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Red Mars (Mars Trilogy #1)

3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 · rating details · 19,385 ratings · 932 reviews

In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge sceince in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of 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. N...more

Paperback, 672 pages

Published July 1st 2009 by Harper Voyager (first published 1992)

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Jun 16, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Red Mars looks at the first waves of emigration to Mars, through the eyes of certain members of the First Hundred, the original settlers. The world Kim Stanley Robinson paints is complex, filtered through the perceptions of different people, the politics intense and contentious, even the debate over terraforming itself is depicted with lively wrangling.

(Honestly, and this may say something about me, but I never even questioned the general idea of terraforming before. I want to live out there! So...more Red Mars looks at the first waves of emigration to Mars, through the eyes of certain members of the First Hundred, the original settlers. The world Kim Stanley Robinson paints is complex, filtered through the perceptions of different people, the politics intense and contentious, even the debate over terraforming itself is depicted with lively wrangling.

(Honestly, and this may say something about me, but I never even questioned the general idea of terraforming before. I want to live out there! So that, at least, took me by surprise.)

I did, however, occasionally tune out of the very technical discussions of this engineering process or that geologic one. The writing in those sections I found to be entirely dry. And often it was related in pages and pages of fairly boring text, and then not tied in to how it affected the characters.

The characters themselves were fairly well drawn - not lively, not leaping off the page, but more alive than cardboard. I did enjoy the differences in the way people perceived their actions, and how others perceived the same actions. But not enough was done with this. If you're going to play with perception like that, and I'm glad that he did, in some way, it has to mean something. Not just that Maya sees herself as enjoying sex without strings and Frank sees it as a oneupmanship game. We got them fighting over this, but never really got to see that clash of perceptions come out. And none of these contrasting perceptions ever really came to anything.

And perhaps it is too bad that the most interesting part of the book happens off the page. The hidden colony, the number of colonists who disappear and found a mystical utopian settlement seemed to me to be the most provocative part of the story, yet only a handful of pages were allocated to them.

On the same note, why did we get only one chapter of Arkady's point of view, when he was one of the main figures in the Mars resistance? We got tons and tons of insider viewpoints, yet Robinson sets up great outsider characters and then never spends any time with them.

Instead, the book dwelt (very well) on the difficulties of fighting for what is best for Mars and the early colonists when those on Earth see it as a mere pawn to be stripmined for their financial benefit. This book is deeply cynical about human nature. The only one able to make any compromises is more or less a sociopath (or at least a deeply disturbed Machiavellian figure). Everyone else never bends on anything ever. No one really understands anyone else. Talking and consensus building is useless.

Goodness knows that it's not hard to believe in the truly cynical and exploitative these days, but could we get some of the counterpoint, please? They exist in the ether around this story as it is told, but Robinson never engages with them in depth.

In the end, this book is good, it's just not enough. And there are seeds of something more in there, so it's frustrating that they're not allowed to flower.(less)

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May 02, 2013 Clouds - (¿head-in-the?) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction-series, science-fiction, reviewed, read-in-2012

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.

On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.

While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and became a...more

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Dec 17, 2008 Matt rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

I just finished reading this for the second or third time. I wish I could bump this up to 3.5 stars, which more reflects what I feel about it.

To begin with, I should come forward with my biases. This is a book you'll either love or you will hate. For my part, I love the planet Mars. Or at least, I love the idea of the planet Mars, because I've never been there. I'd love to go though. If someone from NASA told me that I could go to Mars, and there was only a 50/50 chance I'd survive, I'd be like...more I just finished reading this for the second or third time. I wish I could bump this up to 3.5 stars, which more reflects what I feel about it.

To begin with, I should come forward with my biases. This is a book you'll either love or you will hate. For my part, I love the planet Mars. Or at least, I love the idea of the planet Mars, because I've never been there. I'd love to go though. If someone from NASA told me that I could go to Mars, and there was only a 50/50 chance I'd survive, I'd be like, "That good, huh? I'm sold. Let's do it. When do we leave?" My wife might talk me out of it (she hates the cold), but if I didn't have obligations to family, I'd be there in a heartbeat. I've got this big wall poster of Mars, laid out in all its plucky glory - the Tharsis bulge, the big volcanoes, the massive flood erosion systems. I want to walk on its surface under the red sky and feel the thin cold wind, and this is a book for Mars geeks by a Mars geek. Like Nadia, I want to wildly dance for joy on the Martian dust. If you don't love or can't love the idea of Mars, then all the talk of its ferrous oxides, sulfer drifts, salt pans, and garnet sands is going to bore you to tears. If you do however love Mars, reading this is something like biting into a big decadent layered fair trade organic chocalate bar with 71% dark rich Costa Rican cocoa. So that's my bias, and I think it's a good one, but if you can't entertain thoughts like that be prepared to be bored by like half this novel.

