[PEN-L:6804] revolutionary ecological fiction

[Blair Sandler <blairs@xxxxxxx>]

Anyone else red I mean read the sci-fi trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, RED
MARS, GREEN MARS, BLUE MARS? I just finished the first book, RED MARS, and
it's very good: politics, economics, ecology, and revolution. Here are a
couple of brief passages folks might find interesting, all excerpted from
one large discussion occupying a few pages sequentially:

[DISCLAIMER: the following excerpts represent passages I thought of
interest, but not necessarily my opinions.]


"This usually led to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot
economics...."

"Anyway that's a large part of what economics is -- people arbitrarily, or
as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things.
And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they
have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics
serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of
fervent believers among the powerful."

"Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of
their real contribution to the human ecoloyg. Everyone can increase their
ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use
-- this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the
Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that
objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in
the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South."

"They were predators on the South.... And like all predators their
efficiency is low."

"It should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their
contribution to the system."

Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, "From each according to his capacities, to
each according to his needs!"

"No, that's not the same," Vlad said. "What it means is, You get what you
pay for!"

"But that's already true," John said. "How is this different from the
economics that already exists?"

They all scoffed at once.... "There's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal
values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational
executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole
categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an
ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for
making money only from the manipulation of money -- that is not only
wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in
such manipulation."

"But all of these are subjective judgement!" John exclaimed. "How have you
actually assigned caloric values to such a variety of activities?"

"Well, we have done our best to calculate what they contribute back to the
system in terms of well-being measured as a physical thing. What does the
activity equal in terms of food, or water, or shelter, or clothing, or
medical aid, or education, or free time?"


Later, there is a separate discussion with Sufis (on Mars: this is sci-fi,
remember  :)

"Whole cultures were built around the idea of the gift.... Whatever you
were given, you did not expect to keep, but gave it back again in your
turn, hopefully with interest. You worked to be able to give more than you
received. Now we think that this can be the basis for a reverent economics."


Separate passage:

"He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told
them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so
ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to
be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the
hands of their rulers, just like always."


And one more, in the heat of the insurrection:

"Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists,
communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words *rebel*
or *revolutionary*, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve.
No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists."


Okay, that's all. I'm interested in comments from others who have (or
haven't) read this work.

Blair




Blair Sandler
blairs@xxxxxxx