Poop Shute

Book Review

Due to an unfortunately slow news day in The Land Of Poop, we are temporarily making one of our "Fluff" section columns, Lord Knucklehead's Book Poop frontpage headline news. We, sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you in your day, and hope to report war and/or dismemberment in future.
-Management

If you want to read a truly amazing book, then Red Mars is it. It's a science fiction book that barely qualifies as fiction, as it is loaded with so much science fact. Author Kim Stanley Robinson is a true literary genius, and a scientific visionary.

His book paints a picture of an Earth about twenty years in our future where resource depletion and over-population has the world's leaders looking skyward.

We see every step of the journey, from the first landing of a tightly-knit science team of 100 people, all the way through the early stages of terraforming and a massive exodus of millions of people.

What's amazing is he takes into consideration EVERY aspect of this idea. The sociopolitical problems. The immense geography of Mars itself. The economic state the Earth could theoretically be in by this time. The environmental problems and MANY different solutions for terraforming. It's all there, and it's all addressed in plausible (if not probable) ways.

And we've all seen examples of science fiction predicting science fact, but there are more than a few examples in Red Mars. One that caught me off gaurd was a very brief tv advert extolling the virtues of an "indigestible diet fat." The add says things like 'eat as much as you like' and 'passes right through.'

Olestra anybody? Keep in mind this book came out in 1992, and olestra didn't hit the consumer market until 1996.

The best part of the book, for me, is that each section of the book has a different character as narrarator, and each of these narrarators has a distinct perspective and voice, his/her own set of strengths and weaknesses, and his/her own motivations and even neuroses

I'll leave you with one passage that stuck with me.

They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.

What do you mean?

Games don't mean anything.

Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.

John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.