White Mars; or, The Mind Set Free
A 21st-Century Utopia

While I have really enjoyed some of Aldiss' earlier work, I can't really say this is a good story. It has some really interesting concepts, certainly, but the focus is far more on Aldiss getting out his views on what a utopian society is, or should be, that it gets in the way of the story. There's a......more

This is more a philosophical treatise than a novel, and viewed from that perspective, it's not bad. It's utopian fiction, along the lines of H.G. Wells, and the prose style is reminiscent of early twentieth century utopian writings. The plot, such as it is, exists only to provide a platform for a di......more

This is not a good book. It might appear that this would be a great book: the great SF writer Aldiss pairs up with the great mathematician Penrose to write an SF book. However, this is not a SF book. But, it is also not a utopian novel. Essentially, it is a lot of trees wasted for bad writing. Why am......more

Part high-Utopian visions, part high-energy particle physics. I was deeply affected by the speculative society founded on Aldiss' Mars. Richard Rorty would approve this Martian society where the earnest imaginations and experiments of Utopianists are encouraged over the production of theoretical kno......more

Science Fiction is a literature just built for surveying. To really get into it, one must survey the field. If you read Aldiss, you owe it to yourself to do some literary surveying. Surveillance? Anyhow, you'll owe it to yourself to read some Plato, Sir Thomas More, Sir Roger Penrose, and Kim Stanle......more