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No, this is not a political statement but a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars novels (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) … see? They go from Red to Blue. And since these were published from 1992- 1996, pre-date that whole silly red state/blue state thing, which is in itself wrong because red is the color of Marxism and what we currently consider red states are as far from Marxism as the color blue is, or was, until Tim Russert

thought he’d be cute in the 2000 election and switched the colors and for reasons I still don’t get, everyone has followed along. I mean, all you have to do is take a casual glance at Soviet flags

to see what red really stands for. But it may be appropriate here because Robinson’s Mars moves from a free and downright anarchic society in the first book to an unbelievably sophisticated (and unrealistic) communo-socialist-capitalist-barter system in the last one. Red to Blue. Get it?

The story itself is fairly straightforward: Earth selects 100 people (dubbed the First Hundred. Catchy) to colonize Mars and, from their arrival to about 200 years later, Mars is turned from an arid, dead, frozen hell into somewhat of a nice place, say Alaska in the summertime. Replete with polar bears. No seriously; Ann Clayborne, one of the highlighted characters who manages to survive through all three novels, gets chased by a polar bear while hiking the outback. There are about ten highlighted First Hundred characters, from John Boone, the first man on Mars, to Hiroko Ai, a ghostly highly influential non-presence from Green Mars on (but hold on, she’s actually everywhere. Even back on Earth), who bring the story along, from training in the Arctic to sailing on Martian seas. Then there are the children of the Hundred, decanted mostly from various in vitro tubes (with a few natural childbirth outliers here and there) and immigrants and later arrivals and spies and cops and paramilitaries all over the place who add their two cents but, mostly, it’s the story of these ten or so First Hundred, over a couple hundred years. Wait, what? Yeah, folks are living well past their shelf life, thanks to Martian science, which is science done on Mars, as opposed to done on Earth, which somehow becomes tainted and evil if it’s done on Earth, unlike the science on Mars, which is pure. Depending on your viewpoint.

And viewpoints are all over the place, from the ultra Reds to the ultra Greens, which also does not mean what is does today: the Reds are those who want to keep Mars untouched, therefore red, as opposed to the colonists who want to terraform into a more earth-like place, turning it green, so to speak. See? Those colors should be reversed, by today’s definitions. Which makes this somewhat of a confusing read, that is, if you try to apply today’s definitions to novels written 20 years ago. Which is revisionism. Which you should not do. Have to read a book in its context, not in modern parlance trying to impress someone with how sophisticated and with-it you are.

But I digress.

And digression is the watchword because, Holy, Hannah, does this trilogy range all over the place. Red Mars

begins at a festival 33 years after John Boone lands on Mars, and, after he is murdered during that festival, flashes all the way back to the Hundred’s selection and training and then launching of the first colony ship, the Ares (natch), and then landing and putting things together resulting in the first actual town, Underhill, and then we’re back to the point John is killed and then revolution. Which doesn’t go very well. See, it’s a little difficult to revolt against Earth when all they have to do is pop the bubble of your little town and let all that nice fresh oxygen out into the not so fresh Martian atmosphere. Which may be an incentive to green the place up so Earth can’t do that and then we are in Green Mars

with the terraforming going apace, except for the Reds who are willing to blow up and/or flood your town to keep Mars an arid, dead, frozen hell. Really? Really? And then Earth basically blows up and Mars becomes more of a liferaft than a science experiment and who do you think is going to win this argument? Ergo, Blue Mars.

Man.

It feels very much like we are taking the long way around, out past Jupiter and back, to get to Mars. This has much to do with Captain Digression, Mr Kim Stanley himself,

who simply cannot resist writing overlong descriptions of things that were better left on the editor’s floor, such as a painfully detailed exposition on lichens and fungus, which is far more about both topics than anyone actually wants to know, except the micro specialists involved. This is the problem when big-brained scientists write scifi, they are bent on (a) showing how much they know and (b) keeping their other big-brained colleagues from finding fault: “Aha, you said the lichen spyrogyra numnutsias grows at 25 Kelvin when in reality it can only grow at 26 Kelvin! So therefore you are an idiot and your book is invalid!” You know stuff like that, like everybody yelling at Ray Bradbury because he had the sunrise on Mars coming up at the wrong place. Or was it the sunset? Don’t know. Don’t care. It’s friggin’ fiction. Lighten up.

