Oudheid en Middeleeuwen 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-1900 1901-2000 2001-nu Filosofisch Sociaal en Cultureel Politiek en Economisch Technisch Stalinisme Maoïsme Neoliberalisme Socialisme Neomarxisme en Kritische theorie Complottheorieën Irrationaliteit Irrationaliteit (Bijgeloof en religie) Leugens, desinformatie, propaganda KlokkenluidersThe Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.
Kim Stanley ROBINSON"In the decade following the catastrophes of 2061, people struggled in the cracked domes and torn tents, patching things up and getting by; and in our hidden refuges, the work of building a new society went on. And out on the cold surface new plants spread over the flanks of the glaciers, and down into the warm low basins, in a slow inexorable surge.
Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of new species. And as the generations pass, all the members of a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else, have been forever changed.This is the process of areoformation."(3)
"It wasn’t true that Jackie was their sister. There were twelve sansei or third-generation children in Zygote, and they knew each other like brothers and sisters and many of them were, but not all. It was confusing and seldom discussed. Jackie and Dao were the oldest, Nirgal a season younger, the rest bunched a season after that: Rachel, Emily, Reull, Steve, Simud, Nanedi, Tiu, Frantz, and Huo Hsing. Hiroko was mother to everyone in Zygote, but not really— only to Nirgal and Dao and six other of the sansei, and several of the nisei grownups as well. Children of the mother goddess.
But Jackie was Esther’s daughter. Esther had moved away after a fight with Kasei, who was Jackie’s father. Not many of them knew who their fathers were." [mijn nadruk] (6)
"Hiroko asked them questions, her black eyes twinkling merrily. She lived by the lake with a small group of her intimates, Iwao, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all in a little bamboo stand in the dunes. And she spent a lot of time visiting other hidden sanctuaries around the South Pole. So she always needed catching up on the village news."(12)
"It was the white world, Nirgal saw suddenly. The white world inside the green, the opposite of Hiroko’s green world inside 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 and awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around — those words were tricky. Better to say she loved the green world, he the white."(22)
"The bamboo dorms made a crescent which held most of the rest of the village inside it; each of the big shoots was five or seven segments high, each segment a room, getting smaller as they got higher. The children each had a room of their own in the top segments of the shoots— windowed vertical cylinders that were four or five steps across, like the towers of the castles in their stories. Below them in the middle segments the adults had their rooms, mostly alone but sometimes in couples; and the bottom segments were living rooms."(24)
"After that warm wet hour they dressed, and trooped into the kitchen, damp and pink-skinned, queueing up and filling their plates, sitting at the long tables scattered among the adults. There were 124 permanent residents, but usually about 200 people there at any given time. When everyone was seated they took up the water pitchers and poured each other’s water, and then they tore into the hot food with gusto, downing potatoes, tortillas, pasta, tabouli, bread, a hundred kinds of vegetables, occasionally fish or chicken. After the meal the adults would talk about crops or their Rickover, an old integral fast reactor they were very fond of, or about Earth— while the kids cleaned up and then played music for an hour and then games, as everyone began the slow process of falling asleep."(26)
[In feite wordt in deze bladzijden de utopische gemeenschap van Hiroko bschreven. Boeiend.]
"Inside he pointed to a row of fat magnesium tanks, something like refrigerators. “Those are our mothers. That’s what we were grown inside. Kasei told me, and I asked Hiroko and it’s true. We’re ectogenes. We weren’t born, we were decanted.” He glared triumphantly at his frightened, fascinated little band; then he struck Nirgal full on the chest, with his fist, knocking Nirgal clear across the lab, and left with a curse. “We don’t have parents.”"(27)
"As they were being hustled into the shallows of the big communal bath, Nirgal remembered his dream."(32)
"Hiroko, Nirgal thought as he regarded his mother after this exchange, was very strange. She talked to him and to everyone else as an equal, and clearly to her everyone was an equal; but no one was special. He remembered very keenly when it had been different, when the two of them had been like two parts of a whole. But now she only took the same interest in him that she took in everyone else, her concern impersonal and distant."(37)
"The girls kissed each other and said it was “practice kissing” that didn’t count, and sometimes they turned this practice on the boys; Nirgal had been kissed by Rachel many times, and also by Emily and Tiu and Nanedi, and once the latter two had held him and kissed his ears in an attempt to embarrass him in the public bath with an erection; and once Jackie had pulled them away from him and knocked him into the deep end, and bit his shoulder as they wrestled; and these were just the most memorable of the hundreds of slippery wet warm naked contacts which were making the baths such a high point of the day.
