True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  Instead, you might say, Kipling wrote the Jungle Books in the spirit of that folk tale about the farmer returning from market who takes shelter from a storm in an abandoned barn. There, a hundred cats are slinking shadowy to and fro along the rafters, murmuring to each other over and over again, ‘If you see Simble, tell him Samble is dead.’ ‘Whatever is the matter, my dear?’ asks the farmer’s wife when he returns, shaken. But no sooner has his explanation reached the words ‘Tell Simble that Samble is dead’ when the old familiar farmhouse tabby leaps up from his place by the fire. ‘Then I’m the king of the cats!’ he cries, and leaps up the chimney, never to be seen again. Cats have kings, a boychild can become a wild wolf, the jungle hides a whole unsuspected mesh of secret lives. While Kipling could not doubt that in the end the wildest find a proper place in the great world’s hierarchy, he chooses to look instead at the wild freedom of the search for it, at liberation from the familiar hearth. And worlds within worlds open.

  (1993)

  ROBINSON’S MARS

  Hidden among the many juggled, intermitting aims of Kim Stanley Robinson’s colour-coded Mars trilogy,32 I think there is a secret ambition, to exhaust the topography of Mars, to describe (with meticulous justification) every single one of the planet’s landscapes. He pays out his determination like a planet-girdling rope through the long journeys that figure over and over in the books’ plot. He has, in spades, the necessary land-sense, the feeling for the particular quiddities of rock and desert. He turns his flat starting-data on craters and canyons into writing of such sensuous exactitude that ever after, anyone who reads these books is likely to think of his Mars as the real place, and NASA photographs as sadly inadequate snapshots of it. Beauty abounds. Red Mars gives us the waved black dunes and stepped terrain of the North Pole, the sublime volcanic heave of the Tharsis Bulge (which rears out of the atmosphere), the brittle regolith walls of Valles Marineris; Green Mars continues the unobtrusive drive for completeness with tours of the wind-blasted chaos around the southern pole, the serrated Hellespontus peaks bordering the Hellas basin, the western escarpments of Olympus Mons. As the series goes on, of course, the changes to the face of the planet wreaked by Robinson’s own terraformers threaten to make the task never-ending. New greens and whites creep onto his original thesaurus-beating palette of red shades: scarlet, crimson, maroon, rust, plum, violet, mauve, cerise, indigo, dry-blood brown, ochre, sienna, cinnamon. ‘Persian carpet shreds’ of vegetation grow at the foot of new glaciers, the Hellas basin refills with a warm blue sea, though both square nicely with Robinson’s fundamental sense of the planet as Mediterranean or Levantine, put through a slight Californian filter; a feel which rubs off on his Martian cities, named Odessa or Nicosia or Cairo, nanotechnologically efficient yet also the kind of clove-scented places where coffee cups empty slowly while the world goes by.

  But there’s one region he cannot visit. In a riddle whose answer is ‘chess’, wrote Jorge Luis Borges, what is the one word you must not use? The word ‘chess’. The particular plain of volcanic rubble christened ‘Utopia’ by astronomers goes artfully unmentioned here, except when the characters quietly crack open ‘a bottle of Utopian zinfandel’. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars comes closer than most new worlds in science fiction to the dream of a just no-place. Only in its premises, to be sure: in a firm belief that a ‘net gain’ is possible from history, that human virtues exist which contest the dismal, downward entropic spiral of things as they usually turn out. Murder, disaster and common-or-garden unhappiness are not excluded. By the end of the first volume of the trilogy, the quarrelsome ‘First Hundred’ colonists on the planet have already seen their visions busted, and Realpolitik seemingly triumphant. The ‘blank red slate’ that Mars appeared to be to one character has been scribbled over with the usual messages of power and profit; this new beginning has not proved, as the same woman half-hoped it might, ‘the golden one at last’.

  But still the hope animates the series that people will be remade in the unprecedented act of conjuring up a biosphere from scratch. Delicate desert Mars, arid, chilled to minus 50 degrees centigrade, thinly veiled in poisonous carbon dioxide, challenges its shapers to live up to their own powers. Robinson assumes a sorcerer’s box of technologies which can do almost anything, if the task can only be framed. They amplify human wishes, throwing back inescapably loud the question of what, good or bad, people can manage to wish for, given their own ambiguous selves to work from: what laws, what ecology, what life, where there are as yet no rules, no ecosystem, no patterns of love and work. So the opportunity of Mars is double from the outset. For Kim Stanley Robinson, equally, to build a world (SF’s enormous routine possibility, usually frittered away on hyperbole and clumsy gigantism) without developing the hope implicit in so large a beginning would waste the scope of his planet-sized project. The chance at the good place is half his subject.

