A Good Analysis

by Dylan Jeninga
(Illinois, Wisconsin)

Get to the Martians already!

That seems to sum up Heinlein nicely, thanks! My friend is thinking of making a science fiction short story into a short film, and I was helping him choose the tale.

In other performance news, a theater company near my home is putting "A Princess of Mars" on the stage. I'm only sad I didn't hear about it sooner! I will of course be in attendance, and I will let everyone know how I enjoyed it.

I'm nearly through "Mars" by Ben Bova. The Mars stuff is well done, Bova manages to make geology and international politics interesting, and of course anything involving Martian life is gripping.

That said, there are a few things that take me out of the story.

The first is the incredible sex drives of almost all of the characters. I'll not begrudge a book sex, it's part of the human experience - but astronauts on Mars and the officials behind them really out to spend more time thinking about their momentous undertaking. Sexual competition is a theme of the book, and it feels a bit out of place.

My second problem arises from the other thing the book's characters think far too much about: their ethnicity. The reader may be forgiven if he or she enjoys an old novel with unfortunate racial segments by making allowances for the work's chronological point of origin. However, blatant racism is not the only way to mishandle characters of diverse backgrounds in a story. "Mars"'s sin is to make every non-Caucasian character able to think about their heritage and little else. I can't find the exact passage, but I recall that at one point the protagonist, who is Navaho by descent, thinks about how the Martian cliffs look like the sort of place his ancestors might have built adobe cities. Moments later, he mentally remarks that the rocky spires around him resemble totem poles. After that (but not much after) he imagines Navaho deities descending on the scene. All that, despite his grandfather being his only intermittent tie to the culture of his ancestors. And he's not the only one, the several other characters behave in similarly unrealistic fashion. If I were a character in "Mars", boulders would look like windmills to me and I would wear wooden shoes over my spacesuit. It's simply not how people think.

All this isn't to say that it's not an enjoyable book. It's depiction of Martian exploration is good enough that I haven't put it down yet, and some of the characters are likable enough to root for them (particularly Vosnesenseky, a well drawn tough-guy-who-occasionally-betrays-a-human-heart). I don't think we'll be adding it to the list of classics, however.

{Z: We live in an unfortunately obsessed period, in which writers tend to feel impelled to parade their liberal credentials instead of just trusting the inner light of their humanity to shine through naturally. That's why female characters are so often repulsive - it's a virtue-signalling message from the writer, "Look at me, look how non-sexist I am." Contrast this with a real non-sexist future as depicted in the excellent "Hub" universe of James H Schmitz: there (around 3500 A.D.), the whole species has moved on, the equality of the sexes is no longer an issue; the fight has been won so long ago that women can be thoroughly attractive and equal at the same time.

There is also another issue, of which I am reminded by your interesting piece of news about "A Princess of Mars" being put on the stage. (No, I am not going to speculate about the theatre company's chances of recruiting a fifteen-foot actor to play Tars Tarkas.) Old-style writers like ERB wrote about characters who, for all their faults, had something which today's protagonists seem always to lack. To say what it is, I'll have to use the d-word. Dignity.

I haven't read the Ben Bova book you've described, but I can just imagine the contrast if John Carter were transported into it. The Bova cast of characters would no doubt consider him to be a bloodthirsty maniac; but meantime, what would he think about them? An interesting thought.}

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Oct 20, 2016
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Politics and the Internet
by: Dylan Jeninga

I'm fond of Mr. Obama myself, however, I generally avoid discussing politics on the internet. Not out of any sort of disdain, but simply out of habit after facing the nasty assaults such "conversations" so often degenerate into. That's not to say that the present company would commit such unpleasantness, of course! But as Mr. Greer said, such discussions are meant for forums other than this one.

{Z: Quite right to avoid politics - but bear in mind, my century-on-century comparison is disconnected with party issues; rather, it's to do with the general mind-set of a whole culture.

By the way, I hope I can count on your vote for Solar System Autarch...}

Oct 20, 2016
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Re: Disillusionment
by: John Michael Greer

Dylan, you may have missed being there but you're right on target. Optimism was one of many things that didn't survive the massive cultural shifts of the early 1980s, and yeah, that was when it became more or less de rigueur to drag every character in a story down to the lowest possible level. If I want to watch that in action, I can go to any unmoderated internet forum; I prefer something a little less grubby when I open a SF novel!

Oct 20, 2016
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In tune with the very, very finite
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, that's the thing I find so frustrating about most current science fiction: the only infinities it seems to be willing to be in tune with are those that have been infinitely rehashed. Still, as noted in an earlier comment, SF goes through such phases from time to time, and with any luck that'll change.

As for Chryse Planitia and all, I can understand that in an intellectual sense, but that's not what I experienced at the time.

An elegant tiptoe around the issues surrounding the current US president, by the way. I voted for him, twice; I'm sure I'd find him a pleasant and intelligent person on the extraordinarily unlikely chance that we ever got to converse; I'm disappointed in his presidency, but then it would have taken a much stronger person than he'll ever be to buck the pressures that are driving this country in its current direction. But those are issues for an entirely different forum...

