Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface (2011 Edition)

  Introduction

  Dramatis Personae

  Chronology

  General Summary of the Story

  Genealogy

  Act I: The Origins of the War

  Scene i: The Capture of Chance

  Scene ii: Gaea and Garrison

  Scene iii: Ganesh, Charlie, Beatrice

  Scene iv: Sumikami

  Scene v: Tripitaka

  Act II: The Trial of Chance

  Scene i: The Gathering of the Prisoners

  Scene ii: The Fashioning of the Comet

  Scene iii: The Trial

  Scene iv: The Fall of Chance

  Scene v: The Death of the Comet

  Act III: The Mutiny of the Gladiators

  Scene i: Tripitaka and Garrison

  Scene ii: The Olympic War

  Scene iii: The Coming of Tripitaka to Mars

  Scene iv: The Colony

  Scene v: The Seductions of Garrison and Tripitaka

  Act IV: The Gardening of Mars

  Scene i: Wolf and Irene

  Scene ii: The Battle for the Codex

  Scene iii: The Fate of Tripitaka

  Scene iv: The Birth of the Sibyl

  Scene v: The Garden

  Act V: The Words of the Sibyl

  Scene i: The Sibyl’s Awakening

  Scene ii: Evolution and the City

  Scene iii: The Tree of Life

  Scene iv: The Passing of Gaea

  Scene v: The Roses

  Colophon

  Genesis

  An Epic Poem of the

  Terraforming of Mars

  by

  Frederick Turner

  Spokane Valley, Washington, USA

  www.iliumpress.com

  Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

  Copyright © 1988, 2011 by Frederick Turner. All rights reserved.

  This edition published by the Ilium Press. This book was originally published by Saybrook Publishing Company, 1988.

  Cover design: Kenyon Sharp

  Book design: John Lemon

  Genesis / an epic poem of the terraforming of Mars [by] Frederick Turner.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011946199

  ISBN 978-0-9833002-2-9 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-9833002-3-6 (ePub)

  1. Epic poetry, English. 2. Science fiction, American

  I. Turner, Frederick, 1943– . II. Title

  Printed in the United States of America by the Ilium Press, Spokane Valley, Washington, U.S.A.

  All books from the Ilium Press are printed on high quality, acid-free, book-grade opaque paper stock that meets ANSI standards for archival quality paper. Binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

  Visit the Ilium Press online at www.iliumpress.com.

  Preface (2011 Edition)

  Some time in the Fall of 1984 I was running along the canal towpath that leads from Exeter, in England, down to the little pub, The Turf, on the estuary of the Exe. At that time I was a visiting professor at the University of Exeter. If it rained I would take shelter under the huge overpass that carried the M6 across the whole valley, and practice my karate katas.

  One day I was in a curiously receptive state, brought on perhaps partly by the runner’s high, partly by the odd sense of suspension I felt between my American and my British life and identity. But whatever the cause, I suddenly felt a line of poetry come into my head. Let me be clear: the line had no words, but it had a fierce, swift driving rhythm. It was iambic pentameter, the verse form of the great poets of the English language, but it was unlike any version of it I had ever known. It carried on over from line to line, as does the verse of Milton and Wordsworth, and Shakespeare in his later plays, but the syllables were quicker and tumbled over each other, light syllables often substituted for heavy ones. It was far more idiomatic and carefully syntactical than poetry usually is today. With that rhythm came an anxious urgent voice, that commanded me to listen, a voice of warning or admonition that also carried a deep sadness, as of one calling de profundis in hope that its hearers might avoid the inescapable trap in which the speaker was caught. A prophetic voice, one might say.

  Now I give little credence to claims of inspiration or special unearned privilege, and in any case have a realistic estimate of my own modest gifts as a poet and make no big claims about them. I hear voices, as they say, but so does everybody (though most, I think, don’t recognize them as such, and since we all dream and have gotten used to it, we have learned to discount such phenomena as one discounts floaters in the eye or humming in the ears). So the sense of radical surprise, of “where the heck did that come from?” was itself remarkable.

  Suddenly it was as if I was drinking out of a fire-hose of information. A dozen characters sprang into my mind, each with a full biography. Scenes and scenarios burgeoned, one behind another; plot lines with ironic twists multiplied, all tied together by a central action. A cluster of central metaphors and themes sprang into being. I ran home and in about two hours wrote out forty pages of densely-scribbled notes, diagrams, maps, plot points, scientific concepts, timetables, technological devices, historical events, new social customs, fragments of slang and colloquial language. It was effortless, no sense of work at all, almost a relief like stretching after an effort or sneezing.

  Certainly I had for decades been thinking about writing a science fiction epic poem, and had already written one, The New World. There was fertile soil perhaps, the ground was prepared for what had just happened. But to use one of the central metaphors of the poem, it needed a seed, a seed packed with information, and I am convinced that the seed was not of my making. The writing of the poem over the next year or so was almost like taking dictation; keeping to its strict form of five Acts divided into twenty-five distinct scenes, each of 400 lines, required little calculation (though my excellent editor, John Lemon, found a few scenes of 399 or 401 lines, which I have corrected here).