But outside the bathhouse, as if to try to contain such volatile forces, they had become extremely formal with each other, with the boys and girls bunched in gangs that played separately more often than not. So kissing in the coatroom represented something new, and serious— and the look Nirgal had seen on Jackie and Dao’s faces was so superior, as if they knew something he didn’t— which was true. And it was that which hurt, that exclusion, that knowledge. Especially since he wasn’t that ignorant; he was sure they were lying together, making each other come. They were lovers, their look said it. His laughing beautiful Jackie was no longer his. And in fact never had been."(39)
"But Hiroko, oh my. She was convinced that all human history had gone wrong at the start. At the dawn of civilization, she would say to me very seriously, there was Crete and Sumeria, and Crete had a peaceful trading culture, run by women and filled with art and beauty— a utopia in fact, where the men were acrobats who jumped bulls all day, and women all night, and got the women pregnant and worshipped them, and everyone was happy. It sounds good except for the bulls. While Sumeria on the other hand was ruled by men, who invented war and conquered everything in sight and started all the slave empires that have come since. And no one knew, Hiroko said, what might have happened if these two civilizations had had a chance to contest the rule of the world, because a volcano blew Crete to kingdom come, and the world passed into Sumeria’s hands and has never left it to this day. If only that volcano had been in Sumeria, she used to tell me, everything would be different. And maybe it’s true. Because history could hardly get any blacker than it has been.”"(57)
"They played Population Reduction, and given the alternative they had just contemplated, went at it with a certain intensity. Each of them took a turn being Emperor of the World, as Fort put it, and outlined his or her plan in some detail.
When it was Art’s turn, he said, “I would give everyone alive a birthright which entitled them to parent three-quarters of a child.”
Everyone laughed, including Fort. But Art persevered. He explained that every pair of parents would thus have the right to bear a child and a half; after having one, they could either sell the right to the other half, or arrange to buy a half from some other couple and go on to have a second child. Prices for half children would fluctuate in classic supply/demand fashion. Social consequences would be positive; people who wanted extra children would have to sacrifice for them, and those who didn’t would have a source of income to help support the one they had. When populations dropped far enough, the World Emperor might consider changing the birthright to one child per person, which would be close to a demographic steady state; but given the longevity treatment, the three-quarters limit might have to be in effect for a long time."(142)
"She caravaned with Coyote back south, and in the evenings they ate together, and he told her about the Reds. It was a loose grouping, rather than any rigidly organized movement. Like the underground itself. She knew several of the founders: Ivana, and Gene and Raul from the farm team, who had ended up disagreeing with Hiroko’s areophany and its insistence on viriditas; Kasei and Dao and several of the Zygote ectogenes; a lot of Arkady’s followers, who had come down from Phobos and then clashed with Arkady over the value of terraforming to the revolution. A good many Bogdanovists, including Steve and Marian, had become Reds in the years since 2061, as had followers of the biologist Schnelling, and some radical Japanese nisei and sansei from Sabishii, and Arabs who wanted Mars to stay Arabian forever, and escaped prisoners from Korolyov, and so on. A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash, and she shook her head, disgusted at herself. Who was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they had expressed their anger, they had lashed out. Probably they felt better, even if they hadn’t accomplished anything. And maybe they had accomplished something, at least in years past, before the terraforming had entered this new phase of transnat gigantism." [mijn nadruk] (230)
"Yes — Coyote was a Red, or at least a sympathizer. “Really I’m nothing. An old anarchist. I suppose you could call me a Boonean, now, in that I believe in incorporating anything and everything that will help make a free Mars. Sometimes I think the argument that a human-viable surface helps the revolution is a good one. Other times not. Anyway the Reds are such a great guerrilla pool. And I take their point that we’re not here to, you know, reproduce Canada, for God’s sake! So I help. I’m good at hiding, and I like it.”" [mijn nadruk] (231)
