While the transformative power of a sense of wonder is only ever imagined and sought after by Franz in The Concentration City, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the characters—known as the “first hundred”—achieve genuine awe from colonizing the Martian landscape (Robinson 7). However, as in The Concentration City, it is the first hundred’s captivation with their new environment away from Earth, and its potential, that similarly leads to a grotesque loss of rationality, societal order, and the feelings of devastation. Within the text, the existence of a prominent sense of wonder as “rapt emotive fascination” felt toward the Martian landscape is made initially apparent through the character of Nadia Chernyshevski (SFE). After first landing on Mars, Nadia finds herself in a state of shock over the alien environment and, this culminates in an uncontrollable emotional outburst of laughter and exaltation (Robinson 98). Later, the character of Ann Clayborne further confirms this presence of the sublime by commenting on how seeing the beauty of the Martian landscape is “an alien thrill, impossible to compare to anything she had seen before” (Robinson 142). Like the sense of wonder described by the editors in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, Nadia and Ann …show more content…
Rather than attempting to understand their positions and work together as a collective whole, both groups consider the other as being unreasonable threats to action and they “are (seemingly) splintered by their beliefs” (Robinson 91). In the same way that Franz is misunderstood during interactions with the members of his community, talk between the two groups is also, according to Ann Clayborne, “half-hearted and less understood” (Robinson