The Martians
A glorious companion volume to Robinson’s world-wide bestselling trilogy.All Colours MarsRed Mars. Green Mars. Blue Mars.The Mars trilogy has rapidly assumed the status of modern science fiction classic, capturing the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. Now, with The Martians, comes Kim Stanley Robinson’s essential companion to the Mars series. New novellas and short stories head the collection, along with texts on the Martian constitution, maps and Martian inspired poetry.In short, The Martians is a unique collection of previously unpublished fiction, a fascinating addition to Robinson’s oeuvre, and a must for all lovers of the red planet.
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KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
The Martians
CONTENTS
FOUR: The Way the Land Spoke to Us
1. The Great Escarpment
1. Wrong way
TEN: Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars
TWELVE: The Constitution of Mars
THIRTEEN: Some Worknotes and Commentary on the Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia
EIGHTEEN: An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies
NINETEEN: Selected Abstracts from The journal of Areological Studies, vols. 56–64
TWENTY-TWO: Enough Is as Good as a Feast
TWENTY-SEVEN: If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and other poems
1. Visiting
9. Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art
ii. In the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth
iii. Reading Emerson’s journal
AT FIRST IT WAS fine. The people were nice. Wright Valley was awesome. Each day Michel woke in his cubicle and looked out of his little window (everyone had one) at the frozen surface of Lake Vanda, a flat oval of cracked blue ice, flooding the bottom of the valley. The valley itself was brown and big and deep, its great rock side-walls banded horizontally. Seeing it all he felt a little thrill and the day began well.
There was always a lot to do. They had been dropped there in the largest of the Antarctic dry valleys with a load of disassembled huts and, for immediate occupancy, Scott tents. Their task through the perpetual day of the Antarctic summer was to build their winter home, which on assembly had turned out to be a fairly substantial and luxurious modular array of interconnected red boxes. In many ways it seemed analogous to what the voyagers would be doing when they arrived on Mars, and so of course to Michel it was all very interesting.
There were one hundred and fifty-eight people there, and only a hundred were going to be sent on the first trip out, to establish a permanent colony. This was the plan as designed by the Americans and Russians, who had then convened an international team to enact it. So this stay in Antarctica was a kind of test, or winnowing. But it seemed to Michel that everyone there assumed he or she would be among the chosen, so there was little of the tension one saw in people doing job interviews. As they said, when it was discussed at all – in other words when Michel asked about it – some candidates were going to drop out, others would be invalided out, and others placed on later trips to Mars, at worst. So there was no reason to worry. Most of the people there were not worriers anyway – they were capable, brilliant, assured, used to success. Michel worried about this.
They finished building their winter home by the autumn equinox, March 21st. After that the alternation of day and night was dramatic, the brilliant slanted light of the days ending with the sun sliding off to the north and over the Olympus Range, the long twilights leading to a black starry darkness that eventually would be complete, and last for months. At their latitude, perpetual night would begin a little after mid-April.
The constellations as they revealed themselves were the stars of another sky, foreign and strange to a northerner like Michel, reminding him that the universe was a big place. Each day was shorter than the one before by a palpable degree, and the sun burned lower through the sky, its beams pouring down between the peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges like vibrant stagelights. People got to know each other.
When they were first introduced, Maya had said ‘So you are to evaluate us!’ with a look that seemed to suggest this could be a process that went both ways. Michel had been impressed. Frank Chalmers, looking over her shoulder at him, had seen this.
They were a mix of personality types, as one might expect. But they all had the basic social skilfulness that had allowed them to make it this far, so that whether outgoing or withdrawn in their basic nature, they could still all talk easily. They were interested in each other, naturally. Michel saw a lot of relationships beginning to bloom around him. Romances too. Of course.