  Since that moment I have from time to time returned to the question of whether information could be communicated from the future into the past. Alain Aspect’s work in quantum theory and Richard Feynman’s time-reversible particle diagrams suggest that on the quantum level physics would permit, if not direct backward communication, at least a sort of timeless harmonic integration of information that we observe at different times. Tom Munneke, the ingenious pioneer in the creation of a national medical database, has hypothesized a device called a CASER, to deal with the time-paradox that a message from the future might affect the past in such a way as to destroy the future that sent it—an interesting explanation in itself of why we cannot remember the future. A laser bounces light between mirrors, interacting with itself until it becomes coherent; a CASER would bounce the consequential tails of present events against the future that could send a retro-message to the past until the future becomes coherent with a past that is acquainted with the message, and present us safely with the message. In a hypothetical future history that I sketched in my book Natural Religion (Transaction Publishers, 2006), I explored the issue:

  At some point in this history our descendants…will, to the extent that it is possible, have perfected the art of controlled communication with the past. As I have pointed out, the observer has already been shown to have a weak time-reversed effect on quantum events; for many quantum physicists the direction of time is meaningless anyway, and for relativistic physicists the sequence of events in time is a phenomenon dependent on local reference frames. Perhaps the Bohm computer that constitutes the fundamental
level of the computational universe in our classification can be used to carry messages backwards in time.

  The apparent rarity, unobtrusiveness or unverifiability of events that could be attributed to messages from the future would seem to indicate that the technology of such communications is extremely expensive, dangerous, tricky to use, fuzzy in operation, radically ambiguous when easy, or all of these. The weakest and least verifiable communications could be so commonplace that we do not notice them as such—in this interpreta-tion they are just part of the continuous chatter that goes on in our heads. If retrotemporal communication is easy but dangerous—carrying the risk of wholesale destruction downtime, for instance, as some science fiction writers have imagined—the need for temporal policing would arise, a science fiction staple. My own preferred view is that the nature of the quantum computer itself would require a kind of Delphic vagueness in what could be transferred. After all, a quantum computer does not work with bits of information but with superpositions of contradictory informational states. Vague, airy, allusive, and symbolical messages might be commonplace, invitations from a variety of virtual futures—or in the language of chaos theory, suggestions of the shapes of various potential strange attractors; or in market terms, "vaporware" advertisements for a future product standard. A more sharply focused message might be possible, if really huge amounts of quantum information were sent, and in such a form as to generate unambiguity out of their own harmonics, as a good poem does at its deeper levels. But as I imagine it, the more focused and unambiguous the message, the greater the energy sacrifice in terms of matter, thermodynamic order, the potential of the quantum vacuum or the curvature of spacetime in the timeline that sends the message. Such a message would have to compete with any other timeline's differing interpretation of history and its active attempt to frustrate or muddy the messages of its rivals.

  …[I]f the trans-temporal connectivity of all moments in the universe is, as we have speculated, mediated by quantum harmonic coherence, it is subject to the same maddening ambiguity that bedevils programmers when they try to use the formidable powers of the quantum computer to do actual calculations. If one sent anything definite, it would ipso facto be part of the collapsed-information state of the matter world, would no longer have the superluminal properties of quantum information, and would not get through. The trick would have to be to send messages backwards in time that would be appropriately ambiguous, but which when combined with the definite context of an actual historical situation would produce a meaningful intervention—rather as the decoding keys of the Enigma cypher machine in the Second World War could turn apparently random sequences of letters into a meaningful transmission. …[T]o understand such messages requires a willingness to engage in a terrifying interpretative process: "He that has ears to hear, let him hear". We need rather special ears to hear with. …[W]ith such a message one would always be on the edge of losing one's footing and getting it quite wrong; there would be no assurances except the astonishing promise of faith, that if we go on allowing the story or metaphor to unfold itself in our lives, it will correct itself.

  Certainly the oddity of that first moment when the poem came to me—as a metrical poetic line with no words, that somehow gelled all the vague speculations and researches I had been involved in to date—meets these requirements for retrotemporal communication. That “gelling” felt very much like what the collapse of a wave function would feel like, if one could feel it. Looking back seventeen years at Genesis for the present edition the impression of having been slightly and beneficially—if disturbingly—tampered-with remains.

