Moving Mars

At this past weekend's chess tournament (High School Nationals), I finished reading a small paperback book that went to France and back with us, traded around but never getting to me. It would have been easier to read it in the bright sunlight of Nice, rather than in any of the public spaces of a hotel/convention center. Why are public spaces always so dimly lit?

Being inside under inadequate artificial light seemed appropriate for the topic of Moving Mars, by Greg Bear. It's set under Mars, much as Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is set under the moon's surface (and the families, called Binding Multiples, remind readers of Heinlein's line marriages). I thought the title was going to be metaphorical, you know, but it turns out that it's quite literal. To understand the science, you'd need to have a microchip implanted to work as an "enhancement" to your brain, but what there is seems plausible, seductively so.

Nothing struck me as totally new in the science or the fiction, but it all works well, especially the characterization and dialogue. You care about the main character, Casseia Majumdar, and you come to see the universe through her very Mars-centered eyes.

There are some very interesting snapshots of earth's future, like when Casseia travels to earth and visits Washington, DC where "the [cherry] trees blossomed once every month...tourists expected that" and "in the Potomac, water welled up in glistening hills and ripples and a line of caretaker manatees broke the surface, resting from pruning and tending the underwater fields."

The main genius of this novel is in the description of what the inventor of the device that can move Mars calls "frame shift." It's fascinating, and heartbreaking--the latter mostly when you raise your eyes from the page and realize you've been reading fiction.