Since the Greeks and Phoenicians, civilisations have sent their explorers partly to discover, partly to trade, partly to colonize. Is this how it will be when mankind reaches for the planets? Earth is more and more overcrowded, and there will be an increased drive for living space. Involuntary contraception or even involuntary euthanasia never gets a mention in the debates on population. The temptation must be to move the crowds out to the planets; rather than reduce the Earth's population export its surplus, and to support those surpluses the planets must be terraformed.

WHITE MARS supposes that Mars will not be made green with plants, it will remain scientifically virgin. Those allowed to travel will be either a YEA (Young Enlightened Adult) or DOP (Distinguished Older Person), able to contribute to some part of the experimental work.

Like Kim Stanley Robinson's RED/GREEN/BLUE MARS series, Aldiss and Penrose suppose that Mars will become cut off (by the collapse of the advanced economies) and so become forced to draw up a constitution for the new Areoite society - where there are no weapons, no money, the food is minimal and the water ration tiny.

If your mind is on higher things you may not notice any of these problems. The higher thing on Mars will be the super-collider built to look for the "smudge", the ultimate matter. In Roger Penrose's noosphere these devices lead through quantum mechanics to concepts of being and then to the Ultimate Being, and that is the way things start to go on Mars as well.

Then something peculiar happens: they discover a martian. More importantly, the martian discovers them. (I will not tell you why there is time to prepare for the meeting).

This book comes with two sub-titles: "The Mind Set Free" and "A 21^st-Century Utopia" (both echoes of H.G. Wells), neither of which is correct. The setting free of the minds consists of two strands: the constitutional debate, and the metaphysics implicit in quantum theory. The weaknesses of living under a constitution, as opposed to a system of justice, became apparent in the USA at the end of 2000, and therefore not a worthwhile line of reasoning to follow, while a system of physics which leads to something other than itself ("metaphysics" literally) impeaches itself by its self-contradiction.

There is an interesting strand in WHITE MARS - the Areoites can beam their debates and documentaries back to earth, but they cannot receive anything coming the other way. Except one day a spacecraft arrives from the U.K. - unfortunately, these islands will not have re-asserted themselves as a world power, it is United Korea. Later on a second craft arrives with friendship packages from a terrestrial charity. There must have been close to a complete and catastrophic breakdown of all civilisation on earth, before it reconstructs itself, and this is all we read of it. It is an astonishing omission.

I once struggled to read Penrose's THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND. If Brian Aldiss's name did not come first on the title page of WHITE MARS, I would think that this was Roger Penrose's work, edited by Aldiss through friendship. It remains confused.