Aldiss, Brian - White Mars

VIP免费

2024-12-08 0 0 1.2MB 208 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

WHITE MARS

Or, The Mind Set Free A 21st-Century Utopia

BRIAN W. ALDISS

in collaboration with

ROGER PENROSE

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

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... read more

Customer Reviews

Avg. Customer Review:

charcters, November 25, 2001

Reviewer

i need some information about the main charcters for a project please send me some

information please.

Not the best Aldiss novel for me, November 2, 2001

Reviewer

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.

White Mars, or How Flawed Beings Build Utopia, May 22, 2001

Reviewer

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.

white mars, April 15, 2000

Reviewer

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.

any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical

articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aldiss, Brian Wilson.

White Mars, or, The mind set free : a 21st century Utopia / Brian W. Aldiss in collaboration with Roger

Penrose.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-25473-3

1. Twenty-first century—Fiction. 2. Mars (Planet)—Fiction. 3. Utopias—Fiction. I. Title: Mind set free. II.

Penrose, Roger. III. Title.

PR6051.L3W47 2000

823'.914—dc21 99-462291

First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company First U.S. Edition: April 2000

10 987654321

Dedicated to the Warden and Fellows

Green College, Oxford

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

WHITEMARSOr,TheMindSetFreeA21st-CenturyUtopiaBRIANW.ALDISSincollaborationwithROGERPENROSEEditorialReviewsAmazon.comWhiteMarsis,asitstitleimplies,BrianAldiss'sconsideredreplytothenovelsRedMars,GreenMars,andBlueMars,inwhichKimStanleyRobinsonportrayedtheterraformingofourneighborplanetandthecreationofau...

展开>> 收起<<

Aldiss, Brian - White Mars.pdf

共208页,预览11页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Aldiss, Brian - White Mars

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: