Paper
The Shape of the Signifier
Published Jan 1, 2001 · W. B. Michaels
Critical Inquiry
52
Citations
1
Influential Citations
Abstract
This essay begins with a question: "'The question is, what is Mars's own name for itself?"'' The question gets asked in Green Mars, the second volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy; the context in which it's asked is what Robinson calls an "areophany," a ritual in which the first colonists on Mars recite the names for Mars in as many languages as they can: English, Arabic, Japanese, and so on. The answer to the question, Robinson tells us about two hundred pages later, is "Ka." But this is an answer that in an important sense only deepens the question. Ka is a sound that "a whole lot of Earth names for Mars" have in them, Robinson says (GM, p. 236). But it's hard to see why the fact that the Arabs call Mars Qahira and the Japanese call it Kasei should mean that Ka is "Mars's own name for itself." Ka is also what the "little red people on Mars" call it. But the little red people in Robinson don't actually exist; they are presented as a kind of myth invented by humans. Indeed, one of the ways in which Robinson's Mars trilogy (and much recent Mars fiction, like Ben Bova's Mars and Greg Bear's Moving Mars) differs from some other recent ambitious works of science fiction (say, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series or Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet) is in its apparent indifference to the question of the alien. Robinson's Mars is a lifeless planet before colonization. So if the question about Mars's own name for itself cannot be a question about what humans call it, it can't exactly be a question about what Martians call it either. In the Mars trilogy, there are no Martians.
The question of Mars's own name is not just about what humans call it, but also about what Martians call it, as in Robinson's Mars trilogy, there are no Martians.
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