ABSTRACT

When the spaceship Ares at last approaches its destination early in Kim Stanley Robinson’s extraordinary Mars trilogy its crew of 100 tries to determine which of them will be assigned to which of its many missions on the red planet. Most popular are the ‘series of geological surveys, travelling all over the planet; a glamour assignment for sure’; 1 and I take it that we could assume that John Ruskin, with his lifelong passion for geology, would be volunteering eagerly for that task. Later in Red Mars Ann Claybourne, who is the lead geologist and the most passionate advocate of not terraforming the planet, of allowing it to remain in its original bleak stony being, conducts an expedition to Mars’s northern ice cap. This great trek north, with its awesome landscapes, breaks open the narrow pragmatic horizons of the chief engineer Nadia Chernyshevsky, awakening her to the sublime power and weirdness of the Martian landscape; and I find myself, as I read these pages, recalling William Morris’s travels in Iceland in 1871 and 1873. How that self-declared ‘man of the North’ might have thrilled to the northern Martian lavafields and rock formations, hundreds of times larger and billions of years older than their equivalents on Earth.