"And he [Sax] spent the rest of that day staring into the microscopes without seeing a thing, lost in thought. Life is so much spirit, Hiroko used to say. It was a very strange business, the vigor of living things, their tendency to proliferate, what Hiroko called their green surge, their viriditas. A striving toward pattern: it made him so curious."(316)
"Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not?"(328)
"So Sax attended the conference every day, all day, living in the hushed rooms and halls of the conference center, chatting with colleagues, and the authors of posters, and his neighbors in audiences. More than once he had to pretend not to know old associates, and it made him nervous enough that he avoided them when he could. But people did not seem to feel that he reminded them of someone they knew, and for the most part he was able to concentrate on the science. He did that with gusto. People gave talks, asked questions, debated details of fact, discussed implications, all under the uniform fluorescent glow of the conference rooms, in the low hum of ventilators and video machines— as if they were in a world outside of time and space, in the imaginary space of pure science, surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit— a kind of utopian community, cozy and bright and protected. For Sax, a scientific conference was utopia.
The sessions at this conference, however, had a new tone, a kind of nervous edge that Sax had never witnessed before, and did not like. The questions after the presentations were more aggressive, the answers more quickly defensive. The pure play of scientific discourse which he so enjoyed (and which admittedly was never quite pure) was now more and more diluted by sheer argument, by obvious power struggles, motivated by something more than the usual egotism."(380-381)
"Part of this, Sax reflected over a solitary lunch, was no doubt caused by the big-science nature of the monster projects. They were all so expensive and difficult that they had been contracted out to different transnationals. This was a plausible strategy on the face of it, an obvious efficiency move, but unfortunately it meant that the different angles of attack on the terraforming problem now had interested parties defending them as the “best” methods, twisting data in order to defend their own ideas.(...) It was always quite obvious why people were advocating one program over another; you could look at people’s name tags and see their institutional affiliation, and predict what they were going to support or attack. To see science twisted so blatantly pained Sax a great deal, and it seemed to him that it distressed everyone there, even the ones doing it, which added to the general irritability and defensiveness. Everyone knew what was going on, and no one liked it, and yet no one would admit it."(383-384)
[Opnieuw de commercialisering. ]
"Psychology, sociology, anthropology, they were all suspect. The scientific method could not be applied to human beings in any way that yielded useful information. It was the fact-value problem stated in a different way; human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis: Isolation of factors for study, falsifiable hypotheses, repeatable experiments— the entire apparatus as practiced in lab physics simply could not be brought to bear. Values drove history, which was whole, nonrepeatable, and contingent."(393)
"Over the weeks he began to get a sense of it. Certainly the common wisdom was correct; the emergence of the transnationals in the 2040s had set the stage, and was the ultimate cause of the war. (...) It was not entirely a new order, however. The multinationals had mostly originated in the wealthy industrial nations, and so in certain senses the transnationals were expressions of these nations— extensions of their power into the rest of the world, in a way that reminded Sax of what little he knew of the imperial and colonial systems that had preceded them. Frank had said something like that: colonialism had never died, he used to declare, it just changed names and hired local cops. We’re all colonies of the transnats."(397)
"And thus in 2060 when the transnats had come under fire from desperate poor countries, it had been the Group of Seven and its military might that had come to their defense.
But the proximate cause? Night after night he sifted through vid of the 2040s and ‘50s, looking for traces of patterns. Eventually he decided that it was the longevity treatment which had pushed things over the edge. Through the 2050s the treatment had spread through the rich countries, illustrating the gross economic inequality in the world like a color stain in a microscope sample. And as the treatment spread, the situation had gotten increasingly tense, rising steadily up the steps of Kahn’s ladder of crises."(399)