So what is this novel about? Well, obviously, it's about Mars, but more than that it is about humans on Mars and how people establish an identity and a cultural identity in particular. It is a story about the tension between existing cultural identities and ways of looking at the world, and adapting and adopting new identities. It's a story about conflicting mutually exclusive goals, and how we go about resolving - or more often than not - failing to resolve our differences. In that I think the book succeeds marvously, because the resulting Martian culture with all its disparate influences seems in many ways believable to me and even in some ways compelling so that I'm sucked into it and want to proclaim my allegiance to the Red or Green tradition, and twitter stories about Big Man and where I was when Boone died around the nuclear powered blog fire.

The best part of the story by far is that KSR doesn't attempt to tell a story as big as the colonization of Mars from the prespective a single person. Instead, the story sprawls across a huge cast of characters and expanse of time. Our viewpoint shifts from one major character to another, and people we thought we understood suddenly seem strange and different when seen from within or through someone elses eyes. Like many sci-fi authors, KSR can have his didactic moments, but unlike many his are softened by the fact that none of his characters are in and of themselves really the voice of the author. All of the characters even the most heroic turn out to have flaws of one sort or another, and so rather than being forced to read the dialogue as 'KSR believes this and is willing to hit you over the head with it', you can read the poltiics as 'John or Arkady (or Saxifrage or whoever) believes this, just as many real people do'. The politics of Mars as KSR envisions them turn out to be messy, very human, often petty, and with few simple answers and little in the way of clear answers and simple solutions. That's refreshing, even when KSR's biases are showing.

So why not more stars? Well, the book has big Martian sized problems to go along with its delights. For me, the chief of these is how easy the conquest of Mars is made to seem. It reads like the conquest of Mars as written by someone that has never even been camping, much less someone acquianted with the hardships of an outdoor life. Given the enormous challenges of living on a planet with a thin poisonous atmosphere, a surprisingly small portion of the book is devoted to the theme of 'Man vs. Nature' and most of the time when it is, the cause of the conflict is man's own efforts - as if Mars in its natural state isn't absolutely deadly to human life. I personally have a hard time imagining that something on the scale of the colonization of Mars would be safer, less arduous, and less frought with danger and hardship than say the colonization of the New World. KSR just doesn't seem particularly interested in that part of the story, which to my mind is perhaps the most critical part of the story.

Instead, all the meticulous scientific research is undermined by hand waving all the hard problems away with a wave of the techno-magic wand. The colonization of Mars begins not on a comparitive shoe string, but with an abundance of material massing at least one-hundred thousand times the mass of everything we've ever lifted into orbit. Energy sources are never scarce, and manufacturing capacity quickly soars to an unlmited degree. Technological challenges are quickly overcome by the liberal application of newfoundium and sometimes unobtainium. Almost everyone who dies dies through direct or indirect human agency. Accidents, especially serious ones, just don't seem to happen - Arkady's all to believable problem runs are confined to simulators. Thus, all the quite evident bloody striving of the author to create a believable story of planetary colonization is largely wasted and at times the story resembles just another escapist far future space opera.

But most of the rest of the novel's problems are also its strengths. It's sprawling scale is suited to the story, but makes it easy to get lost. It's changing points of view and flawed heroes means on the other hand that the book lacks a consistantly sympathetic protagonist to get behind and root for. It doesn't help the matter that many of the most likable characters end up dead.