  Often, the worst of utopias is the way they curtail characterisation. Authors produce serenity-by-numbers, snipping and chopping until they arrive at the radically simplified species of human who can inhabit ideal terrain without spoiling it. That doesn’t happen here. The First Hundred, at the heart of Robinson’s cast, are preselected for utopia to the simple extent that all are clever, all scientifically adept, and all are by definition doing what they most want to do in coming to Mars. Within this initial uniformity (and there’s no doubt that universal vocational passion does help utopia on its way) wild heterogeneity reigns, a planned largesse of outlook. Robinson’s optimism has led him to take for a form not a tract, but something like a nineteenth-century novel of ideas, witty and earnest at the same time; a three-decker with generous room for debate and development. The question What is to be done? rings explicitly through it, but is enacted so diversely, and with such an appetite for character, that the people never become dully representative. It progresses by braiding viewpoints. We see the planet through an engineer’s delight in her tools; a psychiatrist’s heart-breaking nostalgia for Provence; a blinking lab-rat of a scientist’s clinical enthusiasm for the biggest lab a scientist could have; a geologist’s reverence for rock; a politician’s disenchanted sense of opportunity; a visionary’s passion for new beginnings; a would-be goddess’s worship of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower; a happy man’s talent for spreading happiness; a manic-depressive’s need for a great stage.

  The hopes aroused by Mars don’t compose into a utopian tableau. They vary individually, diverge individually, sometimes bitterly contradict each other. Red Mars was structured, marvellously, by one such tension, a rooted murderous antipathy which spreads to take in the whole contest between innocence and experience on the planet. This too might seem diagrammatic, were it not that the two men in question, John Boone and Frank Chalmers, are such large creations, not coarsely inflated by their Martian circumstances, but sized for tragedy from the outset: positively Greek, ample far in excess of Robinson’s tactical interest in undercutting the buoyancy of the first with the saturating rage of the second. (The very first voices we catch out of the future ether are theirs, a folksy political speech annotated by a sour internal monologue. ‘“On Mars we will come to care for each other more than ever before,” John said, which really meant, Chalmers thought, an alarming incidence of the kind of behaviour seen in rat overpopulation experiments.’) The blatant corn-fed good looks and glad-handing charm of Boone disclose the portrait of a genuinely good man deliberately mimicking the behaviour of a pasteboard American hero; Chalmers’ necessary awareness of every difficulty Boone laughs away masks a man gripped desperately tight inside, intractable to himself, and once he has contrived Boone’s death, so terrifyingly guilty that his own body becomes an automaton to him, to be guided through the world by a constant vigilance of will. It’s a sign, not of reductiveness, but of Robinson’s success at taking hold of something elemental here, that the pair can be remembered later as the happy man and the angry man, simple names for complex inventions. Their expansion to mythic stature comes a
bout through the processes of time and memory, in which – since no unequivocal voice of the author can be heard – the reader has a decisive role, judging, fitting together, assisting the composition of the picture. The same expansion marks other characters too, because of Robinson’s decision that some of the eyes that witnessed the start of Mars’s transformation should also see its completion. He invented a longevity treatment in Red Mars, with a rich psychological side-effect. By the time his people hit 110 or 120, they can barely remember the years from their 40s to their 90s; history is spiced with amnesia, and the reader frequently knows more of their past than they do. The reader becomes a repository of lost time for these ancients, whose lives have expanded to the scale of the novel, but no longer contain themselves. Time makes giants of them with the reader’s collaboration.

  Even so, it looked at the end of Red Mars (500 large-format, closely printed pages) as if the First Hundred were on their way out of the centre of the narrative. The survivors were last seen beetling wearily away into hiding up the Martian canyons, once more isolated in the wilderness, amid a sort of mineral Götterdämmerung, the landscape itself going to wrack as frozen water erupted from deep aquifers onto the surface, tearing a tumbled, yellow-white path. A generation shift seemed in prospect: time for the spindly young Mars-born men and women to step forward from the background, onto a cleared canvas. In fact Green Mars shows great continuity, holding close to the original narrators, and even to the original sequence of events, for Red Mars has set a pattern of story. Middles are difficult things. Robinson exercises his determination to make each panel of his triptych a fully shaped novel rather than a mere instalment, not by the separate development of a new plot equal in force to Red Mars’s, but in a technique of mirroring that he has used before in his trio of Californian futures, the Orange County trilogy. There, a utopia, an extrapolation from the smoggy present and a Mark Twain-like post-holocaust novel shared a common story of youthful confusion, right down to parallel scenes and common characters, shuffling difference and sameness. Now Green Mars parallels Red Mars, from the mutation of deliberate plans through time’s changes to the final dice-throw of a revolution, only in a new mood, more patient, more inward, more chastened. The grand sweep of terraforming continues, but a sense of cautious movement now prevails.

