Mars terraformation
After all, it has to start with this. The Red Planet in its present shape is very hostile to life, especially to larger mammals. Therefore, in 2040, humanity is making an effort to make this our desert Arrakis a place worthy of Fremen’s dreams of a cosmic oasis. Electrolytic towers are built there, which will enrich the environment with the elixir of life, oxygen and water. And then they’ll move out to let the time do its job.
It takes more than 200 years for the settlers to return to Mars. There is no need to build domed cities there, the air is thin, but you can breathe it. There are even parks around the historic towers. Plantations are being built in distant craters. There are no cemeteries on the planet and they will not be there for a long time – every gram of biological matter is valuable here, after all, millions of years of soil formation have to be made up. Apart from this aspect, everything here looks like a poor but thriving ecological utopia.
Meanwhile, Mars also has its own corporations and its politicians who and who want to shape the history of this place. And it is these games that we will follow in the first half of the story, set in the year 2305. The story gravitates towards sharp political fiction, but it focuses on two heroes, a new settler who came from Earth “in search of bread” and a local girl working for one of the visionaries planet development.
You will see what will come out of these great plans in 2340, which is about a generation later. This is no longer a Dune , but some Modified Coal or other Android Hunter , a technological dystopia saturated with advertising, where everyone is connected to the network, and training is carried out by uploading data to the implants for employees. The clear contrast between the two parts of Mars emphasizes a certain inertia of technological development, which Kosik absolutely condemns, albeit in a very fatalistic style.
Mars, the human planet
In Kosik’s novel, the society of the Red Planet is not much different from our contemporaries. Or maybe we have already gone a bit ahead – we have recycling, zero waste movements or Extinction Rebellion. We save water, turn off the electricity when it does not have to power anything. Martians in 2305 yes, they save and cycle, but they want more. They want to burn fuel like the old Earth, even if they don’t have the fossil fuels. They choose life, “fucking big TV … washing machine, car, compact and electric can opener.” Politicians and employers can only support them in this quest for prosperity that is so elegantly fueling the economy.
For how long will this economy be maintained by the almost non-existent Mars ecosystem? This is one of the novel’s main questions, and as an ecological dystopia, it would undoubtedly be an interesting, even if not particularly original, voice on the subject. In 2002, however, it certainly brought a breath of fresh air to our fantasy literature scene. But that’s not all. There is one more thread throughout the book, which at the end dominates it, to close the whole story with a theme closer to fantasy or conspiracy theories than science fiction.
I loved the first ecological and pioneering part of Mars . The second, highly technological, defended itself with the hero, although it lost its originality. But the ending disappointed me deeply. It was an easy way to go back to the New Age of the 1990s, and it made it impossible for me to take the whole thing anymore as an interesting, profound metaphor for our polluted everyday life. I very much regret that the sixth, revised edition did not contain an afterword that would comment on the author’s twenty years of creativity and the functioning of this novel on our market.
