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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2741 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A Princess of Mars

S.M.Stirling wrote IMO an amazing riff on the Barsoom books called "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" . For those who don't know Stirling, he's a 1776 (luv me liberty, luve me small government, luv me common law etc) Canadian, who is, also, at the same time a hardcore HBD/biodeterminist guy but keeps very quiet about it to not upset the Boomers who are most of his readership.

It takes place in an alternate timeline where someone (or something) terraformed Mars & Venus to support life and transplanted humans there. Cold war kind of fizzles out into a huge space race when it turns out both places are habitable and in fact inhabited. Venus is a jungle planet with primitive tribes, Mars is very cold and quite dry but its engineered ecology supports a slowly declining civilization despite its inhabitants being almost Ivy League material of 125 average IQ. Why Mars isn't in space and colonizing Earth is handwaved in the book with a "no uranium on Mars" claim.

It's amazing how much heresy you can pack into what looks like and is a fun adventure book and get away with it if you package it sa "fiction". There's even some obvious applause bait with mild subversiveness of the male human hero getting rescued by a princess etc. Meanwhile, it seems the reviewers completely avoided mentioning why "hero getting rescued by a princess" makes perfect sense in context. (my metaphorical sides are hurting)

One can also tell that Stirling is uneasy with things as they are for us, because somehow, Martian biology is precisely of the kind that liberals like him would like ours to be. Little in the way of sexual dimorphism, due to an average lifespan of ~250 years, childbirth and child-rearing doesn't hurt women's vocations or careers much.

Publishers Weekly called it "charming", and praised Stirling for "successfully creat[ing] a truly alien environment", but criticized his "inclusion of pirates with eye patches, heavily armored guards riding 'fat-tired, self-propelled unicycles' and other moments of near-parody."[3] Kirkus Reviews lauded Stirling's "magnificently wacky Martian biological machines" and "fully developed and carefully crafted social system", calling the book overall an "unexpectedly rich lode of creative ore", and judging it extremely favorably compared to Stirling's previous work.[4]

At the SF Site, Dave Truesdale "heartily recommend(ed)" the book, saying that he could not "think of a better [example]" of planetary romance.[5]

Meanwhile, within the book, it's made clear that Martian biotechnology works flawlessly and that Martians at their apogee routinely engineered themselves for various desirable character or physical traits. (E.g. the imperial bodyguard caste are almost as strong as earth humans and have psychology similar to that of special forces soldiers. Ultimately obedient to lawful, competent authority but never quit and independent of mind..

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