It's not a book for everyone, but since humanity seems unlikely to grow up and start thinking about leaving the nest in my lifetime, this is probably as close to Mars as you or I will come. And, though it is a flawed story, it's still an extremely powerful and often moving one that I have little doubt will be read with interest and appreciation by anyone that actually does take up the struggle to live on and with Earth's redder sibling.(less)

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Mar 16, 2011 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-sf

The last long science fiction I read was Dune the year it came out. Then a long period of no science fiction, and in the past year a return to the genre. And one thing I have liked about the mid-century sf I have been reading is its low page count. Most of these guys, and so far I have read only guys, get the story done in under 300 pages. And I really go for the ones that clock in at around 180. There's a good idea, the story moves fast, outrageous things can happen but the story can also be qu...more The last long science fiction I read was Dune the year it came out. Then a long period of no science fiction, and in the past year a return to the genre. And one thing I have liked about the mid-century sf I have been reading is its low page count. Most of these guys, and so far I have read only guys, get the story done in under 300 pages. And I really go for the ones that clock in at around 180. There's a good idea, the story moves fast, outrageous things can happen but the story can also be quite moving.

Red Mars is 572 pages long, and it is only part one of a trilogy. (SF writers used to crank out short stories because they only got around a penny a word. Nowadays it seems that long novels in series is the way to go.) But by all reports, Red Mars, and the subsequent Green Mars and Blue Mars are good solid entertainment and a relatively realistic look at how human colonization of Mars might play out. On the cover of the copy I had, Arthur C. Clarke hailed it as "The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has every been written." I don't know how big or how seriously competitive that field is, but I can say that is the best novel on the colonization of Mars that I have ever read.

With 600 pages of narrative you expect some character development, a sense of history, and a good plot. Robinson creates good characters. When we fist meet them they seem destined to fill stereotyped slots in an sf novel of this kind: The ex-Astronaut who was the first man to land on Mars; the gregarious Russian who spouts revolution; the female scientist who believes Mars should remain essentially untouched played against the male scientist fixated on terraforming the planet; the diplomat; and, the difficult, Russian beauty who will allow for a certain amount of erotic tension, but not too much. But the story, told in long sections that focus on individual characters, is never formulaic. The novel follows competent people working hard in an alien environment where where everything around them is deadly.

One hundred of them set off for Mars, and the book covers about thirty years. And yes, at times I felt like I was plodding through a James Michener novel about Hawaii or Texas or The Holy Land. (That feeling could return if I read the next two in the series.) Critics praise Robinson for writing hard sf, science fiction where the writer uses a serious scientific background to develop the plot. Most of that is lost on me -- I never did understand the whole space elevator thing -- but I did enjoy the way the colonization developed from 100 dedicated scientists to tens of thousands of new immigrants, sent either by the homelands to secure a spot on the new planet, or the equivalent of wildcatters out to exploit the treasure trove of metals the planet holds.

There is a mystery, actually several mysteries, involved, and the political maneuvering that becomes part of the expanding society rings true to what one would expect in a world that is part research station, part boomtown, and part escape valve for an earth that is going out of control. I have to say, though, that one description of a Martian sunset is very much like another, and that we have better get busy with advancing robotic technology to get these guys settled on Mars by 2026.

James Cameron has Robinson's trilogy under option, which seems as inevitable as the fact that nothing will probably ever come it. It could be the next Battlestar Galactica, and I don't mean this as a spoiler, but,if they do the trilogy, a lot of actors are going to have only one year contracts.(less)

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Apr 27, 2008 Cassie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hated-it

I found this book to be intensely frustrating, because I had such a love-hate relationship with it. At one hand, I was fascinated to learn all about the colonization of Mars, the various technologies used, and I really loved seeing what the scientists came up with to develop the planet. Likewise, I enjoyed reading about the experience of exploring the planet's surface and learning about it's unique geography. The landscape descriptions are breathtaking.

It's such a shame that I hated just about...more

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Sep 01, 2011 Brad rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: faves, sci-fi, anarchism, doing-the-dishes, ecological, nebula-winner, new-novella, personal-mythology, political, revolution, the-best, why-no-movie

A long time ago in a city far, far away, the end of a friendship began over a disagreement about Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. D--- was so close to the material, so desperate to relive the nostalgia of the original trilogy, so deeply invested, that when we left the theatre and I expressed not just my frustration but my rage at what I'd seen, he took it as a personal insult. A slag of his taste (or what he thought I must have been declaring was his lack thereof). A debate raged between us for...more

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Apr 01, 2008 Paxnirvana rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: why-oh-why-did-i-read-it

