White Mars - Softcover

Aldiss, Brian W And Roger Penrose

2.74

128 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0751529788 ISBN 13: 9780751529784

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2000

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Halfway through the 21st century, an organization with members from each industrialized nation has found a way to colonize Mars. Owing to Earth's economic collapse, the colony is cut off from the mother planet. The head of the colony wants to create Utopia - some, however, want to go home.

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Review:

White Mars is, as its title implies, Brian Aldiss's considered reply to the novels Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, in which Kim Stanley Robinson portrayed the terraforming of our neighbor planet and the creation of a utopian society there. Aldiss disapproves of the whole idea of meddling with another world in the first place, and, more genially, of the melodrama surrounding the creation of Robinson's utopia. Where Robinson's Martians get their chance after near-genocidal warfare on Mars and environmental disaster on Earth, Aldiss's get theirs as the result of a corruption- and scandal-fuelled recession in which supplies for the Martian colony are cut. This is, unusually for the shrewd and sometimes cynical Aldiss, a novel with a hero--Tom Jeffreys, the Thomas Jefferson of this Martian revolution:

His manner was less severe than well controlled. He showed great determination for the cause in which he believed, yet softened it with humour, which sprang from an innate modesty. He was not above self-mockery. In his speech he adopted the manner of a plain man, yet what he said was often unexpected.

This is a very English, very urbane book, in which there is an awful lot of talk--about utopia, about consciousness, about subatomic particles; Aldiss collaborated on parts of the book with mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose. It is a wise book and a knowledgeable one. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Born in 1925, Brian Aldiss is a doyen for many writers, as Iain Banks will attest (see right). Sir Roger Penrose is a physicist hailed as one of the greatest living disciples of Einstein and author of THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND (OUP/Vintage 1990), which won the prestigious Science Book of the Year prize/ He was awarded the prestigious Order of Merit in May 2000.

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