Airports

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

End of the world texts almost always feature the end of air travel. My friend loves airports and even goes early in order to enjoy the rushing to and fro, the greetings, and the patina of travel the exhausted people hobbling away from their flight always have. For my own part I am just as happy to get through the experience. It is fun to see the people, especially in Winnipeg where many of them are traveling north and therefore have interesting languages and accents. But the arbitrary security “random searches,” which nearly always pick me, and the pretentions of air travel in these days of wealth and accessible tickets is a bit much.

Today I am going east, into a storm which has blown off the Atlantic into the Maritimes. There I will greet my friends, visit my friend’s daughter now that she is in first year university and all grown up, and then go to the bush. I closed up the cabin in the late summer and came west to work, but now that I have three weeks and little to do with it but write, I am going back.

The cabin is in rural New Brunswick and quite a few kilometres from town. It is even nearly a kilometre from the dirt road, so I walk in and there enjoy the peace of no phone and internet that many can only dream of. The first part of that procedure is this rushing from airport to airport though and surrounded by Christmas musak and flat screen televisions. Nearly everyone around me is on a tablet or a phone, except for the old lady across from me sleeping and some Inuit in the floor relaxing. I wonder if they are looking forward to getting back home. I know I am. Home certainly is a relative term, for at the end of a summer I look forward to the socialization of the university again, and at the end of a term I am more than eager to be out of touch and away from the grasping hands of the internet’s neediness.

I plan to keep you abreast of bush life, although you will have to make do with my updating my blog once a week. When I come out of the bush, however, on my once a week jaunts to the grocer, I will make sure to tell you how life is in a simpler place.

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Forerunners

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

When I was a child my foster father Cecil used to tell stories of forerunners. These were stories in which a local person would see some image of the near future. For instance, old Tyler Roach who complained to his wife that someone was down at his well with a lantern at night was found dead by the well the next day. Somehow Tyler had glimpsed his own death, as if his failing heart sent his mind a message to be ready, a kind of supernatural get your affairs in order.

One of the forerunners that I often come back to was the story of Cecil’s father milking, and seeing a distant neighbour. This takes place some hundred years ago, when transport was limited to slow wagons in the summer and slightly faster sleighs in the winter. Cecil’s milking father, sitting on a three-legged stool cut from a single tree, looked up in time to see a man from the neighbouring village. It was time for the evening milking, so it was not a mere social visit. But rather, given the distance to the man’s home and country custom, he had obviously come by to put up his horses for the night. Cecil’s father said hello, exchanged a few pleasantries and then told him to stable his horses and that he would meet him inside.

This mundane exchange was to become peculiar when he inquired within the house and found that no one had driven into the yard, for the bells from the harness would have been heard. Upon investigation, there was no sleigh outside the barn and no one else’s horses within. The incident might have been dismissed as mere anecdote but a few days later word passed, as people went between the villages to deliver a cow or a baby, that the man who had visited had died at exactly that moment in his own village fifteen miles away. A true forerunner, he’d been seen to visit another village even while he was dying.

What is most evocative about these stories, perhaps, is the ambiguous way in which the message gets delivered from the amorphous future. Like ghouls in traditional ghost stories, who merely mutter cold and dark rather than commit themselves to a real description of the afterlife that the living might get some use out of, the forerunner instead suggests and implies. The missive from the great blankness that is our eventual demise is delivered by a rubber boot awkwardly placed, or three pitchforks falling at once into a perfect and symmetrical configuration.

The one warned scarcely knows what to make of the message enough to heed it, and their friends are left to make claims of meaning after the fact. Like operant conditioning, the cryptic messages work by occasionally being correct, and therefore engaging that part of the human mind that many millions of years ago looked for magic on the savannah when we first left the comfort of the forest. That part of our minds that wants dowsing and faith healing to be true, and that our friends and relatives, instead of composting gently into the earth from which they came, wander about with ambiguous intent, their purposes known only to themselves.

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What Do You Do for Fun?

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

One of my students asked me what I did with my time and he was at first aghast and then dismayed at my response. In the beginning I didn’t know he was asking about leisure time, so I described marking and course preparation. When that didn’t satisfy, I mentioned the projects I am currently engaged in, such as editing books and writing stories for another collection. Just recently I discovered, hanging near the edge of a sleepless night anther two book projects, and I think I will undertake to put together a guide on how to construct an effective university English essay as well as write a self-help book for how to live cheaply.

