giving AI filter on your phone that you didn’t ask for and can’t switch off.

I prefer getting my shots into photoshop and messing around with my individual pictures trying to get out the details I could see in the eyepiece that the camera couldn’t capture. A lot of imaging of space requires this kind of imaginative seeing. For example the Akatsuki probe from JAXA recently took the highest resolution photos of Venus so far, though they were in IR. Venus in true colour is as blank and white as a pearl.

Incidentally, when you see things moving in real time videos through a telescope, what you’re actually seeing is the turning of the Earth. Looking through a telescope has a way of putting you in touch with time and space’s paradoxical vastness and minutiae.

Mars, being so much smaller, doesn’t give us nearly as much interesting detail as Jupiter, but we can see very faintly the white of one of its polar ice caps.

Mars, a place we have often as a culture looked at and imagined a place we might one day live.

I think this is the strongest argument you can really make for why leftists should care about space - if humanity survives this current polycrisis, and I believe it will, then going to space is a part of our future

The biggest personality in space travel in the richest country in the world is Elon Musk, an actual sieg-heiling fascist. If the future of humanity beyond earth is up to him the only people allowed in space will be straight and white. In a few years they'll only let Katy Perry back up there if she proclaims her love for the fatherland and publicly states that she never kissed a girl. 

Besides Musk himself, capitalists look at space as a market, an expanse of possible resources to be mined, and their devotion to capital makes them blind to everything beautiful about the universe. Solar radiation management, the introduction of reflective particles into the atmosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect is the favourite capitalist climate solution after CCS. Studies into the viability of SRM have shown the possibility it may cause a massive drought devastating the South American rainforests, often called “the lungs of the planet”. Also, and this is really cool, countries like the UK have absolutely no regulations of geoengineering technologies so companies that are working on this kind of thing can basically do anything they want as long as nobody sets fire to all their equipment. In Half-Earth Socialism, Drew Pendergrass describes the undending overcast weather that would be caused by Solar Radiation Management as the “permanent grey skies of Neoliberalism”. 

So picture it: the world is clouded over, the air quality is painfully polluted, the ultra rich get to see the clear sky in their private jets or mountain top residences, the only human beings who will venture beyond the atmosphere of our cradle-planet are part of a eugenics project to create the most historically illiterate human who ever lived. You see on the weather forecast that there will be an incredibly rare clear sky and head to what you are sure was always a public park to see the stars and the planets and the shapes that your ancestors told stories about for thousands of years but then a private security guard who has all the legal powers of a police officer pops up next to you saying “Schcuze me ma'am ‘ave yew got a loicense to appreciate the majesty of the cosmos? This is a private park and understanding your place in a vast universe of intricate beauty and wonder is a customer only feature.”

That’s what I would call “the bad ending”, when it comes to humanity and space. But if I was going to tell you about “the good ending”, I would just tell you about the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Mars Trilogy is a story about an awful lot of things, but in the most literal sense it’s about human population of Mars and a series of subsequent revolutions. It’s a science fiction epic that spans 200 years from the first human landing on Mars through intense political struggle to a vision of a future society where nobody is homeless or starving, where capitalism is a distant memory, the human lifespan is massively extended and human beings have begun to inhabit every part of the solar system as well as travel far beyond in search of new discovery. It is a beautiful and impressive work both in literary and imaginative terms, telling a story both with compelling characters moving through unique experiences in surprisingly relatable ways and with glimpses of the long and slow development of society as a whole. It uses sociological storytelling - one chapter will tell you this guy was here on this night and had these conversations and felt this way about these things, another chapter will begin “over the next ten years, the people in the southern highlands began to”, zooming out and speeding up to watch society change in new and bizarre ways. It is a series whose main character is society or perhaps humanity itself, whose central conflicts are our relationships to existence, nature and the universe and which manages to transition pretty seamlessly from very real components of contemporary political struggle to the lofty mechanics of pragmatically traversing the possible.

It is a utopian story, and I want to explore that deliberately, because I think that has immense value. As Ruth Levitas, in her book Utopia As Method, says “Defending utopia entails insisting that the identification and expression of the deepest desires of our hearts and minds, and those of others, is a necessary form of knowledge and of truth.” The Mars Trilogy shows a possible liberatory future not by taking us up to the moment that revolution is finished and capitalism is defeated and letting us just imagine the rest, but by pushing on past capitalism, making it a mere hurdle we had to overcome to get out there into the universe asking the really big questions, solving the deeper mysteries that we can only really engage with when we as humans can both look beyond ourselves and also look deep into ourselves with real understanding. I think utopian fiction is vital and not just as escapism but as a way of communicating why struggle is worthwhile.

In the politics of collective struggle, imagination is so crucial, and that’s why I find this idea of a future on another world to be the best argument for why leftists should care about space. It’s not exactly a pragmatic argument, it’s about our imagination, it’s about our need to believe, to yearn, to dream.

I often think about the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (I am rarely not thinking about the HBO miniseries Chernobyl) and the way the show lionises scientists, makes them the heroes of the story. Jared Harris’ performance as Valery Legasov, in my opinion the finest of his career so far, includes these tender moments where despite the urgency, the inconceivable pressure, the horror of his situation, his passion for scientific inquiry and discovery shines through, and I think those moments are essential to the emotional narrative of the series, where the obtuse bureaucracy of the state is the foil to the heroic love of truth of Legasov and the other scientists.

I think that people who love the drama of science in Chernobyl will love the Mars Trilogy for the very same.

Science is so integral to this series because it is the vehicle through which humanity is brought to consider itself, to understand its past, present and future, to consider its direction and legacy. On the one hand, that makes the scientific and technological aspects of the story a genre motif like in so many other pieces of heavily political science fiction, a set of analogies and metaphors to tell a story about human freedom. On the other hand, real changes to what human beings can know and understand and change in the universe drive political changes in a way that is true to history. 

Right now we face an existential threat caused by capitalism that scientists have been trying to warn us about and which must necessarily be solved in part by technological changes and scientific discovery which will only be done if we collectively wrest control of our planetary future away from the ruling class. In turn, the ruling class is and has for decades been trying to eliminate the science, to epistemically dominate the world. They are trying to cloud the understanding and progress that new technologies have made possible to choke any threats to their power.

At the same time, developments in technology have brought us to a point where the quality of life for everyone on the planet could be higher than at any point in history if we were not constrained by a completely futile and defunct model of labour, of nations, of wealth and success. People can see this. It’s not hard. More and more people see that the future could be here for everyone if the people who already have it didn’t feel bigger and smarter when they have things that others don’t.

So we have a planet being murdered by the greed of the ruling class, half a population doing jobs they hate that they realise are pointless just to get minute shares of imperialist plunder, the other half starving and straining and struggling day to day just to exist. The richest people in the world are trying to produce ignorance and hatred on massive scales just to cling onto their wealth, because they hope against hope that if they can lie enough it will stop ordinary people from coming to the obvious conclusion: We gotta kill these fascist scumbags.

So when I see Trump’s second administration with Elon Musk leading so much of its pettiest, most pathetically egotistical and insecure horrors, removing all the information from NASA’s website that ever talked about women or people of colour doing anything in space, it seems obvious why we should care. They want the sky to belong to them. They want to be the only ones who get to look up and dream, and we will not let them.

Which brings us back around to the Mars Trilogy. Let’s talk about utopia, let’s talk about revolution, let’s talk about space for about as long as you’d expect in a piece of writing like this, and let’s talk about old people having sex for way longer than anyone asked. 

Poyekhali :)

Part I: Areoformation

Часть I: Ареоформация
パート I: 火星の形成

الجزء الأول: تكوين المريخ

“The point is not to make another Earth. Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.” - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars 

The Mars Trilogy begins its future history epic with an international mission to send 100 colonists to Mars, 50 sent by NASA and 50 sent by the Russian Space Agency. The colonists are meticulously chosen first by their expertise and then their personalities as evaluated by a battery of psychological tests and finally a year living in Antarctica to give them experience as close as possible to living on Mars. The two agencies build an enormous ship called The Ares in orbit and it sets off with the first hundred people to live on Mars on board. On the journey out, deep in the inky void with only each other and the whole world watching, things for the colonists start to get weird.

At first it’s everything you’d expect. Alliances form and break, jealousies simmer, tensions over what could be dismissed in any other setting as abstract or trivial differences become deeply pronounced. One group, the one in charge of the farming project, becomes insular and strange. The biggest personalities on board get tangled up in this little love triangle - Maya Toitovna the leader of the Russian half of the mission, Frank Chalmers, the leader of the Americans, and Frank’s best friend John Boone who isn’t in an official leadership role but was also the first person to set foot on Mars in a previous mission. The christians on board make a point of celebrating Easter, to the derision of the most staunchly atheist and scientific crew. A different three mission members form a love triangle in the cool way where they’re actually do gay sex about it. All of these happenings form the background radiation of the messy little lives of the first hundred, floating along toward the red planet.

