Red Mars

 

For twenty long years it stared balefully down on me: a mixture of regret, of shame, of condescension. How dare you place me, a Nebula Award winner for Best Novel, upon a shelf out of reach, out of sight. It glared out at me with spiteful accusation over two decades. Longer than the lives of both my children, longer than my marriage, over the span of four presidencies, over six jobs and three bouts of unemployment. With guilt I imprisoned it on that shelf as I moved from apartment to home to home office. Incomprehensible grief and anger washed down from it upon me, and the gulf between us, the void, was immense and impenetrable.

Then I decided to just read it.

The “it” is Red Mars, a meaty paperback by Kim Stanley Robinson. I must admit I picked it up solely based on that WINNER OF THE NEBULA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL scroll above the title. Back in those halcyon days of 2001, pre-9/11, young engaged Hopper walked about all a-glow with sci fi plots and characters running rampant in his skull. I was to be a bestselling novelist! I would change the world! I would … well, writing’s hard work, and, uh, twenty years later my output is somewhat less than I’d have thought back then –

But that’s another tale! Back to Red Mars:

So I was all into science fiction – “SF” as we in the know refer to it – back in those pre-marriage, pre-home, pre-children days. I sopped up as much SF as I could as I worked the night shift at a tech Help Desk for a major corporation. I devoured works by Larry Niven, Philip Jose Farmer, Roger Zelazny, Gregory Benford, Samuel Delaney, Gene Wolf, in addition to the classics as those by Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Walter Miller Jr., and Jules Verne. I lived, breathed, and ate SF. And as part of my development, I autodidacted into Modern SF 401 and bought Robinson’s Red Mars one bright Spring day, and sat down to read it.

Right away I sensed something amiss. Instead of the easy pleasure I expected, difficult treading was encountered. Something blocked my path through the words, sentences, pages and paragraphs, and it became my worst nightmare: a deadening slog through something deliciously anticipated. I managed the 23-page Part I “Festival Night,” and then … put it on … the shelf.

But I am not one to quit.

Years ago in high school I put off reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities for an English class. As the night of the essay test approached, I just couldn’t crack the book. In desperation, I picked up the Cliff Notes and managed a B on the test. But it gnawed at my soul until, sixteen years later, commuting on a train into NYC for another tech Help Desk job, I read for the first time the real words spoken by Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, and not some English Major’s interpretation of such.

With similar pluck, I plucked Red Mars off the shelf one cold Tuesday night of January 19. And nineteen brutal nights of sheer endurance I closed it, one cold Saturday night of February 6. Trembling, but satisfied I’d satisfied the karmic cosmos, I looked fondly upon the illustrations of man conquering Red Mars upon its laminated cover, and placed it in the paper bag by the door where I put all my library donations.

My verdict?

Return tomorrow and all will be revealed!