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Mark and Gerry's Sci-Fi Reviews Continued
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RAINBOW MARS by Larry Niven
Review by Mark
In Larry Niven's Rainbow Mars, the future is a lot like the present, only worse. The atmosphere has significantly increased its carbon dioxide content and humans have evolved to breathe the poor air. The world government is bureaucratic and feckless. The world leader is the Secretary General of the United Nations (a militiaman's nightmare)
"We've forgotten so much about the past that we can't separate legend from fact. We've wiped out most forms of life on Earth in the last 1500 years, and changed the composition of the air to the extent that we'd be afraid to change it back"
"The Secretary General was everybody's problem. A recessive gene inherited from his powerful, inbred family had left him with the intelligence of a six-year old child. Another kind of inheritence had made him overlord of the Earth and its colonies. His whim was law throughout the explored universe"
Against this backdrop, Larry Niven presents a novella and a series of short stories. Rainbow Mars is actually a 200 page short novel and unfortunately the worst part of the 300 page text.
The evolved humans have the benefit of a time machine which the human government agency uses for the amusement of the Secretary General. The Secretary General wants to build a zoo to contain extinct animals; the time travellers go back in time to satisfy his desire. The story Rainbow Mars has an absurd premise about going back in time to investigate life on Mars. Not only do the time travellers find life on Mars, but Mars teems with sentient and hostile life forms with high technology. Not only this, but Mars is dominated by the presence of a huge tree that has come from outer space and extends from the Martian surface to thousands of mile up. The story involves the time/space travellers inducing the tree to come to Earth. It is then that we find out that Mars' current desolation is due to the voracious appetite this tree has for natural resources. The rest of Rainbow Mars has to do with the characters trying to reverse the timeline and prevent the tree from ever discovering the resources on Earth.
The story titled Rainbow Mars is not very well written, I often couldn't tell which character was holding the dialogue, and a lot of the description and narrative was irrelevant to the story. Furthermore, the concept of Mars so full of life and the demon tree is ludicrous, and I nearly quit reading halfway through. As it turns out, that would have been a mistake. After Rainbow Mars there follows 6 short stories that are great. Well written, interesting characters, and humorous, they reminded me a lot of the Azimov's classic short stories in I, Robot. Like I, Robot, the short stories have continuity of main characters and there is a common subtext. In I, Robot the subtext is all about the vagaries of robot behavior, in the short stories after Rainbow Mars the subtext is about the time travel agency trying to accomodate the strange fetish the Secretary General has for extinct animals and ancient artifacts like antique automobiles.
Buy this book? No especially at the publisher's price of $25.00. Not if you have any real interest in Mars, space travel, time travel, or environmental collapse. You'ld be better of reading the Kim Stanley Robbinson trilogy Red, Green, and Blue Mars, Baxter's Manifold Time, Crichton's Timeline, or Robert Silverberg's book on environmental collapse I will review next titled Hot Sky at Midnight. If you are a patient person you can borrow it from your library and slog through Rainbow Mars to get to the following short stories and not feel cheated.
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