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📚 Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

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18/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Excellent account of the settling and first steps of terraforming Mars, taking place over a few decades. Good hard sci-fi, with fascinating ideas on how it could be done and the effects, both micro (on the people involved and their immediate society) and macro (on the larger sociopolitical societies of Earth and Mars as it grows, and the physical effects on Mars). Fascinating from start to end; very much looking forward to continuing through the trilogy.

Also interesting reading this at a time when Mars is often in the news as an eventual destination once again, both realistic (NASA) and unrealistic (Musk), not long after reading and seeing Andy Weir’s The Martian and its film adaptation, just after finishing season four of For All Mankind, which is set on Mars, and while seeing Zach Weinersmith frequently post about his recent book looking at how Mars colonization is more difficult and dangerous than most people think. I wonder how much of what we know has changed since this part of the trilogy was written and how it might affect the underlying story if it were written today (I’m assuming that the Green Mars and Blue Mars sequels, being necessarily further extrapolated and less dependent on current real world science, would be less affected).

Me holding Red Mars

Year 50 Day 301

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Me driving our car home, taken from the passenger seat.

Day 301: I actually went to work today! And then was busy enough that I totally forgot to take a picture to prove that I was feeling well enough to leave the house, so my wife snapped this shot on our way home.

Year 50 Day 299

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Me sitting on our couch, with my MacBook running OBS, an iPad acting a second screen showing the final video output, and a DJ controller half-shoved behind pillows to one side.

Day 299: More work on prepping for DJing at Norwescon. Today I was working on making sure I had a good video output setup with OBS to send to the projection screen that will be behind me on stage during the dance. It’s a variation on what I use when streaming, and I really like the way it comes out.

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Year 50 Day 298

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Me on the couch in my Star Trek pajamas, with my MacBook Air open on my lap and the Music app running full screen and displaying a long list of tracks.

Day 298: I have more energy, but still have a head full of goo. Spending some of my downtime on prepping my music library for DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon.

Which involves more swearing at Apple than this long-time Apple user would like it to. I really wish they’d give the Music app the love and care it so desperately needs, particularly when it comes to people like me, who have a large library of owned music and care about metadata, and are not interested in cloud features. I just want an app that concentrates on organizing, managing, and playing what’s on my computer. iTunes in its early days did a great job of that, but it (or its current “Music” incarnation) hasn’t been solid in years.

Year 50 Day 296

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Me in my home office, with shelves full of books and trinkets behinnd me.

Day 296: Good news — improvements are being made! While not at 100%, I’m definitely feeling better, and actually got dressed today instead of spending another day in pajamas. (Though, really, sweats and a t-shirt aren’t that different from pajamas, but still!)

Bad news — it looks suspiciously like now it’s my wife’s turn to go through this. Which is not great, but better to go in series so that we can take turns taking care of each other, instead of both of us being sick at the same time and nobody having the energy to do anything for the other.

Year 50 Day 295

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Me with an annoyed expression.

Day 295: More of the same. I did rally enough to go to work (from home) today, and will for the rest of the week. I am extremely fortunate in that I have a job where I can easily take sick days when I need, and am also able to work from home on days when I’m not sick enough to take a sick day but still sick enough to not want to risk bringing this into the office. Too many people don’t have those options.

Year 50 Day 294

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Me looking bored on our living room couch.

Day 294: Day four of this head cold, and very over it…but it’s obviously not over me just yet. Watching two Marvel movies in one day maybe was a bit much inanity, but it was also right about the level of braining I could manage. Apparently other people at work have been hit with this bug, and it’s nothing more than a doozy of a cold, possibly exacerbated because it’s the first cold I’ve had in around four or five years at this point.

Year 50 Day 293

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Me standing in front of a bookcase full of science fiction books.

Day 293: Still sick; another day of doing as little as possible. Read a bunch of my current book (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars), finished season four of For All Mankind (very good), and watched The Last Voyage of the Demeter (not very good). At this point, unless a miracle occurs overnight, I think tomorrow’s going to be a sick day instead of heading back to work.