Viral

When the alien becomes familiar, and the familiar becomes problematic, what is there left to accomplish? Both in Red Mars and Total Recall, this sense of Mars as some sort of finality for a single person or for society as a whole is rehashed - living again and again the mistakes as we build towards the future. The inclusion of technology, of plastic that forms to one's probing fingers, contributing to the energy that fuels a flawed civilization, doesn't so much juxtapose as help along the magnification of problems of race within an attempted-idealized society.

I guess this week, this is all I have to say - maybe because neither media outlet satisfied me, or maybe because my own answers to the questions posed by them are inadequate. It seems as though I am experiencing my own frustration over the fact that modern science fiction writers cannot form a functional future for our race. We must wonder now, is that indeed too much to ask? Is it so selfish to want to vacation on mars through our memories, or live in a plastic bubble, or shape a new society to our wants, our needs? It left me feeling a little empty, that the further we travel out, the more we revert inwards.

Why can't mars be alien? Because we, as a race, cannot leave society, cannot leave the comfort of culture, and structure, and preconceived notions on earth. They travel with us, because they gave birth to the need to travel in the first place. It's like a virus as much as it is like a seed.