He then asked me if all I did was work, and that became more difficult to explain. I mentioned the time spent with friends, which in Winnipeg is typically at restaurants in order to stay out of the cold and have a place to meet. As well, in the summer, and even this winter, I have the cabin which brings me no end of joy and hard work and room for my larger projects, such as wind power and solar panel systems.

That is really only partially an answer, however. For what many people do not realize, and I am perhaps too serious about this, is that it is fun to pursue your passion. My friend suggested today that writing was a hobby for me. I think of it rather, I told her, as art—on the surface pointless and time-consuming, but altogether infuriating and delightful.

As well, I see this as a contribution that it is necessary to make to society. The great leaps forward, or sideways if you are not fond of the progress narrative, did not happen because we played video games or drank, as my student suggested. Human knowledge accumulated because we devoted what time we had to spare from the pursuit of food, clothing and shelter to the construction of the edifice that is culture. It is hard to imagine Isaac Newton standing on the shoulders of giants, if he could not find any giants at the library. Would he have resorted to the bar?

I do not view my carvings, my rather pathetic paintings, my cabin, and my boat design and execution to be mere frittering away the hours. I learned, I practiced a craft, and like the nervous twitching on the keyboard that this blog post represents, I made an attempt to join with the human community. Our art or passions, what we devote our energy to, are what define us, and although I didn’t want to say as much to the student on the bus, they allow a better definition than drinking in a bar.

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The Word

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

When I was young I thought a single word could change everything. As I grew older I thought I needed to instead depend on collections of words, and hoped that by their jostling Brownian randomness they would somehow settle into meaning. Later I learned that words could form coherent structures, that more important was the order of their appearance if I wanted the heavy lifting I was demanding of them to be performed.

For a time I was entranced by the forms, my rigidity demanding the exact placement of the slotted word. Almost at once the forms stretched, and as I learned more I realized the word was endlessly plastic and could be twisted to suit, deforming structure around it as if the word were somehow unreal, merely an arbitrary utterance cast adrift from intention and desire.

Some told me I should abandon the word entirely, and focus instead on what is known, the reliable physicality of the unworded world, an image in a mirror, or going even further back, the glorious chaos that was the wordless real of my youth.

Only now does it occur to me that I still rely on the single word, that I ask it to carry the burden of inevitable incoherence, Mother Pigcollecting resonance as it tumbles across the page, squirming for space, a piglet at a teat, shouldering aside others in the demand to be heard.

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The Body Out of Control

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

For some reason literary treatment of the body out of control is both evocative and frequently avoided. You can think of Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel which is touted as being such a great portrayal of a disintegrating mind, but one which loses the body in that equation. Where is the need to eat and eliminate? There is the cold, as much as that is possible in West Coast Canada, but the body is a reasonably coherent unit. An arguably better writing of illness, dementia, and aging, or how we may think of this affecting the integration of the body and the mind, is what Jonathan Swift does in Gulliver’s Travels.

His imagining of the rampaging body, the body that is a set of chaotic impulses and functions, caught in social settings and subject to social mores, is a very contemporary way of thinking of how our corporeal selves fit into our social sleeves. Gulliver is constantly caught being soaked in urine and feces, having to defecate and urinate, and generally suffering the humiliation of the outsize of miniscule body. He is too hairy for the Houyhnhnms, and too unalike a yahoo to be considered one of them, by the filthy beasts themselves. Gulliver absorbs this repulsion of self from his Houyhnhnm masters, and strives to fit it into his way of seeing himself. With the Laputans he realizes that turning your back on the body to valorize the mind is a kind of madness, which leads to bodily injury, social destruction, and even mental incoherence. As a six inch man in the Brobdingnagian kingdom, he suffers the shame of the undersize toy, and as a giant among Lilliputians he is derisive of the gullivers-travels-grangerpettiness of their desires. In one famous scene, he even urinates on the palace to put out a fire, an action he excuses by pointing to the lack of water to perform the service.

Gulliver is shackled to his body every bit as much as us, as we have daily visited upon us the humiliation of flatulence, phlegm, and other bodily inevitabilities. Until the singularity, until we, like the worms in recent studies are uploaded to avoid what Charles Stross calls meatspace, we are doomed to drag this meat sack with us, enduring its aches and nausea, and the physicality of its plaints.

