One of my dearest ambitions is to live long enough to witness human landings on Mars and the first permanent settlement there. But, having lived through the false promise of the 1960s space race, I am not holding my breath. In the meantime I can at least imagine what the colonisation of Mars would be like by reading novels. Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose's "White Mars" is in the tradition of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, but imagines the founding of a utopian society on Mars as an example to Earth. The novel is well written, highly readable and a catalyst to the imagination. My only criticism is that towards the end it runs out of steam, as if the novelists had lost interest in their project once they had discussed all its philosophical ramifications. Key plots are tidied up in a series of short dismissive paragraphs which, whilst informing the reader what happened, are hugely unsatisfactory. This part of the story could have formed the basis of a much longer or even of a second novel. I must await my reading of Brian Aldiss' "Finches of Mars" to see if his new novel makes up for these shortcomings.
