Reviews for Return To The Red Planet

The average rating for Return To The Red Planet based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-23 00:00:00 Timothy Perez This book is shelved both under "non-fiction" and under "sci fi" because it's a collection of essays about speculative but realistic plans for colonizing our own solar system. It's a really important book for sci fi fans because the genre of space opera has been redefined in the last 10 years to change the scope from the kind of literally galaxy-wide stories of yesteryear (epitomized by Foundation and its sequels) to similar stories that are set purely within our solar system. Think of Firefly (the TV series) which--despite a lack of scientific concerns--made the interesting decision to set the entire series in a single star system. All the planets, moons, and so forth that you see orbit just one star. That's the attitude that a lot of series have recently taken. One example is The Unincorporated Man and another is Leviathan Wakes. (These weren't the first of course, but it seems to be more of a trend recently.) Both of these imagine a densely populated solar system with major population centers on Earth, Mars, and additionally Jovian moons and key asteroids throughout the solar system. These books tend to fall under the "hard sf" tradition, meaning that they eschew far-fetched technology like faster-than-light travel (or communication). As a result, our own solar system becomes a much, much bigger place where it can easily takes weeks or months to travel from one major location to the next. As a general rule I like this trend because it rejects some of the tropes of earlier science fiction that have, over the years, become increasingly impossible to ignore. For example: the single biome planet might not have raised too many eyebrows in Star Wars or Star Trek the Next Generation, but by 1987 the short story "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" had pretty much buried this conceit. (And that was a big short story: it won the Hugo in 1988.) (If you're not sure what a "single biome planet" is, think about how in Star Wars Tatooine was the desert planet, Hoth was the ice planet, and Degobab was the swamp planet. Then contrast that with the fact that on planet Earth we have lots of deserts, tundras, and swamps without having to travel to outer space to find them.) So there's just a trend in sci-fi of sort of revisiting a lot of the assumptions that got a free pass in earlier generations and taking another crack, this time making them more "realistic". I don't think that there's any objective standard of realism that is better than others, but the roles this plays in science fiction is to keep familiar narrative forms fresh. Space opera (which is a sub-genre of sci-fi that involves big, political plots, lots of action, frequently lots of viewpoint characters, and always lots and lots of travel to exotic settings) seems new again when, instead of randomly named star systems, the characters are visiting Eros (a near-earth asteroid) or Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter). And--if you want to understand that fiction or write some of your own--then this is a great book. It's actually designed as a non-fiction approach to realistic colonization attempts. I'm not sure that will work, because some of the basics still seem unsurmountable to me. If we don't have a thriving colony in Antarctica or under the sea, why would we expect to have a prosperous colonial economy based on settlements on the Moon or Mars? The excitement of going there is higher, yes, but the costs of getting there and living there are also much higher and the real kicker is that, if you grow up at 1/3rd gravity, you're probably never going to be able to come home. Nowhere is that problem really addressed. So, as a manual for colonization, I'm unimpressed. But as a summary of scientifically rigorous ideas for how we might do it: now that is where this book shines. It's got 4 major sections, including technologies for getting out of Earth's gravitational well (like space elevators), plans for colonizing Mars, Venus, the outer Solar System and even the Oort Cloud, terraforming strategies, and finally a section on speculative methods of travel (none that are faster-than-light). So, for getting a solid grounding on hard sf set in the medium future in the Solar System, this book can't be beat. That's a pretty narrow target, however, and for that reason I give the book 3 stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-28 00:00:00 Kevin Olzak A lot of excellent material and a handful of not-so-hot selections. This anthology of articles, mostly by scientists and engineers many of whom also write science fiction, examines multiple possibilities in terms of both technologies and destinations. A few overlook some obvious holes in their reasoning, but most are thought-provoking and solidly put together, especially the work of Dr. Robert Zubrin, which is exhaustively provided with hard science down to the detailed equations and inputs. Other authors look at economic and social concerns, so it's a balanced overview, addressing possibilities throughout the solar system, in interstellar space, and ultimately around other stars. Makes me wish I was my grandson's age with at least a plausible possibility of seeing some of the places discussed.