But then the solar storm hits, and everyone aboard has to hide in an on board shelter to protect them from the lethal radiation. This is a vital moment, because despite being in relatively close quarters living and working together, this is the first time that all of the colonists are in one place, and they get to talking. Cosmic circumstance has convened a citizens assembly of the first hundred, and some of them have an agenda. Arkady Bogdanov, an engineer who the crew psychologist assessed as an entirely work focused man with no strong opinions, announces proudly that he lied the whole way through the selection process and he knows everyone else did too, and everyone else agrees. Arkady delivers a beautiful polemic to the first hundred about the moment they are experiencing in history and the opportunity they have before them. You know the drill “hey guys I think we can maybe live in different ways than we used to on Earth. Now I’m no communist, but…”

There’s this great imagery in the storm shelter section, where because they aren’t in their usual rotating habitat rings they don’t have artificial gravity, so they wear velcro shoes to stick to the fabric surfaces and Kim Stanley Robinson describes Arkady as “rip rip ripping” his way to the middle of the crowd.

Arkady’s ideas are popular but they aren’t wholly embraced by everyone aboard. There are very few actively reactionary oppositions to what he says, but something about this moment that underscores everyone’s politics is that it opens the topic of their right to Mars. The popularity of Arkady’s ideas, later referred to as Bogdanovism when they really gain traction, is because they vibe well with the spirit of the mission that everyone there is on their way to do - they all know they are making the future and that they want to have a say in what it looks like.

This leads to more interrogation of the purpose of their mission before they even arrive at Mars, starting with Ann Clayborne, which is a great name for a geologist - although on Mars she’s an areologist. Ann’s objection at first is a professional one: if she is there to study the geological processes of Mars then terraforming, which everyone seems to suddenly be in implicit agreement is happening, will make her work impossible and irrelevant. What was going to be the biggest leap forward for her discipline in history just as it will be for other scientists aboard, will be snuffed out. Besides, she argues, if there is preexisting life on Mars it could take years or decades to uncover and if terraforming is going to start right away it may kill that martian life before humans ever find it.

Sax Russell, the most autistic man who has ever lived in fiction or reality and head of the proposed terraforming project, waves away all her points and this leads to a heated argument which is watched by people all over Earth, rapidly polarising them in a debate they didn’t know they were having. A whole world of political thinking spins out from this first objection, and a whole movement of people opposed to terraforming who call themselves “the reds”.

The reds have a whole spectrum of positions, from those who are vehemently against any changes to the planet at all to those who think enough change to ease human habitation is good as long as their personal vision of the essential Mars is preserved. This isn’t how they organise though, they organise around specific issues. Some of them oppose the moholes which are basically big vertical holes drilled into the planet’s crust to get the heat from the core into the atmosphere. Some of them are opposed to the space elevator that the capitalists make to transport things to and from Earth. Some of them want to sever this “umbilical cord” to Earth because it is a way that Earth exerts power over them, but some of them are worried that the elevator will be used to send too many people and “they’ll destroy our way of life” and “oh no what if they send too many Chinese people and Indians”. Some of the reds are opposed to the soletta, a big ring of space mirrors used to reflect more sunlight onto Mars to warm it faster, while others are specifically angry about the aerial lens which focuses that light into a massive laser beam carving canals a mile wide into the surface which has every likelihood of making Mars too hot and basically permanently unbreathable which is fine with the capitalists because it would mean they can set up large scale mining operations faster and they don’t care about Mars being for anything except resource mining.

Some of the people in favour of changing Mars for human habitation also approach it from a very spiritual place. Hiroko Ai is the mastermind of the First Hundred’s farming mission and ecological design - she holds the position of chief botanist, but it becomes quickly clear that she has become the leader of a growing cult. The Greens, as they will later be known, want a Mars that is habitable for human beings but also worship mother Mars, performing rituals where they dance together naked and eat handfuls of dirt. They believe in Viriditas, a greening force, a life essence spreading through all things and they see themselves as helping the viriditas to bloom. Hiroko takes the samples of colonists’ gametes that are stored on the Ares and makes a bunch of babies without telling anyone. She’s my problematic fave, my revolutionary ecowarrior cum thief. Her children, raised in the cult, specifically in a hidden underground village, are named for the names of Mars, like Kasei and Nirgal. I’m getting ahead of myself, Nirgal isn’t born until after the first revolution.

The Greens are actually absent for a lot of Red Mars because their strength is in their underground networks, growing like roots. As the population of Mars increases, members of the first hundred encounter people who have very spiritual beliefs about Mars, who take part in an evolving religious tradition coming to be known as “The areophany” , a religion of Mars. There is a growing Arab population in the decades after the first hundred arrive and some of the perspective characters meet muslims who are incorporating Mars worship into their belief systems.

At the same time that these political factions are developing, Arkady’s ideas are propagating in the population. The Bogdanovists sit in an odd third place relative to the reds and the Greens. They engage in ecotage like the reds, though the Bogdanovist motivation is in stopping Earth powers having control on Mars, and at the same time they believe in terraforming for human habitation like the Greens. More accurately, the Greens and Bogdanovists are the ones who say “we are not terraforming Mars, we are being areoformed”. When the Ares lands, part of it splits to go to Phobos, the moon of Mars, where Arkady and his team spend the first few years of the mission working on a space port so that traffic to and from the red planet can navigate the gravity well more easily. Arkady and his closest comrades, being big believers in public luxury and human progress, make the stop at Phobos as beautiful as possible. Every single detail has been considered in terms of design, aesthetic, function, and more.

Arkady’s stated goal with the construction on Phobos is that it will give newcomers the best possible first impression of Mars and of the way that humanity is changing as it steps into an interplanetary future. Phobos becomes redundant as a spaceport when the capitalists and UNOMA (United Nations Office for Martian Affairs) set up the space elevator, a cable spooled out of the asteroid Clarke by miner-factory robots connected to the surface in an areostationary orbit, with the cable swinging slightly but precisely to avoid the orbits of Mars’ two moons. Though Phobos may be less relevant, Arkady’s ideas are not, and Bogdanovists appear at every level of Martian society, concentrated most in organised labour and Bogdanovist enclaves. As tensions grow between the Martian factions and UNOMA, there is a rumour that one Bogdanovist hub even has its own nuclear weapons.

The final long term factor in all of this is the gerontological treatments. The queer throuple from the first hundred develop a series of medical treatments which, if reapplied every few years, will prolong someone’s life, potentially indefinitely. This is why so much of these books are about old people fucking. I didn’t mean like middle aged, I’m talking about there is a scene where a 150 year old man who looks like a gnome and an 8 foot tall native martian catgirl have sex. Okay I’m getting ahead of myself again. Politically, who has access to the gerontological treatments is a big deal. Firstly because on Earth unlike Mars there are classes of people or even whole countries who can’t afford it, and then once access to the treatments starts to even out there is a population explosion because people just stop dying of old age.

All of these factions and their disagreements, the growing disdain for UNOMA and the transnational corporations ruling Earth, the tension around the gerontological treatments and terraforming constitute the powderkeg that is Martian politics going into the 2060s. There is no one thing that kicks off the first revolution clearly. Workers go on strike, terraforming facilities are sabotaged, tents that provide the life support shielding for towns or villages are slashed. These things become the everyday events, and things just escalate and escalate until fighting breaks out. The chapters around the revolution of 2061 are chaos. Communications are blacked out, characters bump into each other and trade gossip about where they last saw this person or that one, the basic understanding of whether the martian forces or UNOMA are winning is anyone’s guess, and then the Bogdanovists bring down the elevator cable.

Clarke asteroid which acts as a counterweight to hold the cable in place is detached and zooms off into the void. The cable stays standing for a short time longer, the umbilical cord to Earth cut but the separation not truly realised, and then there comes a little wobble. Then, with incredible destructive force, the cable crashes down to Mars, wrapping more than two times fully around the equator and pulverising everything under its path. Many die, including Arkady. The falling cable does not distinguish based on ideology. Further fighting causes dust storms, landslides, floods. Any hope of an untouched “Red Mars” is completely lost.

The horrendous violence of the revolution of 61 severs Mars from Earth’s control, stalling terraforming, stalling development, giving the Martian underground space to rebuild, but it also traumatises the hell out of the main characters. Going into Green Mars there is a felt desperation to be able to talk things out peacefully as much as possible. This is where Nirgal, one of Hiroko’s weird children, and Art Randolph, a diplomat from Earth who joins the underground, come together to facilitate the Dorsa Brevia conference. Basically Art, who the books describe as a happy bear of a man, is taken in by Hiroko’s people and immediately witnesses that none of the Martian factions can work together even though they agree on a lot. He sits them all down and basically says “hey, the capitalists have great systems for figuring out what they agree on and then getting it fucking done, and you all are getting nothing done” and so they bring everyone together and draft the points that will eventually form the basis of the Martian constitution.