  The poem did end up being adopted as suggested reading by the NASA people at Houston and the Ames Space Center in California, and I served as a consultant for NASA for a few years. I met Carl Sagan and Chris McKay (a leading NASA space futures expert) at a fascinating exobiology conference at Ames. I became a member of “The Martians,” a group of four including Robert Zubrin, a brilliant space engineer, Robert Haynes, then president of the Canadian Academy of Science, and Martyn J. Fogg, president of the British Interplanetary Society. I got letters from Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the communications satellite. An essay of mine on terraforming sparked a debate in the environmental restoration community that is recorded in Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes, edited by A. Dwight Baldwin, Judith de Luce, and Carl Pletsch, from the University of Minnesota Press. Kim Stanley Robinson cited me in his grand series of novels about terraforming Mars. Whether these repercussions will have helped our planet avoid the future of the hypothetical poet who spoke to me, or, like Oedipus’ attempts to avoid his fate, made that future more likely, is not clear. But the poem is definitely a thread in our historical consciousness, and I hope this edition fulfills that anxious and generous poet’s intentions.

  Frederick Turner

  September, 2011

  Introduction

  The Author and Provenance of the Poem

  The poet of Genesis will not be born until over a hundred years have passed. I do not know his name. He communicated the poem to me in a way that is impossible to explain; I have transcribed it as exactly as I could. Doubtless many twenty-first and twenty-second century concepts have been rendered by me in a garbled or metaphorical way, or perhaps the poet himself, like Milton’s angel Raphael when he instructs Adam, invented twentieth-century equivalents for them, using his historical imagination. I do not even know whether he is aware of having passed the poem over to a twentieth-century redactor and editor; the ending of the poem suggests that he guesses at this possibility. Perhaps indeed some of its archaisms result from his inexact grasp of twentieth-century idioms and ideas, though it is clear that he is ambitious to transcend local temporal variants and speak to the great epic tradition that stretches from Gilgamesh into the distant future. He has deliberately appropriated, for instance, the epic invocation at the beginning, the epic structure, and the epic simile, transformed by technological magic into a kind of blueprint. Nevertheless it is likely that my own cultural, psychological, and esthetic biases have entered into the poem.

  For instance, the defense of science fiction in Act II scene i may derive some of its passion from my own experience of the shortsightedness of the literary establishment with regard to this form of writing, a shortsightedness encountered by the novel itself in its first hundred years of existence in modem Europe. In our sense of science fiction there is no reason why the Genesis poet should praise the form, since the events he describes were for him plain fact and predate him by more than a century. However, I have kept the passage because I believe that, by the time the poet was writing, the term science fiction had come to mean any narrative that rose above popular psychology and that addressed itself to serious philosophical themes; and in particular any narrative that dealt with the matter of Mars.

  The Genesis poet is by the standards of the present a rather peculiar literary personality. He evidently has little respect for the romantic and modernist conception of the artist as charismatic rebel against ordinary morality, as genius, as the true hero of all literature. He goes to some lengths to demonstrate his own rather uncharismatic and unheroic circumstances and nature, his arthritis, the genteel poverty of himself and his friends, the very comfortable nature of the oppression under which they work; and he refuses to give his name. Unlike Wordsworth’s Prelude and Eliot’s Waste Land, his poem pays little attention to the poet and insists on the greater importance of its protagonists; he is almost as self-effacing as Virgil, certainly more so than Dante and Milton. Even Homer gives us grand portraits of blind bards.

  Yet at the same time his poetic ambitions are very great. He has attempted a work intended be one of the foundation stones of an entire planetary civilization, and has squarely taken on a genre demanding the highest artistic credentials. Credentials, however, seem to mean little to him. Evidently he believes that the life and spirit of the world as expressed in artistic culture have an agenda of their own, and that certain works of art
are produced by it in due time, choosing the most convenient mouthpiece that the age provides, and not perhaps overly particular about how perfect that expression is, so its prophetic vision is added to the common stock. Once the vision has appeared it can always be refined by artists of a more agile or painstaking talent. Thus originality is not very important to him; he leaves that to his protagonists and his muses, and draws on whatever artistic and philosophical material he needs to say what he feels needs saying.

  Beside translating the poem in the most sympathetic and exact fashion I could manage, I have provided an apparatus, not very scholarly, including the scientific and literary notes below, a list of characters, a time chart (as best I can estimate the likely dating) and a genealogy. In addition, I have provided a plot summary before each section of the poem to assist readers unfamiliar with the epic form or confused by scientific and technical references. However, most of the poem can, as many readers of the manuscript have testified, be read almost with the ease of a novel.

  A Note on the Science of Genesis

  The biological metamorphosis of the planet Mars into one habitable by human beings, which the Genesis poet describes and which may strike some today as improbable, now appears increasingly feasible. Several bodies of scientists are presently investigating various aspects of the problem, for instance the Institute of Ecotechnics in London, Space Biospheres Ventures, the University of Arizona’s Environmental Research Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Geophysical Union, and NASA. The ecological successes of such institutions as the Wisconsin Arboretum, which has recreated a virtually authentic prairie on degraded farmland, has encouraged efforts all over the world not just to protect but to create complex living ecosystems. As I write, construction has begun on a sealed, self-sustaining five million cubic foot environment in Arizona called Biosphere II; and of course architects like Paolo Soleri have long dreamed of such independent worlds.