Review: White Mars by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose
Oh dear, oh dear! It’s quite hard to make me stop reading a novel once I’ve started - I’m too curious to know how it finishes. This book made me bail out at page 71 (out of 323) and it was only an act of will that kept me going that far.
It’s my own fault really, the blurb does give fair warning:
How can we achieve a better world? A happier future? A new understanding of human life? This startling and authoritative book shows how such a society could be built. In so doing it produces a beautiful and grim new myth.
but wait, there’s more!
And while the utopian debate is in progress, the question of alien life enters in a dramatic way. Oh yes, size matters!
The novel throngs with characters. People are important. They must co-operate or perish. The mover and shaker is Tom Jefferies; on the austere world on which he and his company are exiled, he slowly creates his goal, the humanising of science, the improvement of human existance, the freeing of the mind from its dangerous past.
This is the first time I’ve seen a novel described as "authoratitive" and I don’t believe it merits that classification either. It does manage to be dry, slow moving and lacking in characters that have any real depth. Now, if this was a relic from the so-called "golden age" of science fiction we could perhaps forgive the book some of these flaws but it was published in 1999 and so the authors have no excuse whatsoever.
Instead of a compelling narrative we are treated to pages of description (of dubious merit) of the problems with previous human societies which makes even Vogon poetry seem appealing.
Definitely do not buy this book. I borrowed it free from my local library and I still feel cheated.
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white mars
On the other hand, if you are sick of dreary soap operas, where the author mimics high literature through laughable attempts at drama, then this is the books for you. Hardcore autistic sci-fi where there are no 'deep characters', no courtroom intrigues in one guise or another, no false claims for psychological merit through TV serial character interaction. Just quaint rambling. Heinleinish, Hubbardish. Way below Aldiss's 50's - 70's level, but completely palatable for the non-soap sci-fi buff.
White Mars by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose
I have been a long time, decades I mean, fan of Brian Aldiss, his brilliant imagination, and his excellent writing style. His books are far above the normal science fiction novel. Thus, when I downloaded White Mars onto my Nook, I expected to be entertained, especially since I had not read any of his novels since the 70s, nor any SciFi novel, for that matter, in over 40 years. Boy! Was I wrong! If these two authors intended to make a philosophical, sociological statement, they could have done so in many, many fewer words and without pretending to have a novel here.
I find it difficult to explain why White Mars was written, except as an experiment. But I do know the experiment failed dismally. I finished the novel by reading it on my Nook during waiting periods, like doctor's appointments, et cetera, in a little less than two years. And I read it, primarily, like one watching a train wreck; or perhaps I thought that the Aldiss genius might eventually break out an prove my initial assumptions in error. However, that wasn't the case. The ending, which proved to be nothing more than a summary of what never was, an extremely shortened version of something that probably should have been written out as action fiction. Actually, I think the authors were bored with the "plot" and surmised that this was a quick out, hoping, like the Emperor's New Clothes, that the more sophisticated reader could be deluded.
Imagine a novel with no plot, no direction, no action; then you have the guts of White Mars. This is a book that absolutely goes nowhere and tells nothing beyond a few "old folk's" twisted fanciful remarks about unmarried sex.
The only ongoing operation that can be reckoned to be "action" is, in itself, a parody of how the novel moves: it turns out that there is life of Mars, in the form a volcano that is discovered to be moving a few inches a year across the thousands of miles of Martian desert. This is an analogy of the way the novel moves. And when the gigantic, living creature finally reaches the civilization of man, like the climax of the novel, it extends a stalk like appendage, touches the containment globe of the city, like a slow kiss, recoils, and promptly deposits a small, light rock. Basically, it dropped a turd and so does White Mars.
I have read some bad novels in my time, but this one excels them all in that it has no reason to be called a novel. It is a collection of philosophical comments, some poorly contrived sex scenes between people we know have no reason to be doing something of that nature, summaries of things that should have been expanded, flashbacks of things that were only hinted at in the novel, and lastly, a brief convoluted history of the universe (by brief, I mean 2 pages), and, lastly, an extrapolation of where mankind could go if they could get help from the ephemeral universe.
Good writers; brilliant men; bad, bad, bad novel.
Thanks Charles!
Charles, thank you for posting that informative comment - I feel relived that I did not bail out early only to find the novel redeemed itself later. Like you I find it surprising that good writers could go so far wrong.
White Mars by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose
I'm happy that there are two people in the world who recognize "the Emperor's New Clothes."
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