Literature and Politics
The 3rd annual conference of
The Australasian Association for Literature
University of Sydney
Monday July 6 -Tuesday July 7 2009
Martin, Jenn
Extending the horizons of humanity to new planets is a typical convention in Science Fiction, and as a trope is often likened to the expansion of Earthly frontiers. Californian author Kim Stanley Robinson employs the historical coordinates of the Frontier in his Martian narrative, both by presenting Mars as an empty planet and by rewriting familiar Western American landscapes upon its alien surface. However, Robinson goes on to reject these same coordinates, cautioning against the use of Frontier analogies when envisioning the human colonisation of new planets.
Though Mars might be considered a logical expansion of an Earthly Frontier, providing a new area of free land one day to be made available for development, Robinson’s Mars represents not simply freedom from the physical constraints of Earth but also the possibility of shattering ideological paradigms. The Mars trilogy ultimately expresses a fundamental wish to transcend Earth – a planet that has been outgrown by its inhabitants in the name of progress – and colonisation of a new planet thus provides utopian potential for an entirely new social order.
By exploring the question of the Frontier invited by Robinson’s Mars trilogy, this paper considers the ideological dimensions of Robinson’s fiction. What makes the Mars trilogy unique, as a work of Utopian Fiction, is that the ‘blank slate’ of Mars plays host to a critical problematic: that life on a new planet, though supposedly free from the constraints of Earth, must still deal with ideologies inherited from this original planet. Thus, I employ Robinson’s trilogy to explore a tension between the desire to 'forget history' and the realisation that the politics of any new planet or frontier will be inflected by inherited ideologies.
Jenn Martin is an Honours Student in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include Western American Science Fiction, Ecocriticism, Cultural Geography, and the intersection of utopian thinking with environmental discourse.
