November 22nd, 2008
by
Liz Henry
Frederick Turner’s Genesis is an epic poem about the terraforming of Mars. It looks extremely interesting. I read the pages on Amazon “Look inside the book”; the poetry is good (rare!!!) and there appear to be female astronauts.
Even the few pages I read made me think of the Iliad, the Mahbharata, and Dante. Also there’s a ship called the Kalevala. Epic breadth indeed! I’m impressed!
The shadows are lit pink by Saturn’s rings.
At one end, at the center of the disc,
There is a dimple like a graphic function;
And out of it a beam of pure white light
(Tainted and rendered visible, as if a dust
Had wandered through a sunbeam, by a trace
Of plasma fluorescing as it cools)
Shoots ruler-sharp a thousand miles behind.
About the other end-is this a vessel,
And is this the prow?-there’s a vaguer aura,
Some puddling of the light of distant stars,
That must bespeak the presence of a power
That bends the laminate of time with space.
This ship’s a living tree turned inside out.
Chance’s and Beatrice’s engineers
Of genes and cellular development
Shaped her in secret from mutated mast
Gleaned from a windy coppice by the Glyme,
And fed her sunlight, water and sweet air
As she obeyed the new geometry
Spelled out for her in double helices.
Has anyone out there read it? What did you think? 
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
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Filed under Books & Literature | Comments (2)
I was introduced to this soon after publication by someone who was in contact with Turner. I haven’t read it all, but the extracts I was shown looked magnificent and way beyond the typical SF poetry doggerel. I’ve been looking for a copy for years, so thanks for the tip.
believe it or not I’ve written my own epic poem (86 pages worth) about people living on Mars, albeit 1000 years ago.