The Shape of the Signifier

Abstract

This essay begins with question: 'The question is, what is own name for itself?'' The question gets asked in Green Mars, the second volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy; the context in which it's asked is what Robinson calls an areophany, ritual in which the first colonists on recite the names for 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 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 Qahira and the Japanese call it Kasei should mean that Ka is Mars's own name for itself. Ka is also what the red people on Mars call it. But the little red people in Robinson don't actually exist; they are presented as kind of myth invented by humans. Indeed, one of the ways in which Robinson's trilogy (and much recent fiction, like Ben Bova's 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 is lifeless planet before colonization. So if the question about own name for itself cannot be question about what humans call it, it can't exactly be question about what Martians call it either. In the trilogy, there are no Martians.