New Scientist Book Club: Red Mars author calls emigration to the planet ‘bullshit’

I’m glad to think of people reading Red Mars in the year 2026. Her story begins around that year, but I wrote the book between 1989 and 1991, so naturally one aspect of reading it now is noticing all the discrepancies between what the book thought the decade would be like and what it actually is.

This always happens with science fiction novels: as time goes on, the story shifts from being about the future to being about a past set of ideas about the future. This is a valuable window into how that past felt to those living at the time, something that has not been easy to recapture.

When we read old science fiction, we catch glimpses of what people then thought could happen, which was an important part of their reality. The old text then becomes not so much a matter of imprecise prediction as an accurate portrayal of the sense of potential of the moment, expressing its hopes and fears for what seems to be coming.

As with all fiction, therefore, science fiction is always mostly about the present, even if it takes place in the future, and as it ages, it becomes a window into the past. In its form and content, it serves as a kind of time travel, both forward into the future and back into the past.

That is, if you looked Red Mars how 1990 tries to imagine the 2020s, even if that’s not what it was trying to do, I still think it holds up pretty well. The US and Russia as declining empires joined together in a desperate attempt to contain the new emerging powers? Control. China and India on the Rise? Double check.

And there is more that seems right, like the danger the earth is threatened ecologically and economically by climate change and geopolitical conflict, even to the point of war. Or an emerging social order that manifests itself as a gigantic ongoing dispute about what it should become. None of this needed any special vision to evoke; our situation has been a mess for a long time and something new will emerge because things cannot continue as they are in a physical sense only. What cannot happen will not happen and what will happen can happen. Reality bites, it doesn’t go away.

I like to notice the technological details in the book that I predicted quite well, as well as the details that I completely missed. Sometimes the two are mixed together, like when they still use video tapes but make something like YouTube out of them. Or when John Boone’s Dick Tracy-esque wristwatch contains a talking AI, Pauline—a modest precursor to the many Paulines scattered throughout my other work (see my novel 2312 especially). That’s what happens when you talk about the future: you’re always wrong, but sometimes you’re right, in an interesting mix.

As for Mars itself, when I wrote my trilogy, we were still in the immediate aftermath of the vast amount of new information about Mars that had been provided by the Mariner satellite flybys in 1969 and the Viking orbiters and landers in 1976. These machines gave us Mars in a way that no previous generation had: a new world, real but empty, handed to us on a plate.

It is no coincidence that our new knowledge of Mars was soon joined by a new speculative science called terraforming. Could humanity engineer an alien planet to make it a place where people can “walk around in their shirts”? This question was asked in part because an excellent candidate for such a transformation had just been found, right next door.

Terraformation ideas have been hypothetically applied to nearly every rocky planet and moon in the solar system, but by far the best candidate remains Mars. It has water, quite a bit of gravity, a bit of an atmosphere, and all the various elements that life needs – though not as much nitrogen as one would like – so could the nitrogen currently enveloping Saturn’s moon Titan be transported there? This was the kind of big-screen thinking the terraforming community was deploying at the time. It was as much science fiction as science, a game planetary scientists played after hours. These discussions were extremely valuable to me for my project. What sense of credibility my book has is due to these scientists.

Now, 35 years later, it has to be said that we have learned more about Mars and about human biology, making the whole project of humans inhabiting Mars seem much more difficult than it was then. Rovers from the early 21st century, for example, discovered that perchlorates in the ppm range are mixed into the sand of Mars, and these perchlorates are poisonous to humans in the ppm range. It turns out that the surface of Mars is extremely poisonous to us!

We also learned more about the ill effects of lighter-than-Earth gravity on human bodies and unblocked cosmic rays on mammalian brains. So the bold claims of some billionaires about how soon we will colonize Mars are simply fantasy. They express a wish that the Mars we know now reverts to an earlier, survivable version. But no. In 1990 I was writing science fiction; now the same story has become a fantasy.

Oh no! Like a lot of people, I wish it would work. I’m holding on to my dream and I really still say that we could go to Mars, but in a different way. It would resemble the way we go to Antarctica now. We could set up science stations on Mars similar to McMurdo Station in Antarctica and people could live there for a year or two and then return to Earth.

In fact, they would live much like my characters in Underhill in the third and fourth chapters of my book, but this lifestyle would not change. The visiting scientists would suffer some injury, but they might consider it worth it for their adventure. We would learn a lot from their efforts, and people would be as interested in their project as they are in the work now going on in Antarctica—in other words, not very much. Humans on Mars will be just another aspect of the Anthropocene.

This is a science fiction story that now looks more realistic. It is possible that if you extend the timeline a few thousand years and include the establishment of a healthy relationship between humans and Earth, Mars could eventually be terraformed and fully populated. I hope so.

Certainly the big obstacle to the Mars project now, even more important than its toxicity, is the way we are poisoning the Earth. We need to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off the planet is remotely relevant. If and when we manage to create that healthy relationship, Mars will still be there as a reward for our success, a new project to try.

Please remember this when you see clickbait and statements about humans migrating to Mars very soon. Me, the author Mars trilogy, call that silly fantasy bullshit.

In conclusion, I want to say that all these aspects surround Red Mars they are not what I consider most important. Because it is not a blueprint, a prophecy, or a technical assessment, it is a novel. So what I like most about it is its characters and plot. These are the elements that drive any novel and are essential to how the reader feels about it.

It’s been so long since I wrote Red Mars that I was able to read it a few years ago without feeling like I had it half memorized and without trying helplessly in my mind to revise it one more time. I just took it. What a pleasure it was.

Nadia and Maya, John and Frank, Sax and Ann, Michel and Hiroko and Arkady, Phyllis and Vlad and Ursula and Spencer and all the other supporting characters, they all stepped off the page and into my head. None of them are like me and I don’t know where they came from. They just showed up and told me their stories. What a gift! And what a story it is—not just their interpersonal relationships, but their political interactions with the Earth and their terraforming work and their lives over many decades, all intertwined to become history, or, as my beloved teacher Fredric Jameson once put it, history.

I am so glad that this book flew past me and stuck to the page and is still there for readers to read. I hope you will like it.

The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading a book by Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars. Log in and read with us here.

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