Cureton, Daniel_MENG_2018

Title Cureton, Daniel_MENG_2018
Alternative Title Evolution as Utopia: Representative Human Identity in the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Creator Cureton, Daniel
Collection Name Master of English
Description The following Master of Arts in English examines, The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson, by understanding how humans interact with science, ecology, and humanity's evolutionary identity of the future.
Abstract Mars has a long history in speculative fiction. Since the early 20th century, science fiction writers imagined a world with aliens, civilizations, and a dying planet. The most famous of the early pieces is perhaps Princess of Mars (1917) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. After the NASA probe Mariner shocked the world with images and data-solidifying Mars as a dead, waterless planet-writers were forced to abandon these early images, turning towards exploration, exoplanet sciences, colonization, and terraforming. The contemporary Mars Race, as I have chosen to call it, has caused a shift in the expressions of Mars in Western Culture. Thanks to the exploration and scientific tests done by rovers such as Curiosity, the idea of seriously going to Mars has moved from an ethereal 'future projects' cloud to the 'We will be there by this date [insert hopeful date]'. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson, published between 1993-1996, is the seminal fictional work describing the colonization of the Red Planet. The trilogy sets the stage for a step by step process of terraforming the planet over a two-hundred-year period. Various archetypes and themes structure the story. Included are ontologies, histories, personal dialogues, and politics as varied as human society. My interest is to understand how Mars, as an open spatial frontier, can shape human identity and create utopia while allowing humans to use Mars as a space to reimagine Earth. Focusing on their place in the novels as structural keystones is necessary to understanding the interaction of humans with science, ecology, and their evolutionary identity of the future. Specifically, I examine how several characters act as stand in representative figures for humanity, the ongoing conversation about humanity's own evolution into the future while understanding its changing relationship with nature. Red Mars begins with the first above ground city on Mars. Being some forty years after the initial arrival, the novel sets up the initial dialogue and dynamics by a group of one hundred scientist known as the First Hundred who are sent to colonize the planet. The novel tracks the scientific changes in the terraforming process, but also weaves stories of human politics, love, and adventure in the shifting sands of Mars, leading up to the take over of the planet by the U.N and transnational corporations with the fleeing of the remaining scientists to the South Pole. Green Mars is a generation after Red Mars and is the dystopia after a failed revolution. The novel concerns itself with the attempts of the First Hundred to regain control of the terraforming project and take power back from the corporations who are infiltrating the society on Mars through a second revolution. The story greatly concerns itself with the move towards creating an egalitarian human-nature coexisting society in which the planet speaks as equal to its human occupants. Blue Mars opens as the restored utopia, demonstrating how hard-fought efforts for eco-Marxist government can work in a society. The novel moves into the realms of genetically engineered human evolution, inter-stellar space travel, and the final changes of the terraforming project as Mars becomes like the High Sierra of California.
Subject English literature--Research; Mars (Planet); Humanity; Human evolution; Fiction
Keywords Human identity; Life on Mars; Science; Ecology
Digital Publisher Stewart Library, Weber State University
Date 2018
Date Digital 2021
Medium Thesis
Type Text
Access Extent 821 KB; 65 page PDF
Language eng
Rights The author has granted Weber State University Archives a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce their theses, in whole or in part, in electronic or paper form and to make it available to the general public at no charge. The author retains all other rights.
Source University Archives Electronic Records; Master of Arts in English. Stewart Library, Weber State University
OCR Text Show
Format application/pdf
ARK ark:/87278/s64zj2by
Setname wsu_smt
ID 96851
Reference URL https://digital.weber.edu/ark:/87278/s64zj2by