[DOWNLOAD] "Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and the Leopoldian Land Ethic * (Essays)" by Utopian Studies # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and the Leopoldian Land Ethic * (Essays)
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 219 KB
Description
SET ON BARREN MARS, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy speculates about what paradigms the planet's fictional settlers will inscribe on the "blank red slate." Anything is possible for the group of one hundred chosen to establish the first Martian colony. Their sense of freedom from past political constraints and from future Terran political regulation sets up the utopian potential of the new settlement. And Robinson uses all 1900-plus pages of his trilogy to illustrate the challenges of moving beyond a history spawned on Earth and toward a future, Martian history generated by utopian social, political, scientific, and ecological ideas. The settlers' hopes are indeed utopian in the etymological sense that utopia is always impossible and always existing nowhere. Before the group even lands on Mars, "rival cliques" develop and arguments become "frequent, and vehement" (Red Mars 73, 75). As Maya Katarina Toitovna, the settlement's leader of the Russian contingent, reflects, "Interest groups, micropolitics--they really were fragmenting. One hundred people only, and yet they were too large a community to cohere!" (76). These arguments include Phyllis Boyle's defense of Christianity against John Boone's rational, scientific logic; Arkady Bogdanov's insistence that the architecture of the settlement be redesigned to suggest equality rather than hierarchy; and, more generally, the group's disagreements over their job assignments once the Mars colony is established. In short, and to borrow one of the many technological metaphors in Red Mars, "the international nature of the equipment meant that there were inevitable mismatches of size and function" (108). (1)