Instead of re-hashing my own old review (did one at Amazon already yanno), let me offer up this BRILLIANT routine about Jaws 4: The Revenge by the late (and lamentedly so!) Mr. Richard Jeni:

"Have you ever seen a movie where they don't even try to have it make sense, they just slap you in the face with how shitty it is? You're sitting there, and you're going, "Maybe this movie isn't so bad and maybe I'm not wasting my life," and the movie slaps you in the face and goes:

Yes you are.

and you say "Ar...more

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Jul 03, 2007 Lobeck rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi-fantasy

I debated between a 3 and 4 on this book. The whole time I was reading the series, I was fascinated and bored at the same time. Kim Stanley Robinson gives a very realistic picture of the colonization of Mars beginning with the first hundred scientists, engineers, and other specialists who were selected to live on Mars. Everything from his descriptions of the clouds to his formula for transforming the atmosphere into something breathable are very accurate based on available information, and it wa...more

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Jan 09, 2011 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: action, crime-and-forensics, culture-and-politics, environment-and-earth-sciences, science-fiction, general-science-math-technology, suspense-and-mystery

A fantastic piece of work - to write this, the author had to have a solid working knowledge of a lot of fields, from cultural anthropology to psychology to astrophysics to chemistry to botany to... I don't know how he does it. And then to take the story and make it flow, weaving all those elements together and creating drama and tension - he's a master.

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Feb 03, 2010 John rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Almost finished, but it's plain what K.S.R's agenda is; nothing less than making the colonization of Mars happen by sneakily setting the agenda.
Evidence? A lot of "how to" science: how to make oxygen, how to terraform. how to smelt metals, how to genetically manipulate organisms to survive in horrific conditions, even how to build the very structures they live in etc etc etc. For me there was this huge disconnect between the nature of what it might be like to survive in -250C below, with no air,...more

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Nov 18, 2008 Terran rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: drooling KSR fans

Recommended to Terran by: drooling KSR fans

Shelves: reviewed

IT'S SOOOOOOO BIG!!!!! I MEAN, GEEZE YOU GUYS! YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW AWESOMELY AMAZINGLY OVERWHELMINGLY BIG IT IS!!! THINK OF THE BIGGEST {CLIFF,CANYON,OCEAN,MOUNTAIN,EGO} THAT YOU KNOW OF AND MARS HAS IT EVEN BIGGER THAN THAT! YOU JUST CAN'T EVEN IMAGINE ITS OVERALL BIGNESS!!!!![pant, pant, drool, drool]

Aside from the fawning adulation with which KSR treats our pink neighbor, the plot is just unbelievable. KSR gifts them with nearly magical technology in order to conquer the Red Planet, starts t...more

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Sep 11, 2008 Martin holley rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the greatest books about teraforming Mars. Robinson goes beyond the SciFi and goes into social aspects and how political agendas, religion, culture, racism, and just plain bias play in the outcome. There are many important characters and all have background, so character development is long and slow, but well worth it, being that the character of the characters is a big part of the story. This is more a book about the people that happen to be on mars doing a job, than the job they are doi...more

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Jul 10, 2008 Mykle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Robinson's Mars trilogy is the worst kind of trilogy: it hooks you with an excellent first book, then drags you through an uneven second book and halfway through a kind of boring third book before you finally scream "ENOUGH! I will no longer particiapte in this trilogistic marketing conspiracy!" (Then you skulk off to watch Star Wars Episode 6, and get even more depressed.)

But Red Mars, the first book, is really wonderful. Like a lot of SF, it gets away with some flaws because the ideas are so e...more

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May 26, 2008 Anja rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love Kim Stanley Robinson as an author. He writes very interesting sci-fis about space and exploring the universe but he also ties the book into current day issues (no matter how far in the future it is.) He creates in-depth characters that explore realms of science, religion, and relationships in all of his stories.

