Mars trilogy (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Overview
KSR is one of my favorite authors. Mainly because of this (Mars trilogy) and The Years of Rice And Salt.
The Mars trilogy books: Red Mars; Green Mars; Blue Mars.
The topic is humans colonizing and terraforming Mars.
Very character-driven. You get started with a cast of characters and continue with them through the books and see how the world changes around them and how they change in relation to themselves and to the others.
There is plenty of social commentary, exploration of technology and ideas.
Has strong environmentalist themes -- makes you wonder, to what degree should we preserve the natural state of a world?
Another major topic is on longevity (lifespan extension). (See below: Roots of longevity interest)
Personal experience
Read these during my college years. I recall the feeling of being real happy to get to know the characters. A cozy, comfortable feeling.
I identified most with the characters Nirgal and Art.
- Nirgal -- my image of him in my mind is a person who runs around with many social groups and has many friends and is a devoted friend and is very curious about the world. I think about him sometimes when I think about a model for charisma and having positive social energy. Also he loves running and did trail running.
- Art -- for some reason the most distinct scene of him in mind is him helping out with organizing a convention. I think this (or maybe just other scenes/interactions) left in me the impression of him being kind of a neutral party who floats between many people and hears different perspectives and also is generally eager and ready to be helpful.
Roots of longevity interest
I read Red Mars from about[1] June through October of 2019[2].
And I have this Google Keep note which I made on July 22, 2019:
something to keep watch on
longevity / anti-aging efforts/research
So I'm pretty sure I made that note based on some of the content of Red Mars.
Furthermore, as I described in On Cooking - Veganism and Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet, this reddit post is what directly inspired me to start adopting a WFPB diet. Amazingly, I just checked my Chrome history ("History Trends Unlimited" extension) and I see that I accessed that page on August 3, 2020. My point here is that I recall at some point coming across my Google Keep note above (a while after making it -- i.e. a year) and then being inspired to look into what the current state of longevity research was. I think this then led me to the reddit post. (After looking a bit more into my Chrome history, I see I was already reading posts on the reddit longevity subreddit since around April 2020, but I think it probably wasn't until that August that I started thinking about the dietary aspect of it.) (Ok upon further inspection, I was already on the plantbaseddiet subreddit in April 2020, so maybe I had already seen the above linked reddit post earlier than August. But anyway, I'd still say it's linked to the interest in longevity and thus the Mars inspiration.)
Anyway, I'm kind of trying to say that the Mars trilogy probably had a pretty strong impact on me thinking about longevity stuff and thus turning to WFPB diet and soon after, veganism itself (really not sure if I would have gone strictly vegan if I hadn't first gotten pretty close via the health-minded approach of WFPB).
Environmental dilemma
(Branched off from thinking during The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin)#Ch 1-4): The dilemma: whether to leave natural land untouched (and the series poses this question about large swaths, or all of the land, not just small portions like national parks or such) or to allow human habitation and modification and extraction of resources. On the one hand, it seems obvious to want to preserve the natural beauty of a world, but also, there can be beauty in human culture as well (which may not be able to flourish without modifying the land). This then makes me think of Braiding Sweetgrass, which proposes that humanity can have positive relations with the natural world -- specifically the basis of this is on restorative ecology - fixing what we've done wrong. But in the Mars case, the question is about leaving a brand new world untouched or not.