Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky ("Nadia") was an important member of the First Hundred. She went through the first and second Martian revolutions as a force of construction instead of destruction and she became the first Martian president.

Biography

Pre-Mars life

Nadia was born in 1982 in Russia (Siberia). She became an engineer. She developed a love of jazz music.

The Underhill years

In Underhill, she became the all-purpose go-to person for the construction effort, expert in technical matters and architecture. She became the lover of Arkady Bogdanov and a friend of Maya Toitovna. In a crane accident in Underhill she lost her little finger.

Engineering projects

As colonization progressed, Nadia didn't lack projects to work on. She worked on many construction projects all over Mars, controlling and programming construction robots and doming craters. She was given by Arkady a transmitter that could remotely control the secret guidance jets on Phobos.

The First Revolution

She was repelled by the extensive destruction of infrastructure during the revolution of 2061. She wandered Mars preventing further destruction and gathering survivors around efforts to reconstruct whatever they could. After Arkady's death, she ignited Phobos's jets, driving Phobos to crash on Mars. She was rescued by the Areophany and brought to Zygote.

The Underground and preparation of the Second Revolution

She joined the Martian underground and lived in Zygote. In those years, she was one of the most conservative over the question of hiding from the surface. She befriended with Art Randolph when he came from Terra and they eventually became lovers. She discovered she was very charismatic in organizing mass conventions and acting as a mediator in debates. She was a key player in the Dorsa Brevia Conference. She was a coordinator of the independence revolution.

Martian independence and Martian presidency

After the success of the independence revolution she was the chairman of the Pavonis Mons Congress. Reluctantly at first, she became a member of the global government's executive council and the president of the first Martian government. A stressful and demanding period at a position of real political power followed.

Later life

She had her missing finger re-grown. Following her term, she and Art settled down and started a family; Nikki was their daughter. They moved to Sabishii and then to Odessa in the late 22nd century, where she spent the last years of her life with friends.

Meta Background

Nadia's name, Cherneshevsky, is an homage to Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (the transliteration from Cyrillic and the spelling in latin characters can vary), a 19th century Russian revolutionary and writer. He wrote What Is To Be Done? (which is also a recurring phrase in the Mars trilogy and the title of a section in Green Mars), a materialist and utopian novel tht has also been called overly optimistic and simplistic. It is focused on ordinary people whose actions and efforts to continually improve themselves unconsciously work towards the betterment of society overall. The novel was part of a dialogue between thinkers on this subject, spawning reactions by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky (in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment) and Lenin; Tolstoy and Lenin both wrote works bearing the same name -- an essay and a pamphlet, respectively. Chernyshevsky's novel became a Soviet classic and proved to be highly influential on Lenin and the Russian revolution (some say as important as Marx's Kapital). Chernyshevsky also wrote on environmental determinism as an expansion of Marxist economic materialism; environmental determinism theory is a possible inspiration for Robinson, notably in the development of the Martian underground and its gift economy (Mars trilogy) or (the Anarres of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed is another possible influence).

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