This conference successfully shows how much they all agree on, like capitalism is bullshit, Mars should be controlled democratically, everyone deserves good basic standards of life, but terraforming once again splits the room. The reds register a plethora of small groups so they can have more votes overall in the conference. Hiroko appears naked and painted green and descends into a pool in the middle of Dorsa Brevia, the living embodiment of viriditas and mother Mars I love her I love her I love her I love her I love her.

All this talking and figuring out and arguing and agreeing puts the Martians in a much stronger place, so that the second revolution, in Green Mars, is much more peaceful. The organised forces of Martian politics are simply overwhelmingly stronger than the Earth powers at this point. The UN Transitional Authority, replacing UNOMA after the disaster of 61, is not as strong and not in a good position to negotiate from. Earth is simultaneously experience climate disasters that are putting it in a state of disabling crisis.

Out of the Dorsa Brevia conference the biggest political party in the new landscape of Martian electoral politics - the Free Mars party - is formed. Nirgal and his long term on-off lover Jackie, the granddaughter of John Boone, become the figureheads of Free Mars, but over the following decades Nirgal and the kind of liberatory open collectivist politics he represents gets slowly marginalised. With terraforming practically finished, a new antagonism emerges as Free Mars becomes Mars First, a political strain dedicated to keeping down immigration from Earth. Jackie uses the opportunity of Nirgal going to Earth as a part of Martian delegation to see how they can help to consolidate power around this more reactionary agenda.

As we know, the only thing that can stop a bad girl with borderline personality disorder is a worse older Russian woman with borderline personality disorder, so naturally Maya Toitovna pulls some horrendous Machiavelli shit and Jackie basically loses corporeal form. With humanity entering a new age of collaboration, discovery and expansion, Mars moves past this isolationist phase and into a utopian future.

The debate around terraforming forms the central political conflict for most of the trilogy and actually the original kernel for the story. Kim Stanley Robinson originally wrote several short stories collected as a novella titled Green Mars about characters set in a similar but separate timeline where Mars is being settled and terraformed. One of the characters, Roger Clayborne, is a geologist who is troubled by terraformation and questions the nature of the settling and colonisation of Mars. He said of the novella:

“Yes, I wrote that mainly to stake a claim - at least a moral claim - on the name. I thought Green Mars was such a good name, such an obvious name. And when I heard about Olympus Mons, this enormous volcano, I just had to write about climbing it.”

In the Mars Trilogy the issue of terraforming sits at a comfortable enough distance from real politics to not feel like a direct analogy to anything in particular, while close enough and complex enough to explore lots of very real social conflicts and also to drive the plot.

Let’s work through some examples.

If I were to compare terraforming to climate change it would prima facie strike us as a very apt metaphor. They are changing the climate. The problem of course is that it presents a perfectly inside-out version of climate change where the ruling class and the profit incentive and modern science and technology are on the side of making the planet more habitable. At least to a certain degree anyway.

If I were to compare it to settler colonialism, well, the Reds are trying to preserve what came before, arguing that Earth people have no right to change Mars to conform to their needs. Morally, this is a pretty interesting argument but it’s deeply uncompelling to most people. Even if you believe quite strongly in the right of the cosmos to go unchanged, it’s hard to argue that has a greater moral weight than human life, and doesn’t measure up to the right of indigenous people not to be exterminated, enslaved or culturally erased by settler colonists.

If I compared terraforming to nuclear power, the analogy would be that both are new and developing technologies with huge potential benefits for human beings but also catastrophic risks. If terraforming went wrong it could not only change Mars but leave it uninhabitable for living things as well. In this sense this is the best direct analogy - it doesn’t have its own glaring problems as a metaphor, but it also leaves out all the other political elements that are present around terraforming.

Nuclear power isn’t like climate change or colonialism in the ways that terraforming is, but also terraforming isn’t like any of them in ways that are unique. It also is like all of them in some ways. It is its own thing.

It’s important that Ann’s passion for rocks comes across to the reader not just through this lady who keeps telling the other colonists that it’s not “dust” going in all the machinery “technically they’re called fines” but instead by actually getting us to see the beauty in the complexities of Mars even before there is life all over it.

Because of this, geology is very important to the Mars trilogy. When you read these books, you should be ready for Kim Stanley Robinson to spend an incredible amount of time showing you his special interest in rocks. It’s like the books stop every half a chapter or so to throw a little party for how interesting and fun rocks are.

My apologies to Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space, for using your astronaut portrait to make this stupid meme. People deserve to know your face and name.

I’ve already mentioned the book Half-Earth Socialism  which is definitely a text that sits in the same ecosocialist world as the Mars Trilogy, but I want to also say that the terraforming debate in these books always really reminds me of the Half Earth Socialism game. There’s a really neat little browser game at play dot half dot earth where you unlock and apply cards representing policies in order to try and make the planet habitable while not getting yourself assassinated for changing everything too fast.

The same friend who introduced me to the Mars Trilogy said to me at some point that Blue Mars is a book for the people who really enjoyed the Dorsa Brevia conference where they outline the basics of their politics and constitution and wanted a whole book of that. I think Blue Mars is the book that’s the most like playing the half earth game even though it’s also the book where the terraforming debate is the most concluded, probably because the game starts after a global revolution has put you in place as world leader dedicated to stopping climate change, and Blue Mars takes us from the final stages of revolution to the final utopian vision of the series. I think that speaks to a current throughout the story of this kind of play, I suppose, which is the complex puzzle of convening the scientific and the social through politics.

As always happens in political movements the characters in the books adopt mantras and slogans and one thing they say repeatedly is that we are terraforming Mars but Mars is also terraforming us, which then becomes “we terraform Mars, but Mars areoforms us”. This is fun wordplay because where “terraform” means for us to make the land how we want, or to make it Earth-like specifically, “aeroformation” is something done to us. Aeroformation is always the process of becoming Martian.

Watching the diversity of positions and ideologies among the reds grow outward and then clash and combine and form new syntheses with the Greens and Bogdanovists, battle with the forces of Earth and blossom out again into new shapes is the core success of the sociological storytelling of these books. They capture the fractal evolution of culture and politics and thought over time. As we terraform Mars, Mars also areoforms us.

Nirgal goes to Earth in one chapter of Blue Mars and travels around to lots of different places experiencing this wild culture shock. He isn’t the first martian-born martian to come to Earth, but he is seen as special, as a child of the first hundred and someone raised by Hiroko and a leader of the free Mars movement. His body struggles with the greater gravity, he constantly finds the colours and sounds and the air quality all overwhelming -  he’s just like me for real. He’s also in the most heavily populated places he’s ever been seeing cities and buildings older than literally any structures on his home planet. It’s a lot. 

At the end of his travels on Earth he goes diving in a flooded town in the UK and some flood water gets in his mouth, and he gets horribly sick. The only way he can be saved is being taken back to Mars where he won’t be fighting an infinite hoard of new pathogens at the same time as fighting to breathe and being crushed by Earth g.

Nirgal drinks some Britain and nearly dies immediately, which is just so real. Like our government actually decided to dump so much sewage into our country’s waterways that we have a little brown aura visible to satellites. As a trans woman living in the UK in 2025 I feel like that decision really manifested a quite deep truth about this wretched island.

It is important to understand the terraforming issue because it is the most significant material political question for most of the story and the framework within which the political conflict is all happening, but also because it becomes a reflexive metaphor for our human journey toward utopia. There is a beautiful core idea in the terraforming debate to do with our willingness to leave behind what we have had and been as we step forward into the future and to keep ourselves open to the possibility of being changed in ways we don’t expect. The third book of the trilogy sees more and more fall into place more peacefully until characters are concerning themselves only with the final questions of how long human beings should live and how to ensure the best experience of life possible, sitting and watching as day by day the sky of Mars is a slightly different red and then a slightly different red, and then a slightly different purple, and at last, a Blue Mars.

Part II: They Were All Going To Go Mad Anyway

Часть II: Они все равно сошли бы с ума
パート II: いずれにせよ、彼らは全員発狂することになる

الجزء الثاني: كانوا جميعًا سيصابون بالجنون على أي حال

Once I realised just how much detail I could make out on the moon’s surface with my telescope, I decided to make composite shots of her different phases. As the waxing moon progresses, the lunar maria (oceans) are revealed, huge basins of rock that formed as lava flows filled massive impact craters.

When the Soviets sent the first probes to orbit the moon, the first time in human history that we laid eyes on the fair side of a truth evident in our reality from the beginning, it was immediately obvious that the far side is much more cratered than the face we usually see. Apparently this is not because that side has had more impacts but because it has a thicker crust.

The Lunar 3 probe also spotted a number of lunar maria on the far side, though generally smaller, and the soviets named one of them Mare Moscoviense, as in “the moscow sea”. This ran against naming conventions and was critiqued as a chauvinistic thing to name a lunar feature, but it was accepted after French astronomer Audouin Dollfus proclaimed that “Moscow is a state of mind”.

The moon is roughly 400 times smaller than the sun, but by incredible coincidence the sun is also 400 times further away, which is why they look about the same size to us. The nature of this coincidence is, well, astronomical. They match so precisely that the moon is smaller optically than the sun for most of the month, but ever so slightly bigger at its periapsis. Not only that, but the moon moves about 4 centimeters further away from us every year, meaning she is only this big in our skies for a short time and will never be again. The whole of human history has taken place within the age of the perfect eclipse.

