White Mars [Hardcover]

Brian W. Aldiss (Author), Dr. Roger Penrose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 2000

A 21st-Century Utopia

Two of England's most distinguished thinkers have created a bold and startling vision of a new society escaping the ashes of the old.

In the not-so-distant future, Man will have begun to colonize our planetary neighbor, Mars. Entrenched corporate and national interests have footed the bill, but a few visionary people attempt to keep Mars free of the hidebound ideologies that have plagued the Earth and turned it into a polluted wasteland of war and hunger.

The colony has barely begun to take root in the Martian soil when all communication with EUPACUS--as the industrialized nations of Earth are known--is cut off completely. Environmental and economic stresses have finally spun out of control, and civilization as we know it has collapsed. With no hope of escape or support from Earth, the Martians must overcome the dire obstacles that face them and forge a new alliance for survival.

Led by the brave Tom Jefferies, the colonists struggle to build a new way of living based on the search for knowledge, the improvement of human conditions, and the elimination of the hatreds and delusions that lead to misery in the past.

Included in an appendix is the complete text of the Charter for an Independent Mars, written by Dr. Laurence Lustgarten, a renowned expert on international law.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

From Publishers Weekly

Aldiss (Hothouse; the Helliconia Trilogy) is one of the most important SF writers of the 20th century and a noted mainstream novelist and literary critic as well, but this largely unsuccessful excursion into utopian narrative is unlikely to win him many new admirers. Written in collaboration with the distinguished physicist Sir Roger Penrose, with the noted authority on international law Laurence Lustgarten bylined as "legal advisor," the book is less a novel than a series of long-winded debates on the nature of what might best constitute a utopian society on Mars. Interspersed with these discussions are unwieldy lectures on particle physics, presumably the work of Penrose, and the adequately handled occasional action sequence. The basic premise: a thriving Mars colony finds itself marooned after Earth's economy collapses in the mid-21st century. Led by the philosopher Tom Jefferies, the citizens of the colony, rather than concentrating on survival, seem to devote their time to debating ethical and political theory at enormous length. Their discussions cover a wide range of controversial issues, from abortion to the imposition of mandatory therapy, from the legitimacy of the death penalty to the morality of terraforming. Such a narrative has some innate interest--More's Utopia and Bellamy's Looking Backwards are still read today, after all--but Aldiss, generally a masterful stylist, seems here to lack any sense of what the human voice really sounds like in debate. His language is clotted and artificial, his characters are scarcely human. Kim Stanley Robinson handled much of the same material with enormously greater dexterity in his Mars trilogy.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 323 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (April 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312254733
• ISBN-13: 978-0312254735
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,199,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars White Mars, or How Flawed Beings Build Utopia, May 22, 2001

By 

Ian B. Leary "Webstral" (Mill Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: White Mars (Hardcover)

The discussion of how to build a better society is central to this book, and it is good. Cut off from Earth by an economic disaster, several thousand Mars colonists are thrown back on their own resources to sustain themselves. The focus is almost exclusively on the Mars of the mind-what kind of society can be formed/should be formed in the isolation of the Martian frontier? The characters endlessly discuss what it means to be human under these conditions. What institutions are necessary, and which ones can be avoided? How are we to raise children? How are we to conduct ourselves in a larger society? How are we to cope with our variegated behaviors when freedom brings us into conflict with one another? These questions and more are raised and raised again.

I don't agree with many of the answers White Mars seems to provide, and so I was tempted to give the book three stars. For example, I don't agree that Mars should be set aside as a scientific preserve. However, I believe the most important thing is that the questions were asked and various opinions aired. White Mars is a valuable addition to the debate on Mars and on how human beings interact with our society.

The science is really beside the point, which also tempted me to give White Mars three stars. The discussion on physics and the quest for meaning at the sub-particle level is half-developed and never really tied into the main story. There's also the discovery of native life on Mars, which is more science fantasy than science fiction. The more mundane science of maintaining a community of several thousand in total isolation on Mars is completely ignored, which is also a disappointment. As an answer to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, White Mars falls so short in this department that I can't even say there was an effort at competition.

At its heart, however, White Mars is a discussion on values and humanity. All other factors aside, this discussion makes the book worth reading and pondering.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars white mars, April 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: White Mars (Hardcover)

In White Mars, the authors have written a nifty utopian tale for the technological age. Although the series of events on earth that leads to the eventual isolation of the martian colony struck me as highly improbable, I gave it little consideration as I was swept up in the real drama: The creation of a new and better society--a "mature culture" leaving behind the myths, preconceptions, and bigotries that plagues mid-twenty-first century earth. I liked to see them attack problems such as a lack of water, crime, a threatening over-population (curiously, artificial birth control is barely mentioned)with a kind of cooperative rationality. And,of course, the appearance of a singularly unique alien. Even though I'm particular when it comes to hard science fiction, I highly recommend this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best Aldiss novel for me, November 2, 2001

By 

A. G. Plumb "Greg Plumb" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: White Mars (Hardcover)

For this novel, in fact, I think 3 stars is a bit generous, although 2 would be too harsh. There are some interesting flashes, but too much of it is philosophising in a preachy sort of way, and when science fiction takes its stand with Chimborazo it seems almost out of place. Most of this novel seems to be set in a desert anywhere on the Earth - I had none of the real alien feel that Mars should give, as so well done by Philip K Dick and C S Lewis in radically different ways, even Ray Bradbury - and who can forget Samuel Delany's 'Triton' - these were real places to visit, really alien and challenging.

And then the people in 'White Mars' seem to be placed there in the ethnically acceptable mix just as they were in 'Star Trek' - a pretty old scenario in present times. I also wonder why so many utopian or alternative societies have to be built on deprived or degraded environments. Even imagined societies I admired immensely, such as Ursula LeGuin's anarchic society in 'The Dispossessed'. About the only way of avoiding the difficulties of evolving a society from where we are today, seems to be by setting it vastly in the future as in H G Wells's 'Time Machine' and W H Hudson's 'A Crystal Age.' To me, I would be much more impressed to have a new social order develop under my nose as I read about it, from the base of our current world and mix of societies.

I am also displeased in that an 'alien' influence seems to be required to 'help' people develop their social skills. Humankind may not be the ideal society we would dream of, but we have achieved enormously and I have confidence that we can keep pushing forward, even through the dark times, into a new and better world and by our own initiative.

In all, I was disappointed in this novel, partly because I have admired so much of Mr Aldiss's earlier work.