Oct 19, 2016
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The Disillusionment
by: Dylan Jeninga

I think, Mr. Greer, that your feelings of disappointment reflect a feeling many writers of science fiction seem to share.

The days of dignified characters that Zendexor misses so badly might be a product of an age that was more optimistic, generally (I can't say for sure, as I missed it). These days, it is more common to be pessimistic, to make characters dirty and deeply flawed, to make settings dark and grim. I do not disparage books with tones like this; I am a product of my time and so own and enjoy quite a few of them.

The refreshing thing, then, about OSS fiction is that no matter how gritty you make your characters or settings, they will inherently be more hopeful than they might otherwise be. After all, the characters exist in a universe where interplanetary travel has been achieved and life, or its footprints, can be found right next door.

In regards to promiscuous characters, I really must emphasize that I don't mind them. It just surprises a bit when the first doctor on Mars is perpetually concerned with the one female member of the crew he hasn't yet managed to bed.

And that's really my biggest criticism of the book: that the characters think or act on unbelievable ways, whether it had to do with sex or race. Their behavior pulls me out of the story.

{Z: Now that is a key point - the connection you've made between dignity and optimism. I expect it's partly a case of them running in parallel and partly a case of cause and effect.

S M Stirling is - so I've heard - in line to produce a book or series of books concerned with Theodore Roosevelt, linking him with sf. I'm aware of Teddy R's dark side, his gung-ho militarism, but all in all I don't think one can deny the obvious, that he was a true American hero and a great human being. And it's sobering to reflect that he was a character who nowadays could not exist in public life. His optimism and decency would both simply crash against a brick wall of cultural incompatibility.

Your current President, Mr Obama, I regard as an unusually intelligent, dignified and likeable person compared with his immediate predecessors, but even he - in order to get where he is - has had to agree with and support certain things which would have turned the stomach of any decent person a century ago. I won't be more specific because free speech does not exist on these issues.}

Oct 19, 2016
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re: Bed-hopping
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, you've once again put your finger -- if you'll excuse the potentially sticky anatomical metaphor! -- on one of the ways that current science fiction very often fails: the insistence that way off there in the future, people will inevitably have either (a) the sexual and social mores of today's hip urban middle-class pseudosophisticates, or (b) the parodic reinterpretations of past sexual and social mores in circulation among today's hip urban middle-class pseudosophisticates. It's either casual bed-hopping, that is, or it's the notions that today's casual bed-hoppers have about restraint and sublimation.

(And I say this, having written -- in "Star's Reach" -- a viewpoint character who does a fair amount of bed-hopping. There were reasons for that, in the character and in the society; the point is that this isn't the only possible way that future societies will arrange their love lives.)

Of course that's part of a bigger problem, which is the extent to which so many modern SF authors seem unable to imagine a society in the future that isn't either a close equivalent of ours with more technological trinkets, or a copy of some past society with a coat of alien spraypaint. My example du jour right now is Neil Stephenson's "Anathem," which has people in an alternate earth at a time equivalent to four thousand years in our future, who nonetheless wear T-shirts, eat energy bars, and use cell phones. Er, do we wear togas, eat dormice, and write on wax tablets?

...and all this leads me to wonder if the crashing disappointment that the space probes brought -- I remember when the first Viking lander pictures came back from Mars, and like everyone else I knew, my first thought was, "Is that all? Just an airless corner of Nevada?" -- caused a general failure of vision concerning possible futures. Hmm...

{Z: And the failure of imagination which you mention is all the more odd, in that science-fiction writers are supposed to be so in tune with the cosmic infinite. Oh, well.

A point concerning your reaction to the Viking lander images: I'd like to try to explain why I myself found them enthralling. I suppose that by that time I had developed a split mind about Mars: while I no longer expected the real Mars to connect in any overt way with the literary Mars, there was still a sort of emotional transference between the two, so that the lifeless images were overlaid by an invisible caption, "wow, THIS IS MARS!". Enough to make the 1976 view of Chryse Planitia exciting. Even the more boring Viking 2 site had a haunting horizon in which one could just about make out some sunny ridge of hills.}

Oct 18, 2016
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My reply was back to front
by: Zendexor

The points I made yesterday in answer to your post would have been better in reverse order. My tail-end comment about what John Carter would have thought if transported into the Ben Bova Mars was meant to be my main supportive response to your comment about the absurdly over-emphasized sex drives of Bova's characters. My other comments, about female characters in modern fiction, were comparatively a side issue, and should not have come first. Of course, really it's all one topic in the sense that the problem is the extremely unromantic age in which we live.

The drive that is being suppressed nowadays, in our supposedly permissive society, is the drive for romance and dignity. In other words, restraint and sublimation, in the permissive society, are not permitted.

Though an opponent might argue that one is perfectly free to be old-fashioned if one wants, the fact remains that the dominant culture is intrusive, and enforces a pervasive bias in all media. Culture, after all, is bias.

So we get the sad result that in Bova's book, by your account, even explorers of Mars are more interested in bed-hopping than in the fantastic wonder and privilege of what they are really there to do.

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