But Kim Stanley does not, giving us several more interludes, including a painfully detailed political convention reminiscent of the Simpson’s take on the Galactic Senate in The Phantom Menace.

Oy. Stop. And I almost did, but forged on because this was my second attempt to read this trilogy and by God, I was going to do it this time and not throw it across the room like I did 20 years earlier because of all. These. Sidebars!

And I’m so glad I did because, halfway through Blue Mars, you see the point. And the point is, we keep going. To Jupiter. To the Kuiper Belt. And past.

And that’s marvelous.

Stephen King has written one novel of pure horror genius, three novels of almost genius, and a whole lot of crap. The one genius novel?  Salem’s Lot, followed by The Stand, Dead Zone, and Misery. The Shining was a near miss. The rest you know.

Salem’s Lot remains the best modern adaptation of the vampire tale since Dracula because it’s one of those rare recent vampire stories that actually has a vampire, monster of legend and nightmare, a terrifying relentless demon that generates a bit of sympathy but is evil and implacable and cannot be saved. Not a sparkly vampire, not a postmodern or progressive or romantically misunderstood pseudo-pubescent angst-ridden boy band member or a sexy power grrl striking fangs against the patriarchy and please, find me a bucket so I can throw up now. Vampires are bad. And not in the cool ‘bad’ sense, they’re bad like the coronavirus. 

I read Salem’s Lot in one afternoon after pulling it off a friend’s bookshelf and refusing to go home until I finished it. I hadn’t read this good a horror novel since I Am Legend, another vampire-themed book, and this King guy, whoever he is, gets it. He knows horror, that overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of something out of kin, like a hate-filled murderous monster ten times stronger than you that shrugs off bullets like they were thrown marshmallows. Unless they’re dipped in holy water. The bullets I mean. Although I guess holy water-soaked marshmallows might give ‘im pause. 

Shortly after, I ran across The Stand, shortly after seeing Carrie, and I was convinced this King guy gets it, although…there was something a bit off about both. Carrie was a damn good movie, but a movie is a movie and a book a book and the twain rarely meet and I did not realize the differences until I read the book some years later. Gotta say, the movie was better although the book was pretty good, just not genius and it had those nascent elements of grossness that have come to dominate most of King’s other novels. The Stand was great, almost genius, but something’s a bit off. The ‘good vs evil” theme felt like a plot device employed by someone who didn’t really believe in good and evil, at least, the God and Satatn type. Still, damn good book.

Another damn good book: The Dead Zone. I do not know why this book and the subsequent movie don’t get more love. It was a fast paced thriller and yeah, okay, maybe the eeevil politician was a bit over the top, but that’s not the point: it’s King’s version of the Great Man theory, you know, that history will provide the right person at the right moment. Here, a flawed and fractured man willingly sacrifices himself to stop a nuclear apocalypse. Near genius. And c’mon, Christopher Walken? What’s not to like?

Then The Shining.

Everyone makes the mistake of conflating “Here’s Johnny!” with the novel, and no, book is book and movie is movie and Jack Nicholson is not in the book. You know who’s in the book? A five-year old kid with the sensibilities of a thirty year old and far too much maturity to be believable and has this gift, this shining, and I was stopped. Cold. No five-year-old is going to act like this. They’re just not. Yeah, I know, lots of people think this is one of King’s masterpieces but I think it is the beginning of his end. 

Because look what followed: Cujo; Pet Sematary; Thinner, and then that dreadful Peter Straub co-operation, The Talisman. The Tommyknockers. Dreamcatcher.

Oh good Lord.

It.

Oh. Good. Lord.

I saw It Part 1 and had the same reaction to the movie as I did from the first part of the novel: man, this is GOOD! King is back!! Then I read the second part of the novel and…what. The. HELL?? This is why I haven’t seen It Part 2. Don’t want to have the same reaction.

Somewhere in all of this, I saw Misery and was quite impressed and so I read the book and was quite impressed and thought, finally, King’s back to writing again because Misery was pert near genius: horror without the supernatural, which is the best horror of all. Is King back?

Nah.