Red Mars takes place several decades in the future, around 2040ish (it begins) with Earth slowly collapsing because of population growth and depleting resources U.N. creates a gro...more

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Dec 16, 2008 Chadwick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: utopian-anarchist, sf, world-building-sf

I usually don't go for super hard sf, but this book totally pwned me. Red Mars is a supremely well thought out imagining of the colonization of Mars, with time and research put in to all of the scientific aspects as well as the cultural facets of transplanting human beings to a truly alien world. I found especially interesting Robinson's consideration of the question, how will Terrans become Martians? How will their minds begin to work differently? How will their metaphors, their standards of be...more

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Oct 05, 2007 Hillary Hall rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Since I talk about these books nonstop and everyone around me is tired of hearing about it, I figured it's time to write a review. They are totally, totally good. The premise is that 100 colonists travel to Mars in 2028 (or so) and create a life there... Immigration, transnational corporations, the UN, terraforming, politics, social change, revolution, more revolution, and liberal Martian hippies in low-g ensue, all across the span of 200 years. And since everyone lives a long time thanks to new...more

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Sep 04, 2007 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Sci-fi fans

This book is the first in a trilogy about the colonization and terraforming of Mars, told (mostly) from the perspectives of the first hundred colonists. It is grand in its scientific scope, but it is also a very human story. There is always something a little bit inspirational about exploring stories, about people who risk it all to learn something new, and this book is really the ultimate.

It starts a mere 30 years in the future, and given that the book is 15 years old, it's more like 15 years n...more This book is the first in a trilogy about the colonization and terraforming of Mars, told (mostly) from the perspectives of the first hundred colonists. It is grand in its scientific scope, but it is also a very human story. There is always something a little bit inspirational about exploring stories, about people who risk it all to learn something new, and this book is really the ultimate.

It starts a mere 30 years in the future, and given that the book is 15 years old, it's more like 15 years now. One hundred colonists, mostly scientists, are off on the first colonization mission to Mars. They will live there and try their best to make it a home. However, they all have different plans for their life there. Some want to terraform, some want to leave it in its natural state. Some want to create a new utopian society free from the restrictions imposed by Earth's cultural memory, and some want to use their new freedom as a way to practice the old ways unimposed. So on the one hand, it's a science fiction story, a prediction about the technology of the future and how it will shape our lives. On the other hand, it's a story about politics, a vision of the kind of world we could create without Earth holding us back. It's also about love, life, death and all the other things that really make a book good.

This first book focuses mostly on the science, with a little bit of politics. It is the story of the first years of colonization, building physical and societal infrastructure out of the void of an unihabited, lifeless planet. The way the story is told, which is by turns awesome and infuriating, is to have several long chapters, each 30-100 pages long, all told from the perspective of a single character. By creating characters of all different temperaments and persuasions, you see everything in all possible shades of gray (or red, as it were).

For example, one chapter is told from Maya's perspective, of her long losing battle to keep people friendly towards each other on the 6-month voyage to Mars. She fights with some people, forms alliances with others, all the while lamenting how it's not working.

The next chapter is told as another character, who looks back on the voyage and complains of Maya's constant controlling instinct, her annoying desire to keep everyone under her thumb and her mood swings.

The storytelling structure creates lots of things like this, chances to see identical events from other perspectives, and also to be able to see what people have in common, even when they can't see it themselves.

This book is amazing. It tells a story of building, of creating, of people having an open mind and doing great thing. Of course, in any human story, there's conflict and destruction amidst all this, but the overall march of progress is always present. I highly recommend it. The only bad part is that it's very long, and the sequels are not as good, but necessary reads to get the full "Mars" experience.(less)

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Nov 13, 2007 Jamie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: hardcore sci-fi heads only

Shelves: sci-fi-fantasy

An extremely detailed and ridiculously well researched novel on the colonization of Mars, this book is absolutely maddening. The characters veer from believable three dimensional humans to weird caricatures and plot devices within a few pages. And the author's exploration of the political implications of a newly habitable planet filled with resources for civilization is at first fascinating and then just boring. At least five or six times someone would yell out "This isn't like the discovery of...more

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Nov 28, 2007 C Lynch rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's a very well-written, dense, fascinating book that explores the colonization of Mars from the first settlers, to established cities, to terraforming, and then to revolution. Lots of interesting science; the research alone must have taken years. It's about geography, politics, economics, various hard sciences, psychology, and pretty much everything else. The characters are strong and interesting; Robinson writes from a different perspective in each long chapter. He also gets my Not-Sexist Sea...more

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Dec 27, 2007 Mitch rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Powell's used book buyers

Shelves: action-adventure

Some interesting plot events (the space elevator, its destruction, the interplay between Earth and its "colony", some of the practical concerns about living on Mars [but not bathrooms]) cannot paper over the enormity of this book's mediocrity. Consistently boring word choice, ideas that get argued but not connected, looong descriptions of landscape that add nothing to the story, regular use of the run-on sentence and a general use of 10 words when one will do (JK Rowlings's editor...?). Only the...more

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Jan 03, 2009 Jonna added it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

My now-husband brought me this book way back when we were dating and I just loved it. I tend to be picky about my science fiction -- I only like it if it's creatively futuristic, fairly feminist, and yet somewhat grounded in reality. But I'm addicted to the reali-topia Robinson creates in this series.