When the first hundred get to Mars they have to live in rovers most of the time. They’re these pretty cool scientific research caravans with a folding bellows in the middle. Mobile homes for exploring a currently uninhabitable world. Eventually they construct a series of partially submerged buildings and it becomes a settlement called Underhill. Life in Underhill is described as mostly happy and work focused, but they’re still the only hundred people on the planet, and their options are either being all confined to a pretty small space together or go out, way out into the frozen rocky expanse.

As a result, most of the characters spend most of their time in rovers in Red Mars. Day after day, even year after year, they roll across Mars exploring, researching, terraforming the planet, being areoformed by it.

How over cramped and simultaneously lonely all these characters are, the complete historical uniqueness of what they’re going through and the constant sky-high stakes of everyday work are dire conditions for their mental health that are in place for years and years. This was the plan in the first place in fact. It was always going to be like this, and that’s obvious, which is why Michel the mission’s psychologist repeatedly proclaims that it was futile to try to select sane candidates in the first place. They may as well send mad people, they were all going to go mad anyway.

Nadia is a good example here. Nadia, the group’s lead engineer is perhaps the most sane person there because she just lives to fix and build things, and as a result she winds up horribly overworked doing everything for everyone all the time. Being the queen of just spacing the fuck out seems to get her through most of it, but then between Maya wanting to talk to her about her relationship problems and all the workload she gets distracted and has an industrial accident and loses a finger.

Michel the psychologist’s perspective chapters are almost entirely about how he misses Provence and he wishes he could have sex with the women he’s treating, most especially Maya. Michel is an incurably H&H FtM - homesick and horny French type man. He is increasingly absent thinking about Marseille all the time unless he’s listening to Maya talk about her feelings, and he’s utterly besotted with her. Then eventually they do get together, which feels like the conclusion of Michel even gesturing to being a responsible therapist - though to be fair to Monsieur Duval they’ve been living on Mars for decades and fighting together in revolutionary struggle and I don’t think he’s actually been acting as a psychologist for a really long time at that point. The real moment of departure from trying to keep the first hundred sane is also much earlier than that, when Michel leaves Underhill with Hiroko and the farm team. Michel being the mission’s psychologist compounds the futility of trying to flatten and regularise human beings. Even the guy they sent to keep everyone else normal is too mentally ill to care even a little bit and too horny and French to do his job.

Maya’s two other love interests are John Boone, the first man on Mars, and Frank Chalmers, the machiavellian political schemer who basically wheeled and dealed the whole first 100 colonist mission into existence in the first place. Frank is an awful self destructive and toxic shell of a man. His life completely fell apart when he was working trying to organise a massive welfare program for Americans in poverty because the funding was suddenly cut. His marriage fell apart, he drank and he stewed and he became this sort of political robot, set on realising the most absurd dreams of willful ambition just to feel seen by history out of spite, and he resents John not just for dating Maya after him but because his whole plan was to use John’s gregarious boyscoutish charisma to get the program together, let John be the first man on Mars and then get to be in charge of the colony mission, but John joined as one of the first hundred at the last minute, naturally pulling everything away from Frank with his easy, likeable charm.

And that’s why Frank has John killed.

Frank engineers a plot to have John assassinated in the midst of a riot that he himself incites by deliberately lying to the growing Arab population saying that all islamophobic and anti-arab sentiments on Mars trace back to John. This is several decades into Mars colonisation, but it is literally the first chapter of the series. After this is jumps back in time. 

There is something shakespearean about the brother murder that starts the martian revolution, Frank’s betrayal and loss of the person who understands him best because of his insurmountable jealousy and rage. Despite how different they are at first Frank and John are very similar characters in some core ways, which makes their friendship feel very emotionally legible. It’s not just that they’ve been in each other’s lives a long time even before Mars, but both of them have to live totally immersed in the charismatic world of politics, and while Frank’s internal world is spiteful and plotting, John’s is still quite similarly dissociated. John’s perspective chapter talks about how he knows that everyone just sees The First Man On Mars when they look at him. He says it’s like he put on that fishbowl astronaut helmet and he never really got to take it off.

I think it’s a feat in and of itself that John has as much character as he does when his position as the first man on Mars consumes him so much. His first words on Mars are “Well… here we are”, which feels very intentionally based on Yuri Gagarin’s “Here we go!”, and he reads as a little Gagarin, a little Armstrong and also a little Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. John Boone is probably named after Daniel Boone, pioneer, frontiersman and folk hero, especially the ways that the italicised sections at the start of each chapter frequently tell myths and popular stories that are circulating in martian culture with no obvious narrator. Some of these are about John himself, some of them are about the “little red people” who are like martian borrowers, some of them are about Big Man, a giant who shaped the martian landscape - one of them is about Paul Bunyan mythical American lumberjack coming to Mars and getting beaten up by Big Man and dissolving into bacteria that form the basis of life on Mars. One of the stories about John that I love is that he was on a train to Burroughs, the biggest city on Mars in the early years, and there was a woman with a facial scar in the carriage, and when she left another man started saying how ugly she was and then Boone knocks him right out of his seat and says “there is no such thing as an ugly woman” I love it

Where were we? Names! 

There are lots of references in how Kim Stanley Robinson names characters. Arkady Bogdanov, the revolutionary firebrand for example, is named after Arkady Strugatsky and Alexander Bogdanov, both Soviet science fiction writers. Bogdanov was a bolshevik revolutionary, a doctor and a philosopher and Arkady Strugatsky was one of two brothers who wrote the Noon stories, science fiction classics that basically everyone in the Soviet Union had heard of. Maya Toitovna is named after a character from the Noon books, Maya Toivovna Glumova.

Nadia, who I adore am in love with in a way I have never felt for any other fictional character and want to marry and have babies with, is Nadia Chernechevsky, like the Russian critic Nikolay Chernychevsky, but also since she’s Arkady’s long term partner and Arkady is this sort of Lenin-adjacent figure, she’s probably also named after Lenin’s wife Nadia Krupskaya. You could go on and on digging through the references, but it’s quite a nice way that KSR makes the stories rhyme with history and with other works of classic science fiction. Speaking of which, there’s a character involved in developing the gerontological treatments called Ursula Kohl, like Ursula K! 

When KSR isn’t using inspiration from science fiction writers or historical figures, his names for characters have a poetic ring to them. Ann Clayborne is one of the best examples of that I think. It’s a little on the nose but you need to understand the iconoclast that this geologist-cum-areologist is going to be so why not name her Ann From The Soil, I like it. Phyllis Boyle, one of the antagonists, is called Boyle - she’s got an ugly name because she’s got an ugly soul. Frank Chalmers, who as far as I can tell isn’t named as a reference to anyone, just has a perfectly politician-ish name. Focus grouped. Innoffensive.

Kim Stanley Robinson really understands that idea that “There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen” - Okay this is a dreadful tangent but I just found out recently that that quote doesn’t come directly from Lenin. It gets bandied around as a Lenin quote but it was actually a quite reworked and paraphrased version of something Lenin said and the actual formulation “there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen” came from of all people George Galloway, the Putin-supporting, covid-misinfo-spreading, anti-trans conspiracy theorist who flirts with xenophobic anti-migrant politics, a sort of nationalistic socialism, if you get my meaning. Heartbreaking, most tedious fedora wearing pseudocommunist you know had an absolute banger quote one time.

Anyway, this idea that times stretches and warps is really interesting and I think as soft animals living in a world of imminent spirits we have a felt sense that this is true, that no matter what capitalist commodification tells us, time does not exist in discrete and uniform chunks, that sometimes nothing happens for a really long time and sometimes everything happens all at once, and Kim Stanley Robinson shows a very canny understanding of this. 

When the first hundred get to Mars, they need to agree on a standard to resolve the fact that the Martian day is cosmologically longer than the Terran day by about 39 minutes, and they decide to just have 39 minutes in the middle of the night where the clocks stop. It’s called the timeslip. There just isn’t time during those 39 minutes, they just aren’t “in” time. As the series progresses, this ends up being a time or I guess a non-time of night where a lot of interesting, unusual, revolutionary, or areophanic plot points happen. Someone tells the story of an orgy the whole work crew of a mining rig have during the timeslip. Underground rebels stage a prison break. The farm team holds a ritual worshipping the planet, and then the next day have disappeared without a trace.

Graph of how much time passes in the story (y-axis) for each chapter, scaled for page count (x-axis)

KSR uses perspective chapters in I think a very clever way. The story will make statements of facts that it trusts you as a reader to intuit are actually the opinion of the character the chapter is about, but it doesn’t say “Frank thought this” it just says it. I feel like it puts the reader in the position of historian almost, constantly trying to derive something cohesive out of these people’s different and often contradictory messy experiences.

