my favourite non-hitch-hiker's sci-fi novels are the mars trilogy by kim stanley robinson.

a few times i've searched for websites about that universe - timelines, maps, concordances, etc., and been surprised by a real dearth of fan-boy-ism for this series. this is a totally detail-oriented near-future account of colonising another planet, and the geeks haven't responded by re-rendering the whole thing into a searchable summarised expert-system of some kind? mystifying.

but my most recent search did turn up a few resources - whether hot-off-the-front-page, or cold-but-newly-indexed-by-google, i don't know.

• a detailed interview with ksr largely about the trilogy that avoids being bogged down in discussions of "real mars - when will we get there, how, who, why" about which i do not give a rat's. sci-fi interviewers, here's a hint: talk about the fucking book.
• mars trilogy concordance - a decent start at a real concordance - all form, little content, however. i wouldn't know about that tendency, of course.
• an entertaining attempt to get a community-developed mars concordance going - reminiscent of the various attempts to develop open-source, cross-platform, multi-player, fully 3d updated versions of Elite.

anyway, i had some fun tonight sleeplessly "neading" three sections of blue mars. "neading" what i did to books set in literature classes at uni. Somewhere between pure note-taking and reading, it's basically mind-mapping characters, events, themes, concepts and cracks in which essay-shaped tendrils might take root. the goal is to maximise the detail that sticks in medium-term memory (enables serendipitous moments of clarity/thematic connection/deeper significance during actual essay writing), identify the topic that will best show off irritating under-grad lit student precociousness/"seriousness", and serve as a graph which can be traversed during the essay-writing process when connecting characters to deeper meanings via some tortuous character->event->phrase->theme path.

what could come out of it? maybe a website? probably nothing. neading is ace fun in and of itself, though. i don't have (never did have?) the discipline to absorb novels fully without neading, and the mars trilogy does seem to deserve the level of comprehension that neading can bring. many many (~6) years ago, though, i did write an essay "why the little finger?" pointing out and exploring the significance of the little finger - nadia loses hers in a worker's comp-worthy incident (who'd pay that claim at that time on that planet?), and one of the characters from farewell to my concubine. something like that could emerge.

or, just a list of characters and events?