This is merely one chapter of this ancient story, however. With the body also comes the limiting factor that gives us our meaning in the world. It connects us to our animal cousins just as eating connects us to our families and friends and the offerings of our planet. The body is the conduit to the world around us, the feel of the winter storm and smell of the incipient rain, the taste of seaweed scooped up from the beach, the blinding glare of the sun on the waves, and the low, bone shaking rumble of the avalanche. Without it, we would have to invent new ways of being and interacting. Those proponents of the silicon singularity, so far, have only suggested we duplicate a meat space environment in the virtual world, but if we are shaking off the dross of the meat, and the senses and limitations with it, then we must revision how we are going to fit into that world. There is no reason to join with the Harry Potter magic of the mind uploaded, an apparent material world at our bidding, if we do not re-imagine who we could be under the altered conditions. The inevitable downward spiral of the Stone Angel’s life need not be ours, but if we think of the mind as chained to a duplication of the natural, we are more than chained to the meat past. If Gulliver changes completely by moving across what he acknowledges to be an arbitrary border, we could at least do the same.

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The Hot and Cold of Aid

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

When I first went overseas with the volunteer organization Canadian Crossroads International (CCI)—which I wholeheartedly recommend—they put us through a highly questionable selection procedure. There are a few of these organizations that offer what people in the development field call aid tourism. Frequently aid is an excuse to get into the country and proselytize for many of these organizations are religious in orientation. Although I don’t know the percentage, I would guess they are made up more of Christians of various stripes than other faiths. Christians have a mandate, it seems, to ensure that their true god becomes everyone else’s true god, at nearly any price. After the boxing day tsunami such religious aid packages, where food was dangled over the heads of recalcitrant heathens by over-zealous Christian groups, was made illegal in Sri Lanka. The first law of its kind, it was legislative acknowledgement of what we suspected: that starving people to make them worship your god might be religious but is hardly Jesus-like.

More than a few of the non-proselytizing organizations, and there are many, would prefer to send privileged people from the west to enjoy the other country than to put that money to better use in the community. Thus, we have habitat for humanity teaching teenagers from the west how to build houses in a poor country where most people are capable of building their own home. The teenagers have a great trip, they get to bond with other teenagers from their own country, and in the process learn some useful skills. They have also, in their lights, earned bragging rights back home. The houses get built, although the price of shipping our overfed youth would have built more houses.

The organization I went overseas with had more in common with WUSC than the religious groups. CCI began as a group under the auspices of the United Church, but it threw off the spread the word message and instead began to focus on cross cultural understanding. With that in mind, they chose largely middle class university students, although some older people became involved, and shipped them to a set of countries where their skills, if they had any, could be of use. The main purpose was not condescension-flavoured helping, however, for they were more interested in what a young person from Canada might learn about the other culture and their own place in the global environment by observing the situation of others.

Their rationale about sending the overfed on expensive jaunts was slightly more tenable, although perhaps the outcome was the same. At least with CCI we stayed with a host family, learned some of the local language and culture, and mixed with the manihikicommunity. I went to the Cook Islands, where I was largely responsible for putting together my own placement, but others went to West Africa, South America, and Asia.

The selection procedure that enabled us to join the organisation was flawed by one of the organizers, however. The particular vicissitudes of the set of meetings that led to my selection procedure was due more to the local selection group than the organization in general. In fact, people at the the main organization were disturbed by the questionable practices by the local group and in the following year reviewed some of their practices.

I first heard of CCI through my friends who had gone. Nat had gone to Kenya and Lou to Botswana. They praised the experience and claimed it to be—cheesy as it sounds—life changing. They met amazing people and very much reformed their outlook on their place in the world. I liked this aspect of it, and having little money at the time, was even more attracted by the fact that someone else was paying for my plane ticket and a stipend for living expenses.

I applied, and once I was accepted I was informed that there would be an information session in the region, in which the regional representatives would get to meet all the volunteers and tell them some of how the program worked. Like the others, I was suspicious that the weekend of fun and games, such as icebreakers and other social games, were part of the judging process. The invigilators had chosen exercises in which we were responsible for another person in a blindfold game, and played the part of someone in a developing nation in a feast or famine exercise. They watched how we performed, and although they didn’t overtly take notes, we wondered at the purpose of their attention.