The series starts in the best possible way to key you into this, because the first chapter of Red Mars is from Frank’s perspective as he’s orchestrating his plot to get John killed. We hear a lot of plainly stated rationales and justifications for why this has to happen, why it’s the right thing to do, and it feels like we just sit inside Frank’s mind, uncomfortably close listening to the story he is telling himself of his own life. The story might make a statement about primate dominance hierarchies between people but we’re reading it like “I dunno bro you’re in the process of murdering your best friend right now I don’t think monkeys is where your head should be at”

Frank is a great character for keying into this stuff generally actually, he has bangers like “nobody can really read facial expressions, that’s fake” but it becomes clearer and clearer that every fact we get in the series is stated as perceived by the character whose chapter it is. When Maya starts experiencing memory problems and trauma flashbacks for example, her inability to recall isn’t “Maya couldn’t remember this thing you remember”, it’s “Maya looked at a picture of a man” but we can infer from context that it’s someone she knew and has forgotten.

I do need to say, perspective chapters are almost entirely from the perspectives of white people. There are two non white perspective characters and they’re both native Martians, so it’s not like KSR is writing from the perspective of people of colour as they exist in the context of real world white supremacist society. Like, the whole series is a project of envisioning a quite deliberately multicultural melting pot future, and many parts of non white cultures become vital to the Martian way of life, but this also decontextualises them. The most striking indication of this is when Nirgal goes to Earth and is welcomed as a descendant of the people of Trinidad & Tobago, and he hears steel drums and says “wow they have Martian music here!” The first generation of people on Mars is mostly white, and by Blue Mars most native Martians are born into an almost post-racial society. The intentions are clearly positive but there are some real clangers in there, in the sort of ways you’d expect from a white leftist sci fi writer 30 years ago.

The frequent foregrounding of sex and sexuality in the books is a strength in my opinion, but women of colour are sometimes sexualised in terms that white women wouldn’t be. Given how perspective chapters are written in these books, it could sometimes be white characters’ biases shaping how the story is told, but it would be a lot easier to make a claim like that if we ever saw whiteness from the outside.

Also while I’m on sexuality, sexual orientation does a pretty similar thing to race - there is exactly one gay relationship in the first generation, and then it isn’t really addressed, and then by Blue Mars the original characters’ grandkids are having drug fuelled pansexual orgies and using CRISPR to edit in other genes to become cat girls and shit. Like good for them, I just think KSR may have low-balled how many gay astronauts there were in the first place and it doesn’t feel like he was interested in exploring queer people’s actual perspectives.

Sometimes KSR really succeeds at building a picture of a multicultural post-capitalist future, but sometimes it feels limited in the same ways that Star Trek: The Next Generation is limited. Those sorts of ways that aren’t obvious until you watch Deep Space Nine. I would really enjoy a story set in the world of these books that explores the perspective of black people on Mars and shows that white supremacy isn’t something that just magically melts away because the material conditions improve, because we all know it wouldn’t.

Coyote, actual name Desmond, is a caribbean man who is the only black person aboard the Ares, and he’s not in the first hundred, he’s a stowaway and Hiroko’s secret boyfriend that she  brought hidden with the farm equipment because he was part of her secret plans for the farm team and the Areophany. This is right there in the books, like the first black man on Mars was brought over in a way that feels deliberately reminiscent of chattel slavery, and it’s not completely unexplored, like Coyote talks about how Hiroko bringing him across like that put him at the low end of a very extreme power dynamic and he remains essentially the most cynical and pessimistic character of the original colonists throughout the series, but just like a lot of other cultural and racial politics in the trilogy, it feels like something Kim Stanley Robinson started to approach and then left quite unfinished.

Also in quite classic American atheist fashion, most muslims (written moslems) in the books are part of a very conservative culture that is problematic for the emergent progressive culture of Mars, but the Sufis get a bunch of praise because they like science and academia and aspects of Sufism become part of the Areophany. Someone get Edward Said on the line we’re staging an intervention.

Culture is not a monolith but rather comprises the infinitesimal interactions of individuals, many of them reverent or explicitly positive but contributing to processes like orientalism. Also I dunno dog white people are racist and I don’t think I need to make an explanation or apology for it, I can just say this is a place where the books make me cringe. 

I do think Kim Stanley Robinson broadly writes women quite well though. There are a lot of great female characters right from the start. For one, Maya Toitovna the leader of the Russian half of the first hundred. Maya is such a messy bitch and it makes so much sense. From the outside you just see a woman making lots of terrible decisions but when you’re in her perspective chapters it makes sense - they’re still terrible decisions but you know why she’s making them. On the journey out when she sleeps with Frank and then John, internally she’s like “well I like sex and I like having sex and these people will enjoy having sex with me so we should just have a nice time together” and doesn’t understand how it will be seen from the outside or the tensions it will cause and I - she’s just like me fr fr.

Nadia & Ann are really similarly characters on paper, two women very focused on their respective engineering and scientific fields to an extent that can be almost degendering or masculinising, but in practice they are strikingly different. Nadia is affable, romantic and eager to help everyone get everything done and built and fixed and working from the moment they arrive on Mars, whereas Ann is the queen of saying no to everything. I really like this, they feel like people I’ve met in real life and at times I feel like I’ve been both of them.

And speaking of people I’ve met in real life, not all of KSR’s well written women are protagonists. There’s also Phyllis Boyle, the first hundred colonist who becomes the face of Earth powers on Mars, overseeing the elevator cable and getting filthy rich in the process. Phyllis is the fucking worst and in a very believable way where everything awful about her comes back to the same drive to be upwardly socially mobile, and I’ve absolutely met this person, several times. I live in London what do you expect.

Zo is another great female character that the series uses to explore the political world of the more isolationist native martians. Zo is the great-granddaughter of members of the first hundred raised in the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy. I think a lot of male sci fi writers would probably either write about a matriarchy like “it will be perfect and fix everything” or “it will just be like patriarchy but with vaginas instead” or just “look sexy women in space suits” and KSR has the courage here to say that as an intentional reorganisation against patriarchy, it is quite a lot better but Zo still has a lot of chauvinistic female supremacist thoughts that are clearly the product of a failure to interrogate power properly.

Overall, the use of character perspectives imparts a way of understanding characters that only becomes more pertinent and powerful throughout the series. Everybody is living in a false world inside their own heads and the person they are in there interacts with that world, and that is fundamentally divorced from the outside them interacting with the outside world. That’s very real, actually.

And, given that these characters live 200 years, the way that their perceptions shape the stories that they’re telling about themselves in the long term create incompatible versions of personal history that shape how they remember, or eventually fail to remember, their lives. KSR’s understanding of mentle elf is very poignant.

You’ve got three elfs, right - your physical elf, your dental elf and your mentle elf and that’s you sorted. Everything else is just taking care of other people’s elfs.

I think the implicit framework of mind and experience that these perspective chapters give us makes the evolution of each character’s psychology make total sense. Maya’s internal story of herself is incredibly volatile and erratic, until she can only remember the things that made her feel the most intense feelings. Ann has a lot of bad shit happen to her for a long time, and she starts going into long periods of fugue and eventually tells Sax that she’s developed another personality she thinks of as anti-Ann, and a third alter ego as well that she doesn’t fully understand. This feels like how her mind would make sense of her life. Frank is a hollow rage monster who thinks that all joy is folly and all hope is weakness, because his dreams were crushed so he needs for everyone else’s dreams to be bullshit too. John goes around giving speeches to crowds and he just dissociates through the whole thing being beautiful and charismatic and then people clap, but he’s actually really struggling under the surface.

A really interesting study in this is the evolving psychology of Sax Russell, the best science boy in the whole series. Sax starts out as a character who is very work focused and somewhat unfeeling, struggling to understand why everyone else isn’t as excited about all the science as he is. He is still characterised in this, it is discussed how reclusive and work obsessed he is. People start telling a mean joke behind his back about how he’s actually 100 super smart lab rats that got turned into a person in an experiment gone wrong, which feels shitty. But for the most part, Sax at the start seems like a character who exists so that Kim Stanley Robinson can share his special interests through the mouthpiece of a socially awkward nerd with the biggest state research budget since the Manhattan Project.

Then in Green Mars after Sax has been a part of the underground resistance for a while, he gets plastic surgery and fake documents and goes undercover in the research labs again. Here he doesn’t just roleplay but completely inhabits a new persona as Steven Lindholm. When he’s Steven, he acts confidently, he knows how to be charming, he even has Steven Lindholm thoughts in his head, but when he’s Sax he’s Sax. In other words, his undercover mission taught him how to mask! But crucially he and Steven Lindholm don’t want the same things. Steven starts a relationship with Phyllis Boyle of all people, who Sax despises. Clearly there is something dissociative beyond the way that most people experience neurodivergent masking going on. Then skipping ahead a little Sax gets captured and tortured by fascists and he suffers serious brain damage, which his comrades are able to help with using experimental new treatments related to the gerontological treatments, aimed at enhancing neuroplasticity. In essence as Sax recovers he is able to pull together old parts of himself and become something new.

