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The New World on Mars - Robert Zubrin ****

This is long-time Mars enthusiast Robert Zubrin's paean to the red planet. It's fascinating in two ways. One is the detail of what it would be like to try to get to and live on Mars that Zubrin gives us... the other is as a psychological study of a particularly American mindset.

Underlying a lot of the practicalities side of the book is that fundamental limit of the space traveller, the rocket equation. Zubrin makes heave use of it to show just how much material (human or otherwise) SpaceX's Starship vehicle could get to Mars (or away from it). There is no doubt that there's a really important point here - how much commercial space vehicles, particularly those of SpaceX, have transformed the economics of spaceflight and the potential for sufficient numbers of people and volume of stuff to get to Mars and make settling vaguely feasible. He also draws an interesting contrast between resources and raw materials, pointing out that only the latter are theoretically limited in supply.

When those people do get there, we get onto the main part of the book, which is where the psychology aspect kicks in as a study of something between enthusiasm and self deception. Zubrin's model for the way he sees Mars developing is very much the history of the USA (without the need to deal with inconvenient indigenous people). To an extent you can see the truth of this. The words may be corny thanks to Star Trek, but space genuinely is the final frontier. Like many Americans, Zubrin yearns for that pioneering spirit and challenge the early settlers had. And that's fine. But the problem is that the parallels simply aren't as strong as they are made out here.

The most obvious one is in the hostility of the environment. It may be true that the first European settlers in North America had to start from scratch - but it was starting from scratch in a physical environment very similar to their own. On Mars minor matters of the difficulties of producing air, water, heat and surviving radiation (the latter is something Zubrin plays down rather more than seems realistic) make it a very different prospect. Of course Martian settlers will have a lot more technology to support them - but as Zubrin makes clear, anything high tech has to be imported from Earth, and that makes it extremely scarce and expensive.

The other big problem with the way Zubrin draws parallels is that he tends to compress all of American history across 400 years into a single package. As an example, he believes that Martian settlers will need to make money through innovation: accordingly he believes that Mars will be a hotbed of invention and development. But that wasn't the case with the Pilgrim Fathers. It's no accident that the Industrial Revolution originated in the UK, not the US. Initially, all the settlers' energy went into scratching a living and surviving, not being hugely inventive and productive. The same is likely to be true on Mars. And, of course, where historical innovation could be done in the kitchen, these days it requires chip fabrication and massive computing power rather than pioneer resourcefulness. 

The same problems apply to the way Zubrin envisages asteroid mining as an equivalent of the US gold rush. He imagines a healthy Martian economy profiting by providing goods to the 'asteroid miners' - yet the chances are that any asteroid mining would be done by unmanned vehicles. And much of the apparent logic of asteroid mining comes from the current scarcity of the likes of gold and platinum - which would no longer be scarce with just a single appropriate asteroid. It doesn't feel like a sustainable concept.

Like Zubrin, I suspect, I was brought up on a science fiction diet of people living on the Moon, Mars and Venus. Although not American, I enjoyed these frontier fantasies. But as is always the case, SF is not about predicting the future, but rather about putting people in situations that potentially could arise from scientific and technological developments and seeing how they react. Particularly when it comes to social structures on a future Martian colony, Zubrin seems strongly influenced by the novels of Robert Heinlein. While, for instance, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is very entertaining fiction, it doesn't feel like a good model for real life.

All in all, I'd recommend this book, but perhaps not always for the reasons the author had in mind.

One aside - it's so nice to get a paperback that's a proper Penguin in size and feel.

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