  No longer movers and shakers, his ancient protagonists emerge from the underground after twenty-odd years to slip back under assumed names into smaller roles: designing a single plant, for example, or rationing the water for a new sea. For the former head of the scientific effort, a blinkered cerebral gnome, pretending to be someone else becomes a tragi-comic education in human behaviour. ‘He had never danced in his life, so far as he could recall. But that was Sax Russell’s life. Surely Stephen Lindholm had danced a lot. So Sax began to hop gently up and down in time with the bass steel drum, wiggling his arms uncertainly at his sides . . . in a desperate simulation of debonair pleasure.’ Some of the best writing in the book comes in the melancholy reach of it devoted to the struggles of Maya Toitovna, the hawkish Russian grande dame of the piece, against the strange limbo of her unprecedented age: a wonderful appreciation, in the face of endless time and tormenting fragments of memory, of the fragile shield offered by ‘the ordinary days of an ordinary life’ in an apartment. Yet the caution of Green Mars prepares for things to go right at the second attempt, at least in some ambiguous form that tempers utopia with necessity. (An alliance grows with a slippery, seemingly friendly corporation called Praxis – theory into practice, indeed.) A sense is also building of the accelerating remoteness of what Robinson describes, however acclimatised to his Mars the reader has become. Unlike the First Hundred, born in the 1970s and 1980s, who therefore see with something like our sense of wonder, the Mars-born begin from altogether elsewhere. When, in Blue Mars, their moment finally comes, the break is conclusive. The Mars of the settlers’ seven-foot, polysexual, unwittingly aristocratic grandchildren is an admirable place, but maybe not somewhere we would be at home. Robinson, though, insists on negotiating the explanation that utopias, almost by definition, tend to avoid: how careful steps across the teetering fulcrum of the historical see-saw might get you there from here.

  Where Red Mars ends with a dreadful flight through ruins, and Blue Mars ends with a day out at the beach, the trilogy’s public business all done, Green Mars at the midpoint of the journey to utopia climaxes on a hopeful exodus. It’s a set-piece scene: thousands tramp away from a drowning city in filtered masks, like something out of an Eisenstein film. Yet – typically – Robinson pulls off this classic coup of large-scale writing without fanfare, without formality, without throat-clearing announcements of imminent grandeur. Somehow he furnishes epic scale and epic satisfactions without epic emphases. His language is always direct, like the best mountaineering or nature writing; and though never casual, unattached to literary etiquette except as a source of ideas. He exploits, in particular, the power of ingenuousness to lead one into mood without heavy cues or visibly elaborate artifice. As a result, maybe, his manner always comes across as slightly boyish; yet he uses it to work to an ideal of unobtrusive transparency. His range of sympathy is enormous, and mature. He observes from very close to: hence the unemphatic presence he secures for the reader at the core of a jealousy, in the midst of crowds, at the midpoint of a discursive train of technical thought, on the crest of a black Martian dune under a violet sky.

  At the same time he is fascinated by the absurd simplifications and distortions that occur when the same things are seen from outside, when they transmute into public possessions and produce meaning of a different kind. The events of Red Mars become the ‘red soap opera’ of TV reports, instant kingly legends spring up in John Boone’s footsteps, and furnish a sort of choral farewell to him on his death. Maya discovers she’s been made a character in an opera, ‘Meaning some villainous coloratura was down there on Earth, singing her thoughts.’ This outer crusting of rumour and glamour is the level on which bad science fiction operates all the time, continually flogging at heroic appearances, pumping the language uselessly for excitement, trapped in the cycle of diminishing returns. About the time Red Mars was published, Ben Bova’s Mars put a rival expedition on the planet. There were thrills galore. In his spacesuit – Bova reported – the first astronaut to step down from the pod ‘looked as he had been swallowed by a robot’. Robinson, by contrast, likes two-word sentences sometimes, plain fresh exclamations: ‘It’s funny!’ ‘It hurts!’ ‘It’s beautiful!’ They aren’t facile. They’re a sign of justified confidence in his powers: which can take on the intricate long haul of the task he has set himself without getting lost in histories or technologies, which can manage the incorporation of all this into imagined bodies thick with age and complicated memories, and then still find the moments of direct response. You assent. In fact you can only respond in kind. Robinson’s Mars? It’s good!

  (1994)

  THE AMAZING TERENCE

  A talking rat is fighting for his life against a terrier, inside a circle of excited men who whoop and roar and snarl. Another rat bungee-jumps down from the rafters to rescue him. In the instant of astonishment before both rats are whisked skyward, the human onlookers just have time to notice that the rescuer is wearing a tiny straw boater on his head. He lifts it. ‘Good evening!’ he squeaks.