Myths of Mars

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars we are given Mars as a symbol. Again and again the many names that Earth’s past civilizations have given the red planet are invoked; Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmarkhis. Mars means different things to different people, whether it be the preservation and pure pursuit of knowledge (the Reds), a new space to spread human life and shape the ecology (the Greens), or a brand new society, different from Earth ( Arkady’s Revolutionaries and Hiroko’s underground group). To the thousands of emigrants desperately trying to find a better life, Mars is a place of myth and opportunity, all of the First Hundred part of that all encompassing myth.

Myths play out through the novel from the very beginning. It is said that all myths begin with a grain of truth, and it is no different for the First Hundred and their successors. Hiroko, the reclusive Japanese ecological and closed systems scientist is the subject of much gossip and myth on the Hundred’s long trek to Mars. They say she has a cult-like following, and that she kept everyone’s sperm and eggs for herself. Maya is initially disgusted when she hears of these “myths”, seeing it as stereotyping of the sole asian woman on the ship into the “dragon lady”.

But of course, these myths about Hiroko turn out to be based in truth. Hiroko indeed is the leader of some kind of Mars cult, blending Japanese Shinto beliefs with a reverence for the Martian land. She also has been keeping reproductive material from all of the First Hundred, as John Boone found out when he found his son, born from him and Hiroko.

So what does that mean about the other myths surrounding the other First Hundred? Or about the ridiculous story of the Big Man and Paul Bunyan of Mars? Surely, if each myth has some truth, those are based in some kind of fact. Perhaps John Boone really was not the first man to Mars...

Michael Randolph