Misery is a glaring exception to the dreck that King churned out during this time period. Dreck. Yes, that’s what it is. Looks to me like King succumbed to his own success, turning into a book factory assured that everyone would buy anything he wrote because he is Stephen King and everything he writes must be good and must be horror and no, it’s not. Gross is not horror. Ick is not scary. It is revolting, and is much easier to write than actual pulse pounding horror. The looks and smells of a corpse takes about a paragraph to describe, three or four paragraphs if you’re getting paid by the word. Describing the evil spirit or beast animating that corpse takes a bit more effort. And when you’ve got deadlines and lunches and meetings in New York, then you just phone it in.

This is what happens when a writer forgets his calling and follows Mammon, believing money is the sign of ability and that everything your publicist tells you must be true. You become self-defining, you decide what is good, not readers. Screw the readers. I’m Stephen Freakin’ King!

I mourned the passing of Stephen King. The guy who wrote Salem’s Lot. The guy who once cared about horror.

And then I picked up the Gunslinger.

Now, I am not read up on the whole Dark Tower saga, what novel or novella was first or last and in what order which part of what story is supposed to go, but there’s another  movie out, surprise surprise, and I spotted this paperback Tor-lookin’ little novel with a comic book cover and the movie looks interesting so what the hell, picked it up.

And was impressed. Greatly.

The first part of the story made no sense and I was rolling my eyes so far back in my head because, oh my God, it’s Randall Flagg in another guise and then I got to that marvelous middle section with the falcon and said, my God, King is back.

Or, maybe, he never left. Is a voice crying in the wilderness. Hoping we’ll hear him.

This way, Steve, we’re over here.

Everyone knows the scifi grandmasters- Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein- but there’s another set, not so heralded- Moorcock, Wolfe, and Vance. Who? Oh, c’mon guys, you know: Michael Moorcock wrote The Dancers at the End of Time series (and a couple of Blue Oyster Cult songs); Gene Wolfe wrote the extraordinary Book of the New Sun novels, and Jack Vance wrote…Jack Vance.

It’s kinda hard to describe the guy. “All-over-the-place” Cervantes would just about sum him up. The Dragon Masters is stunning and probably the best thing he ever did, a hard scifi story that reads like fantasy and, okay, so Vance is like Heinlein, but then there’s “Cil,” a short story that’s magic and fantasy so he’s Poul Anderson and, well, no. He’s Jack Vance. Pretty much his own category and I’ve long admired him. It’s almost automatic reflex for me to pick up anything I spot of his. That’s how I got Araminta Station. 

There it was, cheesy cover and all, sitting on the shelf at Blue Plate Books and I had never heard of it but it was Jack Vance so, mine. And about ¼ of the way I am shaking my head ruefully and laughing out loud because…well, here’s an example: 

“Would you like to travel and visit other worlds?”

“I have not thought too much about it. I wonder why everyone asks me that question.”

“I’m sorry if I’m boring you,” said Glawen (page 262)

Seriously, who writes like that, I mean, since the early 1800s? Only genteel Victorian drawing room readers appreciate such conversations. Which is exactly the point here because Vance has created one of the most stolid post-Victorian Victorian societies in his Gaean Reach novels, of which Araminta Station is the first of a trilogy set in that far future, far flung locale.

The little snippet of conversation presented above is between our hero, Glawen, a resident of Araminta Station, and a Yip prostitute. Glawen has been sent “undercover” into Yipton by his uncle, a chief of Bureau B, to sniff out possible revolutionary inclinations by the Yips, a sort of weird peasant working class imported to the planet Cadwal to do the heavy lifting and now intent on making Deucas their own and what in the blue blazes am I talking about? I don’t know! You pretty much have to pick out the plot and backstory and culture and history from context, and it ain’t easy, primarily because Jack Vance insists on using a picaresque, stultified very old fashioned language in this novel. It’s not the first place and time he’s done so: “Cil” referenced above is a classic example, but if you’re not prepared for it, it’s off-putting. Think of Jack Vance as beer: an acquired taste but, once you like it, you really like it.

And I really like it. There are adventures galore in this novel as the intrepid Glawen gets himself into one pickle after another in his effort to acquire Agency status so he can stay on Cadwal or get booted off as excess baggage. There’s murder mysteries and cults and witches and kidnappings and heroes riding to the rescue and it’s like a Robert E Howard and Sax Rohmer story combined into a Lord Bulwer/Jules Verne hybrid. And that’s just the first book. I can imagine what the next two are like.

So if you get a chance, pick it up. But go easy. Beer ain’t for everybody.