The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson changed my life. I read them all, one after the other in two weeks, when I was about twenty-one, and I became obsessed with Mars. Reading Robinson’s Mars Trilogy felt as if he had been to the future and knew exactly what was going to occur. He writes like he is prescient. He is a master science fiction author. I adore his work with a fervour matched only by that of J.G. Ballard and Iain M Banks. Robinson is a god of sci-fi.
I began to research Mars, then NASA started sending rovers to Mars! I was so fucken excited! It gave me hope — hope that humans would become an interplanetary species. It is our only way of survival.
65 million years ago, in the “KT Extinction Event”, an asteroid the size of Texas wiped out 75% of life on Earth. We cannot allow that to happen again.
SpaceX is currently preparing us for the colonisation of Mars. When this is made permanent, it will truly mean we are safer in our banal corner of an ordinary spiral galaxy, amongst trillions of other galaxies that may be far more interesting than The Milky Way. We still do not know just how interesting our own galaxy is. We currently are a Type 0 Civilisation. Until we become a Type I Civilisation, I doubt we are going to find out about the neighbours!
Now, to The Years of Rice and Salt. This is not science-fiction in its truest form. It is an alternate history, where Europeans are almost totally wiped out by The Plague, then overrun by Genghis Khan, who kills the rest of the Europeans, thus never allowing the white race its non-fictional historical dominance. I really recommend it. It’s so compelling, I finished it in two days. It’s that good. I’ve read it four times.