One way that Sax becomes a lot more Steven Lindholm-like as he changes is that he’s a lot more romantically successful. It’s perhaps funny to imagine someone becoming a ladies’ man in his 130s, but the Mars trilogy wouldn’t be the Mars trilogy without so much OLD PEOPLE FUCKING hell yeah OLD PEOPLE FUCKING it’s time to talk about OLD PEOPLE FUCKING!!

The first hundred are generally in their 40s or 50s going out on the Ares when they start having polyamorous shenanigans. The gerontological treatments work by repairing processes that wind down over time and combatting specific ailments that usually cut life short, but it doesn’t make everyone 25 years old again. They’re healthy and strong and they’re also getting older, albeit more slowly.

I’m gonna be really for real about this for a second and before I carry on I wanna say our society has a serious problem with fetishising youth to the point that I’ve used “old people fucking” as a self-contained setup-punchline several times now. Old people have sex, let’s talk about it.

One of the central conservative and patriarchal ideas in our society is marriage, between a man and a woman, nobody else ever, one-and-only, 2.5 children and a dog and a cat and a white picket fence. I’m going to speak to my carabiner-wearing audience for a second and say imagine having 200 years, maybe 300. Imagine all the time you would have to love and live a life with partners who become family, your closest oldest friends as well as lovers. With so many years to share between you, there might be times that you are happy to spend apart, spend with other people, spend seeing each other often but not living together. Life is long and you can take it slowly. It’s beautiful, right?

Maya and John have this passionate, limerent, intense, crazy romance that they can’t possibly make work in a domestic routine. They argue, they fall out, they part, they yearn for each other, they travel, they grow, they find each other again. Marina, Vlad and Ursula, the power throuple, are living their own teeny 3 person utopia just working on their research and their writing, two lesbians keeping a pet man - this is how I choose to interpret their relationship for personal reasons. Sax and Ann are clearly completely nuts about each other from the start, and they have baggage and personality issues and trauma that they literally need 170 years to work through so they can be together - and they do! 

I would be keen to defend any degree of sexuality in art, I firmly believe porn is art, but to be clear about these books if you’re interested in reading them, KSR is a lot more explicit in his descriptions of rocks than he is of sex. At the same time, the way that the characters connect is fascinating both on the interpersonal and the political level. There’s a line that makes me shudder about Maya looking up at Frank just after they have sex and seeing his eyes “like the windows of an empty house”. There is also loads of interesting writing about the sexually liberated culture of future generations of Martians.

Native Martians grow up under significantly weaker gravity so they’re all like 8 feet tall. At the same time they develop ways to edit their biology and change themselves. Hey Kim Stanley Robinson, you know what would have been a really cool type of person you could have written into this part of the story is that would really fit with what you were doing here? Yeah never mind. I already feel seen as a catgirl. At the same time that their physicality is different, native Martians also have a polyamorous pansexual dating culture, and it feels like their noticeably different physicality and sexuality are an interleaved reflexive metaphor.

Sex is important to people and is an important way people relate to each other. Seeing characters who live for such a long time so have such intense and specific baggage relate to each other is fantastic and the series is a lot stronger for having so much old people fucking.

There’s this beautiful section about Nadia and Arkady flying around on a blimp together - they’re travelling Mars dropping off heater turbines very early in the story as one of the first approved terraforming procedures, but it turns out that Sax has hidden lichen in the units to completely circumvent all discussion and start spreading life on the surface right away. Despite this Nadia and Arkady are having a wonderful time, reunited for the first time properly since the Ares. They’re just hanging out not bothering to get dressed in between bouts of passionate love making, the way you do in some relationships when you know you’re not going to need to see anyone but your beloved for a sustained time. It’s such a joyous chapter and the way these two very serious and practical minded people become silly happy soft creatures in each other’s arms is lovely.

For me Nadia and Arkady is one of the persevering images of romance in the series, but there are many. Another favourite of mine is John and Maya right after their first gerontological treatments, feeling odd and tender and beginning to experience the regenerative effects sitting in a sauna together contemplating all the decades they could now have together that they never knew they would. It describes them as being pink like newborn babies and I think about basically every time I’m in a sauna.

These books have so many fascinating characters having very real feeling relationships and growing as people in ways that speak to so much about the human condition, which is why the end of the trilogy being so preoccupied with memory and memory loss and death fits so well. They lived through a lot, and then they started to forget parts of it.

And then the series ends with every remaining first hundred taking acid together.

Okay, this is Sax’s final triumph - he figures out a treatment that will supposedly refire all the memories stored in the brain, letting people experience their lives over again and make new sense of it all and re-sorting their memories into a pattern that can hold, because without it, the super old have been going into something called “the quick decline” which I don’t think KSR says this explicitly but it’s basically dying of a broken heart. Anyway, they all go back to Underhill and they take Sax’s drugs, and move through this big collective remembering together.

They all get a better grip on what happened and are able to tell their own stories again, and this fixes their memory problems, and then everything is just kinda chill. They know that at some point soonish they’re each gonna die but they can make peace with that because of the understanding they’ve gained of themselves and their lives. I said it’s an acid trip and it’s not technically an acid trip but reading the description of it as a woman of psychedelic experience I was like yeah this is clearly acid. KSR did a little cheeky tab and is telling us about what if all his OCs did a little cheeky tab together. I honestly wish more stories ended like this, but maybe that’s the advantage of utopian fiction. They’ve solved all their shit, they are free.

The last remaining antagonism is just about how we live and how we approach death. It shows us that the reward for the struggle is moving on to bigger deeper questions. In my view, that’s possibly the best motivation we could have to figure out what is to be done.

Part III: What Is To Be Done? 

Часть III: Что дѣлать?
パート III: 何をすべきか?

الجزء الثالث: ماذا ينبغي أن نفعل؟

In Blue Mars, when humanity expands across the solar system, one chapter explores life on Mercury. Mercurian politics is bizarre - like a fuel-rich desert city-state because the planet is so close to the Sun and people have figured out by this point how to transmit stored energy huge distances and of course because Mercury is far too hot to be habitable. The only city on Mercury rides a huge monorail around the top of the planet to remain permanently in the dawn twilight. When people do go on surface walks they sometimes experience a kind of solar mania. Something in our monkey brains seeing the Sun so much bigger than usual and we flood with dopamine and have to just run full pelt towards it.

Honestly looking through a telescope at the sun, solar mania makes so much sense. The beauty of our star, the nuclear mother of all life on Earth, shouldn’t be so shocking but the Sun is simply magnificent.

Now if seeing the Earth turning was impressive, seeing the Sun, Moon and Earth all come into partial alignment and then just as suddenly fall out of it again is positively dizzying. I made composite shots of the partial eclipse at the end of March, and the sunspots caught my eye.

Sunpots are the paired points on the Sun’s surface where unusual loops of magnetic flux connect to the star. When you see them side on they look like a little dimple, because the particles in the flux tube are more cooler and transparent. This dimplish appearance is called the Wilson Effect. 

I decided to watch the Wilson effect by taking more pictures of the sun, and I was surprised to see, in 3 photos taken 3 days apart each, that the same group of sunspots moved a little over a quarter of the way around the sun. This meant that the surface of the sun must be spinning, since in the same time we had only moved 1/52th of our orbit.

As it turns out, the sun’s surface spins quite fast, with a period of 36 days near the poles and faster with a period of 25 days at the equator. This meant I had accidentally done some actual science, observing the rotational period of the Sun.

To make this more obvious I made composites every day for 17 days until I was attacked by a violent outbreak of British weather and yes! You can see it, the sun spins! Even for something as powerful and constant and seemingly unchanging as our sun, change and in fact revolution never stops.

There is a Foucault quote at the start of Yiching Wu’s excellent history The Cultural Revolution at the Margins. It reads “A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre - a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, and overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of dispersion”. Where the Mars trilogy centres around its particular favourite characters, it tells a story in the classic fashion. On the other hand, there is a pervasive sense that history is happening with or without these characters, that when it happens most directly to them they have very little say, and that the cosmos remains absurd and inscrutable despite the neat narrative at the heart of the series.

Looking at some of the most significant deaths in the series is a great way to understand this. When Frank has John killed in the first book it really seems like his finely tuned plan has worked like a well-oiled machine, and it isn’t until very late in the series that we learn more of the moment-to-moment details that reveal its clumsiness. In Blue Mars, characters reflecting on the night that John died realise that Selim, the man Frank specifically tasked with the murder and whom he poisoned in order to cover his conspiracy, wasn’t actually the one who killed John. This doesn’t excuse Frank of course, he incited a riot after spending years spreading rumours that John was trying to suppress muslims on Mars and then John was targeted and killed by muslims in that riot. We thought everything went to Frank’s plan down to the letter. Nothing is ever so simple.

When Arkady dies, it is in the gargantuan destruction caused by the collapse of the elevator cable. The cable that the Bogdanovists cut. He is caught in the path of the falling cable because he is one of many many people in the highly populated region that is impacted. It doesn’t matter which side he’s on. Historical forces are rarely laser focused.

