Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The white world outside the green, the opposite of Hiroko's green world outside the white. And they had opposite feelings about them. Looking from the green side, when Hiroko confronted something mysterious, she loved it and it made her happy -- it was viriditas, a holy power. Looking from the white side, when Sax confronted something mysterious, it was the Great Unexplainable, dangerous an awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around -- those words are tricky.

p. 13

I like the contrast here of joy at a mystery and fight against what we don't know. And which is truth and which is real? Great stuff!

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is the second volume. It concerns much of the terraforming efforts to make Mars livable. Mostly it is the same characters.

Enjoy.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anytime, anywhere, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together -- while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and a rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they came into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created in a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the the cities under bombardment.

p. 504

I love dinner and the times we get together with friends and families ad we eat and talk. What a special time and how lucky we are to be able to share this time. It reinforces our humanity in so many ways. We celebrate our animal nature with the eating, and yet we celebrate our collective intelligence by doing it socially. How sad it is that some people cannot see this. And Hail to the Baha'is who use a shared meal as the basic religious ceremony. 

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

"Live," as the Japanese said helpfully, "as if you were already dead."

p. 371

What a concept from this society where everyone is always aware of the reactions of other people. To live as if one were dead means to live as if there were no consequences. I will have to check this out.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

p. 379

Are there people who always have a political purpose? What a weird thing. I guess this is one reason I have trouble in meetings and school politics. I know that I am hard for many Japanese to understand. I always say what I mean or keep silent. I where my agenda on my sleeve. Some Japanese are always trying to figure out what I rally mean and what my real agenda is. I am also crippled because I take everything everyone says at face value. Do I have political Asperger's Syndrome?

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

" A talib is a seeker and the seeker's tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality."

p. 281

These are Arabic terms, from Sufi's that are roving Mars. What a concept that we are all on a journey towards reality. Very Buddhist. And if we are all moving towards death, is death the ultimate reality? What a depressing thought.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

"... If you don't go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and other infrastructure workers would always rate as the most productive of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all."

"sounds about right to me," John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him. 

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

p. 269

Economics as astrology - yeah. I always thought the advice I got from my astrologer was better han the advice that I got from my broker. And I never thought that either one had much of a grounding in reality. 

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

It was a good winter. He learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Archeon people, both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should be run. At Archeon this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these were to them much more critical than politics, or what Marina called "the supposed decision-making apparatus."

p. 269

(note: Archeon is a research center doing terra forming of Mars)

I love the idea that economics as the deformed offspring of ecology. Money is a measure of the energy in a system. That is all. However, the drive for wealth perverts it into something of importance all out of proportion to the reality. and it just gets it wrong so often.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

... the beige and yellow tiles they sat on had started to throb, as if lit from within; light gleamed on every water droplet covering the tiles, like tiny chips of lightning scattered everywhere, and Maya's body sprawled over the sparkling tiles pulsing before him like a pink candle. The intense thereness of it -- "haecceity," Sax had called it once, when John had asked him about his religious beliefs -- I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was felling he thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to moment.

p. 265

And we only have this moment, for ever. Wow!

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Extroversion-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence fro many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concept. Not as a simple duality of course; one did not simply label a person plainly this or that, but rather placed them on a scale, rating them for qualities such as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on. These measurements had been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that the  exceeded chance by a huge amount. So the concept was real, quite real! In fact psychological investigations had revealed that extroversion was linked with resting rates of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backward to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibit the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extrovert, while the high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion. This explained why drinking alcohol, a depressant which lowers cortical arousal, could lead excited and uninhibited behavior.

p. 195

Two points here. First, I always wonder about the science in these books. They are not called science fiction for nothing. Still, it has the tone of authority that makes it sound accurate. I also wonder how much of my approach to life, which I would put in the scientific/analytical bracket, comes from the stuff I read from an early age. Often it gave me a way to visualize the concepts I had learned. And that is part of the power of fiction. It allows us to see things in a new way, not just science, but also the human relationships that are at the heart of any great or even good story. We are testing out what might be. I once heard it said that that was why romantic comedies are such popular films - we are all trying to figure out the relationship game.

The second point has to do with the content. The character, Michel, thinks of these things in terms of suppression of the higher and expression of the lower. I sort of think of these things in Freudian terms. If there is higher critical arousal, then the super ego is given more power. The introvert does more thinking about stuff, not the knee-jerk reaction of the extrovert. The days are spent in thought because of the arousal. We don't do things because we keep thinking about it. I often think back to a high school reading - Milton's two poems, L'Allegero and il Penseroso. Once again the visual images have stuck with me all these years, even though the words are gone. I guess I could look them up. LOL

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Ann pursed her lips, stared out the window, shook her head. Her face could be so bleak; it couldn't be explained entirely by Mars, there had to be more to it, something that explained that intense internal spin, that anger. Bessie Smith land. It was hard to watch. When Maya was unhappy it was like Ella Fitzgerald singing a blues, you knew it was a put-on, the exuberance just poured through it. But when Ann was unhappy it hurt to watch it.

p. 139

What a fun metaphor - emotions like great divas. And it fits so well.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

"The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when the listeners remember the discussion, what really matters is that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y."

p. 71

And as I write this, Barak Obama has just made it as the Democratic nominee fo president. And we will all be looking at the "persuasive arguments" of the up coming campaign. And it will all come down to who we like, especially our friends.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is going to be fun. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is the start of the series that made me think of creating this blog. I have read it at least four times, and each time I read it, I thought "Oh, this is a great idea. I should mark it." As I went on reading, without marking those passages, I would feel a slight disappointment. I wanted to save those ideas. So, as I realized that I would be working my way through to reading this again, I started this blog.

So, here we go, it is the year 2030 and the first 100 settlers are going to land on Mars and start to build a new world.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

Things you don't like, things you think are wrong, you can always walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act.

p. 235

Active compassion - or taking actions based on our compassion. Very hard to do.

And that is a good place to end this trilogy. They all live happily ever after and so one. It was a good read.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model, no one pays for it. The carbon the British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty- three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. Your helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon you are describing as inevitable because o your financial shell games, then two thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand answer possible."

The World Bank guys flinched at this. "Well," one of them said, "we don't se it that way."

Charlie said, "That's the trouble. You see the way the banking industry ses it, and they make money by manipulating money irrespective of effects in the real wold. You've spent a trillion dollars of the American taxpayers' money over the lifetime of the bank, and there's nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistance agriculture to ch crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and then you insist on austerity measures even though your actions shattered the economy. You order them to cut their social services to pay off their debts to you and your financial community investors, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That's your idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan and instead you've been the United Fruit Company.

p. 144

I have seldom seen the state of the world economy stated so succinctly or so eloquently.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

on a rave in Solona beach:

... it was true in the Belly-Up of the beast, in the cacophonous sweaty strobed space of the rave, there were plenty of alternative life styles being enacted right before his very eyes. Most provocatively in fact. Some very serious kissing and other acts, dance as simulated standing sex, heck actual standing sex if you were at all loose with the definition.

p. 118

I've been there and done that, but not recently. Maybe I should keep a closer eye on the schedule for the Belly Up.