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Title | Red Mars
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Author | Kim Stanley Robinson
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Cover Art | Don Dixon
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Publisher | Bantam Spectra - 1993
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First Printing | Bantam Spectra - 1993
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Title | Green Mars
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Author | Kim Stanley Robinson
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Cover Art | Don Dixon
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Publisher | Bantam Spectra - 1994
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First Printing | Bantam Spectra - 1994
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Title | Blue Mars
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Author | Kim Stanley Robinson
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Cover Art | Don Dixon
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Publisher | Bantam Spectra - 1997
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First Printing | Bantam Spectra - 1996
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Title | The Martians
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Author | Kim Stanley Robinson
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Cover Art | Don Dixon
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Publisher | Bantam Spectra - 2000
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First Printing | Bantam Spectra - 1999
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Category | Science Fiction
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | John Boone, Frank Chalmers, Maya Toitovna, Sax Russell, Ann Clayborn, Arkady Bogdanov, Nadia, Nirgal, Michel, Peter, Coyote, Simon Frazier
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Main Elements | Space Exploration
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Website | kimstanleyrobinson.info
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 Red Mars
For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.
John Boone, Maya Toitovna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is to give Mars and Earthlike atmosphere. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planet's surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces - for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars.
Green Mars
Nearly a generation has passed since the first pioneers landed, but the transformation of Mars to an Earth-like planet has just begun. In Green Mars the colonists will attempt to turn the red planet into a lush garden for humanity. They will bombard the atmosphere with ice meteorites to add moisture. They will seed the red deserts with genetically engineered plants. Then they will tap the boiling planetary core to warm the surface. But their plan is opposed by those determined to preserve the hostile and barren beauty of Mars. Led by rebels like Peter Clayborne, these young people are the first generation of children born on Mars, and they will be joined in their violent struggle by original settlers Maya Toitovna, Simon Frazier, Sax Russell. Against this cosmic backdrop, passions, rivalries, and friendships will explode in a story as big as the planet itself.
Blue Mars
The red planet is no more. Now green and verdant, Mars has been dramatically transformed from a desert world into one where humans cand flourish. But as Mars reaches its final transformation, Earth is in peril. A great flood threatens an already overpopulated and polluted planet, and Mars, its last hope, may find itself facing a population explosion or an interplanetary war. Meanwhile, the First Hundred settlers or Mars are being pulled into a fierce new struggle between the Reds, a group devoted to preserving Mars in its desert state, and the Green "terraformers". Soon the human drama at the center of this breathtaking epic explodes in political upheaval, leading to new explorations into the solar system and to choices that will decide the ultimate fate of Mother Earth.
The Martians
From a training mission in Antarctica to blistering sandstorms sweep through labyrinths of barren canyons, the interwoven stories of The Martians set in motion a sprawling cast of characters upon the surface of Mars. As the planet is transformed from an unexplored and forbibidding terrain to a troubled image of a re-created Earth, we meet the First Hundred explorers - men and women who are bound together by Earth's tenuous toehold on Mars. Presenting unforgettable stories of hope and disappointment, of fierce physical and psychological struggles, The Martians is an epic chronicle of a planet that represents one of humanity's most glorious possibilities.
I was in love with this series before I ever read it...but it turns out that judging a book by its cover is a risky business and my high expectations for what this series was actually about was not met. Don't get me wrong, it's a good series but...well, let me list the problems I had with it.
The technology - ok, so it turns out that this series isn't actually about the science and technology required to terraform Mars. Thus, Robinson had a tendency to speed up scientific development to ridiculous levels. I mean, what's the chance that one hundred settlers would land on Mars and the only one that died was actually murdered? The second worst thing was a character losing a finger. There was no equipment failure. They somehow magically created everything they needed from the planet's resources. And terraforming was complete in less than two centuries...and I don't mean just breathable air, I mean plants and wildlife and everything else. Oh, and while they were busy trying just to survive they also happen to stumble across a longevity treatment so people can now live centuries (I guess it was just a plot device needed that so the same characters could carry through the time period the series covered, could see no other meaningful reason for tossing in a concept that would make a series of it's own to discuss), and to wrap things up, we'll also discover interstellar travel, since I guess if you're on a scientific discovery roll might as well cover all the near impossible problems we're faced with right?
The next issue I had was, well, Robinson covered a LOT of ground. Technology, psychology, economics, politics, sociology, ecology and everything in science from geology to quantum physics, you name it, it was covered. I enjoyed some of that, because a lot of was actually hard science, regardless of the pace at which technology evolved, however they tended to come in info dumps and if there was a topic you didn't much care for (economics and politics for me...had to snore through the whole creation of a constitution) it could get kind of boring. However, I have to conceede, that if ever we should colonize Mars, ALL those issues will have to be dealt with. Just was a bit overwhelming to have to read about it all at once.
Robinson also clearly loved the idea of Mars, to the point where the characters would roll about it's surface in a rover for entire chapters at a time, usually alone so it was just descriptions of the terrain punctuated by a few thoughts. Much as the reader needs Mars to be described to him, having every single rock, sand dune, and later, piece of lichen, pointed out could get a little boring at times. Sax alone must have analyzed at least a hundred distinct pieces of lichen and small plants during the course of the trilogy.
And the characters. Yes they were interesting, they were all dysfunctional in their own way, each representing some aspect of something Robinson wanted to explore, but I personally ended up not getting attached to pretty much any of them. They weren't just dysfunctional, they were mostly unlikeable. Maybe Sax by the end, and of course Nadia. Being an engineer myself and not particulary socially adept I guess I tended to sympathize with them the most. Nirgal was also a breath of sanity.
I can see why these books have won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, they are epic descriptions of everything we'd run into if we were to attempt to colonize and then terraform Mars, including whether it should be terraformed at all or perserved in it's current state. After all, putting a bunch of plants and bacteria on it would wipe out billions of years of history of the planet, it would all be tainted, it could kill off any existing life hidden deep beneath the surface. The ethical question of whether humans should mess around in a pristine ecosystem, even a dead one. But right, nearly forgot...this trilogy didn't just cover events on Mars...on Earth governments are being taken over by corporations, and due to climate change waters are rising, and due to the longevity treatments populations are exploding...did I mention these three books cover a LOT of ground?
So while I still love the covers, and it was definitely worth a read, I'm not sure I'll ever read them again.
November 2017
The anthology of short stories had it's ups and downs. It actually introduces a set of new characters that have their own storyline that continues throughout the anthology which I thought at first weird (when I read the first one wondering who everyone was) then interesting as more and more stories accumulated. And of course we meet up with old favorites. It still suffers from people just wandering the terrain and describing the colours of rocks, at least 50 pages if not 100 were dedicated to a single climb of Olympus Mons, interesting, but I didn't need every handhold and foothold mentioned the whole several kilometers up. And I'm not someone that is all that interested in poetry. But I think my favorite was "Purple Mars" where Robinson describes the day where he finished the manuscript, printed it out and mailed it, but doing so while taking care of his young son whose favorite word was "No", it was a perfect conclusion this epic saga.
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