There is of course also a benefit to the way that stories and narrativization bring elements together and make history more comprehensible to us because human beings are storytellers. China Mieville admits in the introduction to his story of the Soviet revolution that he has his “heroes and villains”, but even in his very Leninist account there is a lot to learn about other parts of the revolution.

The Mars trilogy is best read in conversation with accounts of historic revolutions because of its very sociological style. I think you could draw an equilateral triangle between Cultural Revolution At The Margins, the Mars trilogy and China Mieville’s October. The Mars trilogy is a semi-narrativized history of fictional revolutions, Cultural revolution at the Margins is a very academic and denarrativized account and October is very narrativized non-fiction.

Reading October was when I first learned about the Narodniks, a political faction in the 19th century Russian Empire whose actions failed to directly bring about revolution but who inspired other parties who later participated in the events of 1917 in various ways. The Narodniks were a group of socialist intelligentsia who moved to the rural country to try to act as a vanguard to the peasantry in something like the way the bolsheviks later did vanguardism for the proletariat. It didn’t work, the peasants all worshipped the Tsar as an actual God-king who was fighting the corrupt bureaucrats and politicians in… wait I know this one…. The Narodniks eventually switched to organised terrorism against the tsarist state in the hopes of shaking the peasantry’s loyalty and eventually did actually kill Alexander II. Their political ideas and actions were an important part of what unfolded in the next few decades, but not in a directly traceable way. The way that the reds participate in ecotage and the ways their ideas evolve and smash together with the Greens and synthesise new positions reminds me of histories of real revolutions like this.

Pluralism is something often lost in leftist discourses because everyone wants to tell the story of their own team. A huge part of the success of Lenin and the bolsheviks at gaining power in the Russian revolution was in telling the story of the revolution as it unfolded and telling it specifically as a bolshevik story, but its reality, just like the reality of all populist revolutions, was one of many different factions, parties and organisations pulling in directions that seem from the inside like complete opposites but from the outside obviously combine to give an overall momentum away from the previous order. The greens and the Reds in the Mars Trilogy are fighting broadly over whether Mars should reject terraforming as an imposition from Earth or change the planet to make it as comfortable for life as possible. These seem like opposite positions. Both however start with the right of the people on Mars to determine what is done with the planet. Both positions are “free Mars” positions.

As the original mission unfolds, the first hundred pick up a japanese phrase from Hiroko: Shikata ga nai. It means “it cannot be helped” and is a common idiom like “it is what it is”, but it changes subtly in meaning through repeated use by the characters and also as a motif in the writing. There is a chapter titled Shikata Ga Nai right after a character tells several others that next time they have a revolution they shouldn’t blow so much stuff up. Like he says “there are other ways” and you turn the page and it says “Shikata Ga Nai”. KSR is doing that thing video essayists do where they end a chapter in conversation with the title of the next – that’s the thing I did with literally this section!

The new meaning creeping in is taking for granted that they are working toward the goals they agree on, that they find alternatives unacceptable even if alternatives technically exist. Shikata Ga Nai then turns from fatalist to a kind of revolutionary optimism. It also works perfectly with places the story confronts you with situations where either you and all the people you care about are going to be destroyed by the government, or you and all the people you care about are going to destroy the government. Shikata ga nai.

The ability to disappear and separate from the mainstream effectively is a basic condition for the growth of a revolutionary project. This is about how people engaging in revolutionary activities can vary their visibility to the state. Ultimately revolution is not about leaving and making a new society elsewhere but about changing society. This means having enough space where the powers that be can’t see you to be able to plan, but also having the hidden structures to allow the things the state tries to make illegal to continue.

I think everyone is familiar with the use of “underground” in this way, as in underground queer spaces, the radical underground, the underground railroad. In the US right now for instance there is an obvious need for underground structures that protect people from ICE officers and help trans people survive and help people get abortions, as well as underground spaces that allow the invisible planning of actions against the zionist death machine, and perhaps against the American state itself. There is also a need for spaces that certain people can completely disappear into if necessary.

This obviously isn’t the whole structure of parallel power though. There will be plenty of things that can be done as were “above ground” that are also vital, like mutual aid networks, trade and tenant union activities, and protests. This is why some people use terms to describe this half way sometimes visible sometimes not state of life. I call it the disappearing act. Margaret Killjoy has an excellent article where she calls it the “demiground”. In the Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson describes it as the demimonde, a name originating from France in the 1800s for women living on the fringes of so-called respectable society.

The tiny village communes that Nirgal and Hiroko’s other children grow up in are completely underground. You would have to be completely trusted to ever be taken there. The mohole towns that secret enclaves such as Hiroko’s trade with, for example the Bogdanov-Vishniac mohole are much more open. Doubtless any UNTA police who tried to go in would be leaving in a bodybag, but it’s a town. It’s on the map: it’s hardly secret. The most public and open part of the demimonde is Sabishii, the first university on Mars which becomes a hub of dissident and revolutionary political thought.

I have often been a defender of so-called “echo chambers”. I think the downsides of dogmatic ideological spaces are pretty obvious, but I don’t think people talk about their positives or purpose very much. Echo chambers aren’t really echo chambers, they’re more like the vat where they keep the secret sauce, the pure wellspring of absurd and abstract ideological dogmatism completely incompatible with real life on every practical level. And that’s great! Unless you’re in it, in which case it sucks! But it’s great that it exists, and necessary for a revolution.

We don’t spend time with characters during their actual education at Sabishii, but Nirgal reminisces about it when he’s plunged into the world beyond the underground and narratively it’s clear that it serves as a stepping stone for him between the bizarre insular world of Hiroko’s hidden village, Zygote, and living among the broader population, a half-way lifting of the veil of childhood innocence. 

Time is part of the disappearing act, the shearing apart of social realities. As I already discussed, there is the timeslip - Martian days and Earth days are literally different lengths - but culturally time is experienced in different ways too. I’ve seen this distinction made a few ways - I saw someone on instagram referring to “black time” as a phenomenon, I’ve also heard the term “island time”, and I’ve also seen the distinction described as “polychronic versus monochronic cultures”. I don’t know if there are other examples of monochronic - single time - cultures besides modern capitalist culture which commodifies time by turning it into uniform blocks of seconds, minutes and hours to be filled with productive labour, but maybe I just haven’t read enough on it. When people talk about polychronic culture, a culture that can accommodate people’s subjective experiences of time based on the stories that they are telling together and about themselves, it feels more like they’re describing an experience of time that isn’t alienated by capitalism. Either way, the underground, the demimonde, the first hundred and Martian culture generally absolutely runs on “island time”, and moreso the more radically against Earth power they are.

At one point Ann laments the wristpad communications system - these books were written in the 90s this is their smartphones - and she says the supposed freedom to be in contact with anyone at any time is actually a “manacle on your wrist”. When I read this and looked at my wristwatch it was like a jumpscare. The wristpad communicators for the martians, just like smartphones are for us, are an amazing tool for having access to any information practically instantly, contact people, keep notes, and everything else a small internet-connected computer can do and Ann’s observation that it also traps everyone into the world of appointments and deadlines is perfectly apt.

That seems like a big part of why Hiroko’s farm team get gone as soon as they feasibly can. They just want to be as far from the normal way of doing business as possible. When they’ve set up their secret village, underground routes and trade networks, they reemerge at a huge festival that John Boone throws on Olympus Mons. When John sees Hiroko, I think at this point for the first time in decades, he tells her “we needed you”, but Hiroko being the stoic revolutionary mastermind that she is knows that what she has been building is what they all needed much more.

As the Martian structures grow, their parallel power also includes parallel economics.The same boffin power throuple who invented the gerontological treatments also invent what they dub “eco-economics”. I think this is a bit silly, because economies are already structures for organising ecologies, but it communicates the idea that they are trying to create a balance that achieves environmental goals while also creating a more equal society. To that end, they have a nitrogen standard and a hydrogen peroxide standard like how we used to have a gold standard - their commodity values in trade are measured against the value of tonnes of the chemicals they need to burn. This might seem absurd if we were assuming capitalist trade, but the Martian underground is also really big on the idea of gift economies, where parties are not looking to accrue the most of anything to increase social status, but instead to give away the largest amounts of things to demonstrate their social status. 

This is my mandatory once per video plug that everyone reads Debt: The First 5000 Years and the rest of the works of David Graeber.

The hydrogen peroxide is a fuel that people around Mars need, so it serves as a standard for exchanges where people are trying to get more for themselves, because they can value it in relation to production. The nitrogen is purely for terraforming, and one or both parties in a gift exchange will burn nitrogen proportionally to equal out the exchange. I want to draw the distinction here as gift exchanges and greed exchanges, but Graeber points out how our society creates this false dichotomy by teaching us that every trade is zero sum with a winner and a loser. In an economy like the Martian hybrid economy, people in any particular trade may want to stop the other party hoarding, or doing the gift equivalent, known as potlatching, which is basically where somebody shows off how much they have by giving it away, and there is some fun character interaction around this. Overall though, they’re living intentionally and collectively, not playing monopoly.

