Review: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Published: HarperCollins UK/Bantam Spectra (1993)

Series: Book 1 of the Mars Trilogy

Awards: British Science Fiction Association Award, Nebula Award

Nominated: Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, and Locus SF Awards

The Book:

“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 Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets 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.”

~from barnesandnoble.com

I’ve been meaning to read the Mars Trilogy for quite a while, ever since I enjoyed Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt years ago.   Given the length of the trilogy, and the overpowering density of detail I expected from Robinson’s work, I somehow just kept putting it off.  Now, I’m finally doing it, and Red Mars is a wonderful first installment of the series.  I would personally say that it stands alone as a novel, but I have heard other opinions.  It certainly leads into the second novel, sort of like how the 20^th century led right into the 21^st.

My Thoughts:

I would say that, above all else, Red Mars is a hard SF novel. The focus of Red Mars is the process of colonization and the formation of a Martian society.  I’m sure a tremendous amount of research went into extrapolating how current technology could advance in such a way as to make the colonization possible.  Robinson is incredibly thorough, and he meticulously details everything, from the construction of the habitats, to the many different efforts towards terraforming, and so on.  I particularly enjoyed the terraforming discussions.  Robinson describes all the different ideas the scientists on Mars have for increasing the surface temperature, thickening the atmosphere, and increasing the oxygen content of the air.  Not everything is a success, and some of the plans backfire in interesting ways.  Robinson shows us the effects of the settlement and the terraforming on Mars through lengthy descriptions of the planet’s countryside and geography.  Whether or not all of the technology he describes could be real one day, almost all of it seems completely plausible. 

Beyond the physical effort of colonization, he also spends an immense amount of time detailing the sociological, political, and economical forces shaping the colonization.  The colonization begins with the First Hundred, carefully selected specialists that are sent to establish the first dwellings on the Martian surface.  Even among the First Hundred, there are many conflicting ideas of how Martian society should be shaped, what their relationship should be to the Earth, and to what extent Mars should be terraformed.  The situation becomes immensely further complicated when their past catches up with them in the form of governmental controls, transnational corporations with their eyes on profit, and desperate, culturally diverse immigrants from the crowded Earth.

The narrative is from the point of view of people from the First Hundred, and it shifts with each major segment of the book.  I enjoyed that, even though it was in third person, the narration felt distinctive for each character.  While none of the characters seemed universally sympathetic, they were all well-rounded and had interesting ways of seeing the world.  My personal favorite segment was that of the homesick French psychologist Michel Duval.  However, even while we’re following hard-working, cynical Frank’s bitterness, idealistic, Mars-loving Ann’s despair, or the drama queen Maya’s love triangle, the focus is always on Mars.  They are all just the human windows through which we are allowed to see the development of Martian history.

Though I was very entertained by Red Mars, I have to admit that, in my opinion, it was not a completely flawless book. It’s very slowly paced, and the human stories were often overshadowed by the huge amount of scientific, geographic, social, and political information that ran through the narrative.  Furthermore, some of Robinson’s guesses for the future were a little off, so the novel sometimes feels a little dated.  For instance, Robinson’s colonization of Mars is headed by the US and Russia in the 2020s.  I’m not sure who could head that kind of a multi-billion dollar project given today’s economy, but I doubt it would be US/Russian.  Also, his Earth is collapsing under a Malthusian population crisis, something that doesn’t really appear to be hanging over us at the moment (or maybe I just don’t see the signs!). 

One other element that bothered me was his most fanciful technological development—an immortality treatment.  I think he included it so that we could follow the same characters through a large swathe of Martian history, and so that Earth’s population problems would more quickly come to the breaking point.  However, compared to how much detail he lavished on the other technology of the novel, the DNA-repairing, anti-aging treatment seemed almost like a simple plot device.  Despite all of this, I think I can solidly recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in reading an in-depth description of Martian colonization.

My Rating: 4.5/5

Red Mars is an immersive, thorough, near-future account of the colonization of Mars and the subsequent development of Martian society.  It is terrific hard SF, with plenty of ecology, geography, physics, sociology, politics, engineering, and economics to keep your mind engaged.  It also features well-developed, if not completely likable, characters through which the reader watches the future unfold.  Though it is thick with information and slow-paced, it is a fascinating vision of the sort of future we could still be moving towards.