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Last week, China’s Zhurong rover successfully trundled onto the surface of Mars, and returned its first images of the red planet to Earth. It has become the third rover operating on Mars, joining NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance; hopefully next year they will be joined by a fourth, the European-Russian Rosalind Franklin.
Hopefully, anyway. The successful landing of Zhurong and Perseverance, and the runaway, years-long triumph of the Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity rovers, means we risk becoming a little blasé about these missions. They require a tremendous coincidence of expended treasure, technological mastery and simple luck. Temperamental scientific equipment is put through the hell of rocket launch and landing, and then called upon to function in exotic and unpredictable conditions, operated by remote controls with a minutes-long lag. But function they do – Opportunity was launched in 2003 and transmitted until 2018, when it was silenced by a dust storm. Perseverance w
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Earlier this year, I read a couple of books that made me want to plant a forest. So, that’s what I ended up doing.
The first book was Barkskins, by Annie Proulx, and the second was The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Barkskins is set in early New France and tells a story of several generations of foresters. Spanning the globe and exploring the cultural and economic relationship of humans with forests and trees, this is a story about forest industrialists, Indigenous peoples, and the loss of old-growth forests.
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Last year, about a month into the pandemic, I reached for something comforting: the 1992 science-fiction novel “Red Mars,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’d first read it as a teen-ager, and had reread it a handful of times by my early twenties. Along with its two sequels, “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars,” the novel follows the first settlers to reach the red planet. They establish cities, break away from Earth’s control, and transform the arid surface into a garden oasis, setting up a new society in the course of a couple hundred years. On the cover of my well-worn copy, Arthur C. Clarke declared it “the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.” In my youth, I considered it a record of what was to come.