Even though the utopia is only truly realised at the very end, these books should absolutely be understood as utopian fiction. The third book, by this point almost 200 years on from Red Mars, describes a period of human history they name the “accelerando” where human beings spread out all across the solar system sending habitation missions to different planets and moons, arts and sciences of all kinds are smashing out breakthrough after breakthrough. Humanity is batting 1000, essentially. 

Utopia as Method highlights Karl Mannheim’s conception that “utopia [is] the proper description of ideas that when they pass over into conduct tend to shatter, partly or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.” I think conversely utopian ideas tend to shatter partly or wholly when they pass over as well, this is the destructive nature of synthesis.

All in all I think there is a lot to take from Kim Stanley Robinson’s sketch of revolution. I don’t think it has everything, like I don’t think there are really any instances of CIA or spycop kind of shit infiltrating and sabotaging the martian revolutionaries, but it is helpful sometimes just to have a sketch, a roadmap, a vibe even to work from. Every writer on revolution is trying to communicate the same core ideas with their chosen linguistic metaphors. Ultimately, what we are seeing is a system of nodes with a schema of connections between them, and in revolution there is another system of nodes, perhaps the same nodes, that becomes allergic to the first system, and grows to take over the space.

Historical or fictional analogies help us take that abstraction into something we can parse. Take the elevator cable for instance. In the UK, the richest sector of the economy is financial services. The UK makes big bucks laundering American imperialist plunder capital. That means that the financial districts of London are like Mars’ umbilical cord to Earth. If there was a general strike shutting down all public transport, this would significantly slow operations in Canary Wharf, but they would adjust to a mixture of remote working and essential in-office operations. If the critical infrastructure that keeps the finance perverts rubbing their £50 notes was shut down, physically blockaded or destroyed, or if hypothetically the American economy went into freefall, it would be like the elevator cable had been brought down, and the cable would probably wrap more than twice around the entire equator of the british economy and likely kill a lot of people.

You could make these sorts of analogies all over the place - how London connects Britain to America, how big businesses in smaller cities all over the UK connect them to London, how extractive trade relations connect the imperial core to smaller poorer countries all around the world. All of these are their own kind of space elevator.

Sunspots have wide dark outer regions - the penumbrae - and darker, deeper, more concentrated centres - the umbrae. Sometimes there can be more than one umbra in one penumbra. Cities have massive urban sprawls and concentrated cores where the most intense economic forces are at play. Sometimes there are several centres in the same city. Sunspots turn with the spinning surface of the sun, but are also shaped over time by invisible electromagnetic forces. Cities are shaped by and grow and shrink and sometimes disappear because of invisible economic forces. 

Sometimes sunspots form in the wake of a larger sunspot. In the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s, a whole bunch of towns were planned and built to help with housing congestion in London, the largest of them being Milton Keynes. Some of them were based on existing small towns or settlements but some were entirely constructed in one huge effort.

Sunspots occur more and less frequently on an 11 year solar cycle. The sunspots build up and the Sun expels a bunch of energy and they die away. The magnetic forces that control sunspots are in a stable cycle. The invisible forces that shape our cities, our construction and our production, by contrast are not sustainable.

Venus has been pointed out as an analog and useful research focus for anthropogenic climate change multiple times, most famously by Carl Sagan. The Venusian atmosphere is a fucking nightmare. It’s mostly carbon dioxide, thick clouds pressurised into supercritical fluids at the surface where the ambient pressure is over 90 times Earth’s and the temperature is upwards of 462 degrees Celsius. Above an altitude of 30km the planet is enveloped in clouds of Sulphuric acid. The surface of Venus is hotter than the surface of Mercury despite receiving a quarter as much irradiance because the thick clouds cause a runaway greenhouse effect.

It has been suggested by NASA researchers that long ago Venus may have had oceans of liquid water, and may have been the first habitable planet in our solar system.

Conclusion: There Is No Other Way

Вывод: Другого пути нет
結論：仕方がない

النتيجة: لا يوجد طريقة أخرى

Sax goes from one special interest to the next working on mining then chemical synthesis, processes to heat the planet or put more elements into the atmosphere that will be good for terraformation. Then as terraforming progresses he becomes fascinated by lichens, mosses, fungi, flowers, the design of ecosystems and permaculture. Finally in Blue Mars he is driven passionately by a quest to fix the failing memories of the super aged.

Ann by perfect contrast spends 200 years loving rocks. The number of passages in this story about Ann happily clunking around with her pockets full of geological samples looking for more rocks makes me think of that guy who got fired from NASA because he stole a bunch of moon rocks to take them home and put them on his bed and have sex next to them. Ann fucking loves rocks.

Ann and Sax have this enemies-to-lovers arc across the series, but like Sax doesn’t see Ann as an enemy. He is clearly in love with her and he just can’t understand why she doesn’t just like all the cool science he’s doing, and she is also clearly in love with him but also hates him with a terrible passion. It feels like a scathing interrogation of heterosexual romance by KSR.

Sax really just does what he wants all the way through the books, most significantly when he decides to just get in a plane and shoot down the aerial lens. Most significantly to his relationship to Ann, he instructs doctors to give her the gerontological treatments to save her life when she’s had an accident which is directly against her wishes. Ann’s seems to lack any agency throughout most of the stories because everything she argues against basically just happens. While the terraforming debate is interesting it seems like the obvious answer was always going to be to go ahead with terraforming, but her insistence opened a space for people to be able to consider the legitimacy of what they were doing, and in doing that created a shared sense of deliberation of how and why and when and how much to terraform. The radical refusal, the position of pure critique or cynicism, no matter how abstract or infuriating it may come across, creates the basis of democracy. Ann Clayborne more like Ann-archist, am I right?

I once read in a classic literary work - okay it was a force fem novella - the assertion that “time is a man and space is a woman” and I think this is a really powerful idea. Time and space are fundamental elements of existence just as masculinity and femininity are basic elements of being in human culture, undergirding practically everything. Yet on closer inspection masculine/feminine is a dichotomy imposed by our own perception, by language, and sometimes by politics misappropriating “science” just like the artificial division of the bodymind into the mind/body dichotomy, or for that matter, spacetime.

In the understanding and exploration of space, the precise and dependable calculation of time is vital at every stage and scale, but also in the measuring and evaluating and capturing and commodifying of space, the rigid regularisation and calcification of time is the driving engine. See, time is a man and space is a woman.

One politicised technology I didn’t compare terraforming to earlier was space exploration, which is a sort of reflexive analogy right, because terraforming is a part of it. But I think we can expand the same ideas about terraforming out to everything to do with space.

Space exploration is only really viable as a huge collaborative effort, and with how important space observation of the Earth’s climate is in understanding the climate, it is crucial to understand planetary challenges like climate change to be at least in part matters of space. While I was writing this essay, the American government cut the state’s science budget in half, reducing NASA’s funding by about a quarter while also pushing a nakedly fascist ideological line trying to erase women and people of colour from the history of space exploration. Meanwhile, the African Space Agency began operations, hiring key staff with the explicit goal of closing the gaps in climate data. As America’s power over space declines, the rest of the world steps forward to pick up the slack.

We should care about space. We shouldn’t let billionaires control this one thing unanimously without any democratic control because we shouldn’t let the ruling class control anything, all power to the people.

Space offers us an incredibly vast imaginative realm to play in. Sure, the history of space exploration has already been inescapably political, and as actual space exploration evolves there will be more real space politics reified and specified as it is passed from the abstract to the real, but I think somewhere beyond the boundless expanse there is a space in our minds that we must not lose sight of.

In a sense the unpopulated untouched Mars was the utopia - the Mars that existed in Ann’s mind - it was shattered when it came into contact with reality, but also at the same time shattered the order of things. The version of Mars that was then to be fought for as more and more terraforming happened and could not be reversed had to change, and become something controlled democratically, something utopian in the classless, borderless, from-each-according-to-ability to-each-according-to-need kind of sense. Utopia and futurity are inherently related concepts. The view of utopia from the present is always looking forwards, and the view of the present from Utopia is always looking back.

If we accept that we are going to terraform, that we are going to go to other celestial bodies and make them more like Earth, then we declare that we are bringing the way things are to the universe, and this is perhaps the most hubristic and nonsensical idea we could propose. The universe is quite literally infinitely bigger than us: how can we imagine that we are going to make it like us and it isn’t going to make us like it? We must go everywhere trying not to terraform but instead ready to be areoformed, to be venuformed, to be jovioformed and saturnised and andromedated too. Everywhere we meet a new frontier we and it will shatter and become something new, something strange. Something martian.

The Mars Trilogy is a lot of things at once, but what always pulls me back to it is the way that despite being so explicitly a story about revolution, about building a new kind of society, about political change, it is also a story that pulls us so far beyond the end of capitalism that the questions about life and existence it considers make revolution almost trivial. Of course it will be done. Shikata ga nai.