I blindfolded Kelly and led her around the grounds of the retreat on the Nova Scotia coast, encouraging her to put her hands on dead jellyfish and in other ways having fun. In the feast or famine exercise, I was awarded by chance the opportunity to set at the table of the rich, with all the food I wanted, while others sat on the floor and ate with their hands out of one pitifully inadequate bowl of rice. We were to feel how those in developing nations felt, although with the people at my table bragging about how much food they had in front of those on the floor, I was uncomfortable. I had argued that I belonged on the floor when I was chosen to represent rich people, and finally, becoming annoyed at the behaviour of my rich peers, I began to throw cookies to those who requested it from amongst the world’s poor. This was not received well, and I was told I was ruining the exercise. I told them I was an aid truck, arriving in a village and dispensing foreign aid. I was thrown out of the rich table, so, mining it for transportable snacks, I joined my compadres on the floor where I was better appreciated, and I felt, better understood.

Partway through the weekend, Sandy told us that we were no longer being judged. Everyone present was going overseas and we should just enjoy ourselves. Perhaps she thought we were being too wooden, or that she was not getting to the heart of each person’s unfitness, in Sandy’s terms. In any event, people realized more, and that evening, which would be the evening before we left, we were encouraged to take large pieces of paper and draw our life line. We were to make a road map of where we had been, our traumas and history, and our hopes and fears for the future. Each person dutifully got their coloured pencils and set to.

I was suspicious. It sounded like such a great way to get to the heart of something people would be reluctant to say if they felt they were being judged. I drew a picture of a face, and then wrote some of the lines of a poem I was writing that went on to become Multiple Personality Disorder. After, we were encouraged to hold up our timeline and tell the rest about it. Mine revealed little about my personality, except perhaps I was interested in writing and was a terrible sketch artist. Other people talked about abuses they had suffered, their fear of people not liking them, recent breakups, medical issues, and a host of more mundane issues. I watched Sandy, but she gave no sign that any of this concerned her.

My friend had told me that Sandy’s stove had two settings, hot and off. She was the same friend who told me what happened after the weekend. True to this description, the invigilators sat down after all of the prospective travelers went home, and decided whom they would allow to go. Tim told me later that he was uncomfortable with the lying to the volunteers, and that he felt they deserved more respect than that, but Sandy shouted him down and achieved the result she wanted. They sent out letters after that weekend to all who attended, telling them that the weekend was a success and informing them of whether or not they had been found fit or judged to be wanting. Two people from my town were rejected on the grounds that they were not social enough, and apparently, I found out later from others privy to the meeting, Sandy had spoken against me, but could not make a strong enough case to convince the others who did not share her animosity.

This caused some discussion amongst the volunteers, although I was more angry than others. I despise being lied to and I felt it was so unfair to trick this vulnerable group under circumstances in which they felt safe. When our next meeting came about, I watched carefully as Sandy approached a fellow volunteer and asked her to draw a nice card for someone who couldn’t attend. After everyone signed the card, Sandy (not being able to resist showing her consummate skill at manipulation) announced that the artist also had to leave early. Sandy told her fellow invigilator how she had deliberately asked this woman about the card so that she felt included. I overheard this, and it confirmed for me that this was a person for whom manipulation was as natural as breathing and as toxic as mustard gas.

Later, still on the first evening of the second meeting, we were asked to tell the crowd our greatest fears about going overseas. Of course, people were much more circumspect now; they remembered what happened the last time they were asked to divulge and no longer believed the claim that we were no longer being judged. I spoke up finally, about what had been bothering me. I said, “I am concerned that Crossroads has lied to us.” That bomb dropped solidly into the room.

“What do you mean?” an invigilator asked me while Sandy glowered.

“We were told at our last meeting, months ago, that we were no longer being judged, just before an exercise in which we were asked to divulge our greatest hopes and fears.”

The meeting was adjourned rather quickly before the discussion could begin, but a few curious people, ushered along as they were, asked me about it and I told them what I knew. Sandy requested a meeting with me and the other coordinators where she told me I was sabotaging the weekend. I was told not to talk about how they lied and that my friend had no business uncovering the falsehood. She took no responsibility for her actions, and although the others looked uncomfortable with their complicity, she seemed proud of what she’d accomplished.

More than a few others approached me for information, but we knew were powerless in the situation if we wanted to go on the trip. I spoke to Tim privately, since he was an invigilator, and he agreed that it was unethical, and that he had spoken against it at the time, but that it was done and we must move on.

