I Read Books: Moving Mars
Greg Bear’s award winning science fiction thriller. Although there is a nod towards the “movement” being political, the title does, of course, literally spoil the resolution.
Future Mars is politically divided, something that Earth and the Moon (the larger economic powers in the inner system Triple) find uncomfortable. Our heroine Casseia Majumdar finds herself thrown out of Mars University because of suspected anti-statism; radicalised she joins a protest as the nascent unification process falls apart.
Becoming apprenticed to politics she travels to a rapidly self-conforming Earth that is gearing up for the Big Push – interstellar travel. There, for some reason, the Earth powers now seem to be trying to prevent Martian unification. It might be related to Majumdar’s former lover Charles Franklin, a brilliant physicist, and his work on descriptor theory.
Bear’s Mars is a little weird, more in the big strokes than in the daily life – people get married, go to university, find jobs etc, though there’s a certain twist to all of these. The really alien planet is Earth. The big political ideas – transforming from a family-clan network of Binding Multiples to a Federal Republic of Mars – is not as bold as might be hoped, even for a novel from the 90s. This is made up for by making the big science ideas, the Martian life, the quantum logic thinkers and especially the tweaks to reality, extremely cool and weird and even creepy at times.
Read This: For one of the best Mars novels from the 90s Mars novel burst
Don’t Read This: If you want the imagination of the politics and relationships to match that of the science
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