1 The MARS TRILOGY both Kelly Link and Gavin Grant review in this article.
Mad Lit: Kelly Link and Gavin Grant
Issue #33
The multitasking literary duo compares notes on Kim Stanley Robinson's epic sci-fi trilogy
By Ling Ma
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Kelly Link and Gavin Grant met in a bookstore, an auspicious beginning for what’s turned out to be quite the literary coupling.
Fast-forward a decade or so, and you’ll find the married pair raising, from their Massachusetts home, their two big literary babies: the publishing house Small Beer Press and lit zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, both of which have been heralding readers toward speculative fiction (or New Weird, or whatever you want to call it these days).
Some of the best selections from the zine have now just been collected in the anthology The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
Just once, we changed our Mad Lit rules and asked them both to pick one title together, then fill out the questionnaire separately. Is it just us or are the responses cuter this time?
KELLY LINK
1. The book I choose is: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (I’m cheating a bit, because I’m picking three books).
2. In one sentence, this book is about: the colonization of Mars, immortality, political engagement, revolution, community, and memory.
3.The first time I read Red Mars and Green Mars, I was: rafting down the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon with my mother, sister, and brother. I had a waterproof ammo box, and every night when we made camp, I’d pull out the books. I’d picked them because they were mass-market paperbacks, and also because they were long. I didn’t want to run out of reading material halfway through the trip. It was 1992 and I’d graduated from college a year earlier, and then traveled around the world (I’d won a free trip).
I wasn’t smitten by the series, as much as I admired Robinson’s writing. In 1996, when Blue Mars was first published, Gavin and I were both working in a bookstore, and I read it on a beat-up sofa in his basement apartment. There were lots of clanky water pipes, and a previous tenant had stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. I loved Blue Mars so much that as soon as I finished it, I started over again with Red Mars and read the series twice through.
4. One free-associative personal memory I have of this book is: Gavin telling me that he’d just finished reading Blue Mars. I asked what he’d thought of the first two books, and he said with a very straight face that he only ever picked up the last book in a trilogy, because that was all you ever really needed to read. A few days later, he confessed he’d been pulling my leg.
5. You should read it while listening to: I see that someone has put out a CD of a recording of the winds of Mars plus the music of Bach. But if you were looking through my CDs, I might suggest Spanish Dances by Andrew Lawrence-King.
GAVIN GRANT
1. The book I choose is: the three my wife has cheated by picking, so I’ll go with it.
2. In one sentence, this book is about: the colonization of Mars, terraforming (changing other planets into Earth-like planets), politics (in the interesting sense), and water rights (something to keep your eye on in coming years).
3. The first time I read it, I was: I think I was living in Los Angeles and I suspect, since they came out in hardcover, that I read them from the library, and that I read the series (despite what I told Kelly) as they came out. Of course, this may be completely wrong. I may have waited until they all come out and read them then: they came out between 1992 and 1996 and I have the memory of a very holey thing.
4. One free-associative personal memory I have of this book is: reading the books and realizing that pretty soon finding sources of water was going to be a problem for cities. Water rights are so sexy!
I was canvassing for Greenpeace in Los Angeles and we’d get in a van, go to different parts of the city, knock on doors, and ask people to pony up to save the world. (It might yet happen!) Some parts of L.A. look like the desert but some (I’m looking at you, Irvine!) have these weird English-style lawns, which is just the oddest way to use water in a desert.
5. You should read it while listening to: either Gillian Welch’s cover of Radiohead’s “Black Star” or Tinariwen, a mind-melding band that plays old blues and world music that tears apart both those labels and brings them into the 21st century.
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