#theres simply not that much genuinely arable land!

[transgenderer]

There isn't a lot of good Sci fi set in the 2100s. You can extrapolate a little bit, get some future flavor but keep society recognizable, or go way in the future where things are barely tethered to earthly reality, but hitting in the middle is hard, because you need to present a long but plausible path from here to there. The Mars trilogy and rifters trilogy are both set in that sort of far-but-not-too-far future, and they're both good, but very different, in ways that invite comparison.

The obvious duality is dystopian/utopian, and theres definitely something to that, but I think it oversimplifies both works. The world of rifters is pretty terrible, but if you know more about peter watts, or if you just pay attention as you read, it becomes clear that rifters is actually something close to a best case scenario, a vision of the world where people in power are ultracompetent and for the most invested in the continued survival of the human race. The world of rifters has faced massive challenges, but society has kept on ticking regardless.

And similarly, while the Mars trilogy is certainly utopian at parts, this utopia is hard won, and fragile, and takes a looooong time to achieve. And the Mars trilogy's vision of earth is at times dystopian, and ever trying to spread it's sickness to earth. So yes, a simplification. But the real duality that interests me is the role of....well I'm not sure what the word for it is. "Homesteads", perhaps? Mostly isolated communities, independent from the rest of society, especially resource-wise, under the control of no government. Obviously informed by the American west, but also the long history of hill peoples around the world

I think people who are aware of the fact the systems that govern our world are chaotic and fragile and uninterested in human values have a tendency towards homesgead-ism, myself included. When you feel like everything is barreling towards collapse, or at least has an unacceptable likelihood of collapse, and it's all coercive and molochian and hostile, then the idea of having a little house, maybe with a community of like minded people, that doesn't depend on the massive unknowable machine or global politics/markets/etc, is very appealing! I mean, you might not endorse that urge, but it's common to have it

So anyway, homesteads in rifters and mars! Rifters is, in large part, the story of such a homestead, and not just a homestead but the sort of extra-smug one where not only do you not need society, society needs you! Of course it's watts, so this homestead is bizarre and fucked up and at the bottom of the ocean, but it's there, and the idea is expanded on significantly in the later books. But the wattsian homestead, is importantly 1) hard-won, and 2) not replicable. The rifters group has lucked into their beautiful little isolated world, the best they can hope is to stay in it, and even thats unlikely.

Mars, on the other hand, takes homesteads as a given. Mars is covered in homesteads, powered by robotics and hard work and cleverness. These homesteads are clearly difficult to build in the literal sense, they require work, but (except for the first one) to the reader they basically just pop up. Mars takes as a given that you can happily separate yourself from society and live in a nice bubble on Mars, but the characters are determined to do more than that, to build a free world, and then to free earth too. And fundamentally thats where the utopianism lies! The Mars trilogy said, not only can you live a good life, but it's so easy to achieve a good life that you can build a good world. Which is a very nice sentiment, altho perhaps not so personally resonant as watts