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Jan 15, 2009 Joleen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi

This is the opening book to a great series. However, before I hit the last 100 pages I wasn't sure I was even going to finish the book and had no intention of reading the others. There were simply too many characters for me to keep track of and much more detail of the Martian landscape than I what I could digest. Robinson opens with a murder on the red planet itself before jumping back in time to the first human voyage to Mars. Presumably, this was meant to pull the reader into the book before d...more

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May 31, 2012 Saxon rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Solid, easy to read and intellectually thoughtful in parts. Mars, of course, is an enigmatic setting, and I get off on this colonization stuff, with its wondrous technologies and the constant threat of grisly death. It all touches something in me that has existed since the age of 7, when I was enchanted by killer Star Trek aliens that looked like flying cheese danishes.

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Dec 28, 2008 Eric_W rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Stanley Robinson has written a very interesting series of novels (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) that speculate about what would happen should Mars be colonized. I have completed only Red Mars so far, but if the others are as intriguing as the first they will be well worth reading. Truly the book is a political treatise as much as an action science fiction novel. As soon as the first ship lands and the colonists begin to build a base they are bifurcated into two factions: those who would p...more Stanley Robinson has written a very interesting series of novels (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) that speculate about what would happen should Mars be colonized. I have completed only Red Mars so far, but if the others are as intriguing as the first they will be well worth reading. Truly the book is a political treatise as much as an action science fiction novel. As soon as the first ship lands and the colonists begin to build a base they are bifurcated into two factions: those who would preserve Mars in its pristine, primitive state, and those would want to begin the “” process that would try to recreate an earth-like environment. Both visions have a certain utopian quality to them. Earth has become overpopulated and hopes that Mars will solve some of its mineral scarcity problems. Soon the corporations have begun to dictate policy and by the end of the book a revolution is underway to cut the tie to earth and stop immigration of those looking for a way off the dying Earth. The original “ Hundred” become mythologized and after a treatment to prevent radiation illness turns out to virtually provide an unlimited life-span, they become revered (and feared — several are assassinated) for their supposed wisdom and insight. There is an underlying theme of the paradoxical utopian questions “ is to be done?” and “ have we accomplished?”

The story is told from several points of view and I found that of Nadia Chernyshevsky (most illuminatingly there is a Russian dissident named Chernyshevsky who wrote a volume of utopian fiction from prison entitled What is to Be Done? in the 1860s) the most compelling. She gains enormous satisfaction from the buildings and creations of her problem-solving accomplishments, but she is also sympathetic to the goals of the revolutionaries after it becomes evident how the political and ecological situation has deteriorated. The bad guys are clearly the multinational corporations who create their own security forces to suppress dissent and owe allegiance only to the profit motive. Another appealing character is John Boone (get the allusion?) who wants to build a better social fabric on Mars based on the physical realities of Mars, inevitably a harsh world. He becomes a wandering Socratic proponent of a plan for the new society. His answer is often to create dialogue among the many parties and in the end — nope I won’t tell what happens to him — tries to build a culture.

Robinson speculates throughout on what constitutes nature and speculates through the characters about whether we have an obligation or right to create or model the natural environment for our own purposes. (less)

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Apr 22, 2013 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My partner doesn't read a lot of science fiction, and, as a consequence, when she read the pull-quote on the cover of this book, which is something to the effect of "The best Mars colonization science fiction ever written," she thought it might have been damning with faint praise. Of course, the colonization of Mars is a popular topic in science fiction, and so Red Mars really had to earn its status on top of that pile. And earn it it does.

