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Author's Note
Dear Reader:
When I was researching my Mars novels in the early 1990s, I kept running across references to Antarctica. It was the part of Earth most like Mars, and scientists studying Mars often went to Antarctica to do research. I had read about the classic Antarctic explorers when I was young, and now, reading about it again, my interest was rekindled. And in the acknowledgments of one book, the author said "Thanks to the National Science Foundation for sending me down to Antarctic as part of its Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program."
That caught my eye. I made inquiries, and the administrators at NSF told me that the artists and writers they sent south had to be doing art or literature that was specifically about Antarctica. They would not, for instance, send me down there to do research for a book about Mars (I asked). So, I thought, I'm going to have to write a book about Antarctica.
I made a proposal; the people at Bantam were agreeable, and NSF selected me for their program in 1994. In October of 1995 I finished Blue Mars, and within two weeks was flying to New Zealand, to wait for an LC-130 Hercules flight to Ross Island, Antarctica.
In the months preceding my trip I had contacted various Antarctic scientists who had helped me with my Mars books, and they had generously invited me to visit them at their research sites around the continent. But when I got down to McMurdo, I found that all my plans were in the air. Some of my scientists had not made it down themselves, and the Antarctic weather made all scheduling completely unreliable. Only at the moment of a flight could you be sure it was really goingto happen. At first this was disorienting, even maddening. But when I became used to, I realized what it was: it was Freedom. I had no idea what I was going to be doing even three or four days in advance. Depending on weather, and other people's plans, I might be at the South Pole, I might be on top of Mt. Erebus, I might be in the Dry Valleys. But no way to tell in advance. It was completely unlike ordinary life in that regard.
So I relaxed, and had six weeks of unscheduled Freedom. I spent ten days in the Dry Valleys, helping glaciologists set weather stations on glaciers; I went to the South Pole, and partied with the crew there over a wild Thanksgiving. I helicoptered to the top of Mt. Erebus, and crawled inside a glacier with a mountaineer friend. I spent a glorious week with a team of geologists on Roberts Massif, a part of the Transantarctic Mountains that is like a rock island sticking out of the ice sea of the polar cap. I sat in a helicopter fighting winds to get back to McMurdo, and then sat in a hut at Cape Crozier when the winds proved too strong, eating emergency rations with a group of nematode scientists (wormherders) and trying to make radio coms with McMurdo. I got outrageously cold, and ate huge meals, and laughed a lot, and listened to a million stories.
And of course all the time I was thinking, what about my story? What story will I tell? I wanted Antarctica to be more than just an exotic backdrop for a story that could have happened anywhere. I wanted to do more than just retell the classic stories in updated form. I wanted to tell Antarctica's true story.
In this desire I found that science fiction was the perfect form for the subject. For one thing, Antarctica is a science fiction place already; it takes high tech to live there at all, and it looks like another planet entirely. Then again, the next hundred years down there are clearly going to be more interesting even than the last hundred. You can see it coming, like a slow motion train wreck: there are people who want to make Antarctica a wilderness "World Park," left untouched by humanity; while at the same time there are poor southern countries, struggling with debt and over-population, looking at the estimated 50 billion barrels of oil that lie under the ice down there, and thinking there is no good reason not to extract it.
So the outlines of my story were clear. If some southern governments went to Antarctica in search of oil, and some radical environmentalists tried to stop them by means of non-lethal sabotage, and even the slightest thing went wrong with that sabotage, then people would be in deadly trouble immediately.
But I also wanted to retell the old stories of the classic era of exploration, because they were too good not to tell. How to do that in the context of my tale? Well, part of my story concerned a wilderness adventure expedition, caught in the crossfire between oil interests and environmentalists; and suddenly one member of that expedition was a Chinese feng shui guru, transmitting his adventures to a Chinese TV audience and therefore telling them all the old tales, in his own way. With this appearance of Ta Shu, all the pieces of my puzzle were in place. I could have him retell the old stories, and tell my new story of sabotage gone wrong, and within that framework I could also tell many of the stories of the people who work down there in Antarctica, keeping the whole show going. McMurdo is like a very small American town stripped to its essentials, with people from all walks of life doing their jobs down there to keep the town running; and the basic absurdity of running a town in such frigid hostile conditions was the source of daily hilarity for all. I did my best to weave all these people's stories into the novel as well, and just as the six weeks of travel down there was a joy, the year of work on the novel after I got back was a joy as well. The whole experience was tremendous fun, and I trust that that is a feeling that will touch the reader as well.
Sincerely,
Kim Stanley Robinson