She sent an irate letter to me, cc’d to my friend, as well as head office, in an attempt to discredit me and have me thrown out of the program, but Sandy was known in Toronto. They instead asked what had been happening in the east that so greatly devalued the trust that Crossroads needed to maintain its credibility.

People at head office knew my name when we had our last meeting in Toronto before we left, and I anticipated, even as I guessed we would not be fed breakfast on the final day before our flight, I would be rejected at the last moment. Instead, I was suddenly—if thirty hours of flight could be called sudden—in the Cook Islands, where I tried to find some way to make myself useful in a place of people more competent than me.

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Writing the Police

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

I sometimes imagine telling the story of a cop in a police state. I think about what goes on in their head, whether they are merely following orders, like the Nazi underlings claimed at Nuremberg, or whether they are so desperate for a job that they would do anything, that being mall security led them inevitably to this. Maybe they have the lust for power that we imagine them to have. They started their life as children killing ants and worked up to kittens and cruelty in school, until irresistibly they were drawn into a work where such brutality can be hidden behind the mask of service, where sadism might be the citizen’s protection, if the public does not look too closely.

I never end up writing these mannequins that I sometimes imagine. Instead, I have cops brutalized by a system, fearful of their colleagues, enacting scenes which they carry throughout their entire lives. Or I write of those nearing retirement, having taken the job when it meant something different to be a cop, when they were a respected member of the community, not a feared arm of the state. Caught in troubling times, those older cops try to hang on for their pension, although their society demands much more than the protection they offered in their early career.

When I write my police, of whatever stripe, I must rely on my imagination, however. The police we meet are automatons, stepping through a dance which has already been decided for them by a set of legal strictures, by their own peccadillos and predilections, by the gut responses of the suburban house owner, and the occupy activist. The cops I see follow orders, maim and kill, arrest and help, but under the geas of a legal system which is as slanted against them as it is biased for commerce.

Caught in this system like us, like any citizen, they do what they will, breaks laws to help and to hurt, and otherwise hope their paycheck comes in time for their bills. Take away that paycheck, and they are in the same position as us. That is always worth remembering, that Mountie Bob can easily become Salty Bob, if his financial circumstances change.

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November is Novel Writing Month, Not Short Story Writing Month

Posted on November 8, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

As many of you know, November is the month that many people around the world put away the procrastination and pick up the pen, or more likely keyboard, to expand a late night idea into a novel. The challenge is to write fifty thousand words in the month, and there is an online community to support you in your goal. There you can sign up for an account, publicly keep track of the amount of words you write, and have others’ success or adulation inspire you to greater heights. Even computers want to be part of the fun.

I have never been much of a joiner, so I have never signed up and I am not absolutely sure how much of what I have written was done in various Novembers. This month I told myself that even if it sounded inviting I would not get involved. I have not written a longer work in a while but I am snowed under with editing and prep work for three other novels (those of you following the saga on facebook have heard about this). Thus, I convinced myself, I would work on other material, mark the many hundreds of pages of student essays, and in other ways distract myself from the project which leads to so much keyboard punching throughout the world.

I kept that promise, kind of. Another world, one recognizably ours, although in a dystopic and easily foreseeable future, kept intervening. I find myself writing stories set in a world where genetic code is modifiable through cheap and dubious online kits, where the poor, as always, struggle to maintain themselves while the gated communities house the rich whose virtual reality technology allows them to visit even the most dangerous slums. Laying in their beds, the rich stalk the dismal streets looking for ever more exciting carnage, a child splayed under the wheels of a truck, the bodies of Ebola victims, and holographic projectors allow them to be both present and invulnerable.

They appear as ghostlike beings, who drift along the hundred terabit trunklines, since they cannot substantiate far from a data source. If they pay enough for the protocols, and their VR gear is comprehensive, then their substantiation is stronger, and even modifiable, and they can hear and smell. Their point of view is what their avatar sees, so in almost every way they can go where they wish. Hackers flood to the thickest of the avatars, however, striving to get past firewalls and into the code stream. They wreak havoc with the imagery, but also hack along the line, getting to the source, which is the reclining meat body which controls so much of the wealth of the society. Since the avatars are the plaything of the rich, they are protected from these attacks by laws they have forced into place, and it is even illegal to touch them, since that would ruin the fantasy for the user.

In this world, young people want to hack, old people want to use the system to their advantage, and groups set up events where code reality is mixed with what they call real. Anything is possible if you have a high data line and money and willingness to take risks.

I have written three stories so far in what I have come to call the Code World series. “The Technology Infection” is about an event, and two irresponsible teens who attend in the flesh to watch, and it turns out, to participate in the mayhem. “Having a Baby” is the tale of an old woman immigrant from Vietnam who, grieving the loss of her family, has found an illegal and possibly immoral solution to her inability to procreate. “Moving with Meat” features Jailee, who wants to crack into the hacker community, but at thirteen years old she is an unlikely candidate unless she has something to offer.

Let me know if you are interested in reading them and I’ll keep you abreast of the progress.

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How to Make Facebook Work for You

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

This is nowhere as easy as it sounds and I am sure that people more media and tech savvy than me have worked out a better way. The problem is that my facebook feed bombards me with cat videos and clickbait articles from people who are theoretically friends. I was drowning in the many times facebook confronted me with how Henry liked what I liked, and how his digestive system, all the way from the mastication to excretion, was as much my business to know, to comment upon, as people far closer to him. I am bludgeoned by what my facebook friends—and some of them are extremely peripheral—eat for dinner, who they date, what kind of films they dislike, and a plethora of other information they have provided for free to market survey firms that trade in such data. That would be fine if I was at all interested in that type of material. I am not.

I realized last winter, while scrolling through eye deadening and mind numbing status updates and invitations to game, that facebook, was starting to control my mood and waste my precious time.

It was meant, perhaps, to bring people closer together, and it does that. I can feel the breath on my neck and the elbow in my back as if I am on public transit with everyone I went to school with and they are all chattering about the minutiae of their lives.

Instead of solving the problem the way some of my friends have, by deleting my account, I strove to find a solution that would bring together facebook and the types of information I do not have time to source myself. Accordingly, I “followed” the feeds of several science news sites. Now, instead of learning the ins and outs of Henry’s bowels, I am invited to read about the latest discoveries in dark energy, the tiny frogs making a comeback in the rainforest, the recovery of genetic material from ancient human skeletons, planet formation, and extremophile bacteria.

Of course I am still treated to what animal my friends are, what TV character represents them the best, and how mad they are that it is snowing in Canada in the winter. But I can endure that frivolity a little bit more if I know that just below my screen, is an entrance into some of the fantastic work scientists around the world are doing.

I encourage you, silent facebook sufferer, take back your mind, and make facebook work for you. Subscribe to news sites that offer news you would read instead of clickbait, follow the blogs of people who are worthy of your time, and become a good net citizen by not wasting your facebook friends’ bandwidth and making their media saturated lives just that much more difficult.

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To Talk About Mars

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

No talk about Mars is complete unless you begin with Giovanni Schiaparelli and his canali. It has become almost a cliché in the field of exobiology, at least in terms of Mars, that ancient history, complete with Percival Lowell’s maps, should be trotted out one last time.

The talk I saw today did more than that however. Rather cleverly, Dr. Ed Cloutis put together a narrative of the driving forces of Mars exploration. He spoke about the early conjectures about Martian life, which he referred to as a drug inspired fantasy, and then went into the gritty details of the various missions from Mariner and Viking 1 and 2 onwards, outlining how each one built upon the knowledge gained from the last and how each made a contribution to the field. His talk was complete with photos and lists of instruments on board each of the missions, and the narrative lines he drew were coherent and believable.

What struck me most profoundly, however, was how little we know, despite decades of research. Rover after rover, orbiter after orbiter, and we have a list of chemical signatures and values associated with temperature and humidity. I am reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars in which the princess explains the origin of her knowledge about Earth, and John Carter isPIA17944-MarsCuriosityRover-AfterCrossingDingoGapSanddune-20140209 shocked to learn the rather mundane reason: “Why, every school boy on Barsoom knows the geography, and much concerning the fauna and flora, as well as the history of your planet fully as well as of his own. Can we not see everything which takes place upon Earth, as you call it; is it not hanging there in the heavens in plain sight?”

Mars is also in plain sight for us, albeit some distance away. Robert Zubrin has campaigned for ways to bring it closer with his Mars Direct plan, and the Mars One team plan to begin a televised colony in 2025. it is a testament to the various space agencies around the world that we know as much as we do, and it is a testament to our own intransigence that we know so little.

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