"Red Mars" is science fiction at its absolute best, a bo...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Maduck831 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.” (77) “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and push...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Lisa Hall rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I tend not to be a hard sci-fi reader and I listened to this one (audiobook). I was struck continually by the sheer amount of research that had gone into this novel. There is a lot of space/science presented and explained (in general terms)in what many reviewers outside of this genre would call an info-dump. The story revolves around man's immigration to Mars and the inevitable socio-economic factors that our protagonists, the first 100 on Mars, are drawn into. Most are 'scientists first' and ev...more

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Feb 09, 2013 Kurt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: anthropology, sci-fi

This isn’t an easy book for me to review, because while I admired it as much for its depth of detail as I did its ambition, I only rarely enjoyed reading it. By the same token, once I got to the end I was looking forward to the sequel as well as dreading the qualities that made this book a difficult read for me.

Hard sci-fi sets itself a pretty high bar for technical realism (or, in this case, realistic believability). In that regard, Robinson’s command of detail reminded me of a Tom Clancy nove...more This isn’t an easy book for me to review, because while I admired it as much for its depth of detail as I did its ambition, I only rarely enjoyed reading it. By the same token, once I got to the end I was looking forward to the sequel as well as dreading the qualities that made this book a difficult read for me.

Hard sci-fi sets itself a pretty high bar for technical realism (or, in this case, realistic believability). In that regard, Robinson’s command of detail reminded me of a Tom Clancy novel. Not being a scientist myself, I have no idea of how accurate he might or might not be (though the current explorations of the Mars Curiosity Rover casts a certain amount of doubt on the amount of water he posits being under the surface), and certainly we have to cut him a little slack on how fast technology can develop. It’s definitely true that one innovation can feed another, and it’s plausible to think that the tech that allowed these “first hundred” people to Mars meant that a number of other things were on the cusp of leaping forward.

Like a Clancy novel, however, the tech can overwhelm the narrative. This is a purely personal reaction on my part, but I felt that the detail subjugated the narrative. The story was overwhelmed. Not that it was difficult to follow, but that it bogged down. I found myself skimming long sections and looking for what happened next. He’d already established himself as a reliable authority on his world and its plausible connections to the one we live in; I didn’t need this to be reiterated so often.

The story begins with an event about two-thirds into the overall action, the assassination of a prominent member of the First Hundred. From there the action jumps back nearly fifty or sixty years to the company’s training in Antarctica. The group is international in scope and the politics are such that the American and Russian teams are the preeminent members. Knowing that this particular man is going to die and knowing who is responsible shapes your understanding of the early chapters of the book. Furthermore, Robinson switches POV with every major subsection RED MARS. It is a methodical and deliberate exercise in worldbuilding.

The downside of this approach is, like the technology, that it becomes excruciatingly detailed. I felt I had a great understanding of Maya, Frank, Nadia, and John – and even of non-POV characters such as Sax or Ann, whose perspective we don’t get until the very last section (that was a lovely surprise, in fact). John’s section for me was the weak point in terms of character development. Established as one of the most naturally charismatic of the First Hundred, smart, thoughtful, and reflective, the work to make him non-manipulative in his section actually undermines his character, making him instead a contradiction in his own terms.

One of the maxims that people talk about in regard to writing fiction is “Real life is boring.” Robinson has crafted a realistic novel about the settling of Mars, and to my mind it is too realistic, too pedantic, and too detailed. I could have as easily given this book 3 stars instead of 4, but that seems remarkably stingy given the scale and scope of this book. Its overall weakness is in its storytelling. The story is fantastic. There are no villains, but there are a lot of motivated people, there is a lot of money to be made, a lot of egos in the equation, and an entire planet – Earth – desperate for the resources that Mars would seem to offer.

If hard sci-fi is your thing, I can easily imagine not only a perfect read for you here, but a perfect trilogy. If fast pacing is what you’re looking for, this is almost certainly the wrong choice. But wow – how smart and how bold to put this together.
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Dec 13, 2012 Emma Weine rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: worth-a-quick-read, owned

Definitely a love/hate kind of book; love the technological advances and challenges Stanley-Robinson comes up with, especially as they're mostly based on non-fiction and technology that is already in use or soon will be, and loved the terraforming ideas for the same reasons. Even loved the geographical descriptions of Mars, some of which are utterly luscious and based on actual discoveries and live footage. That's what my two stars are for. But god I loathed each and every character, character p...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Hariboc8n8o16 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book polarized me. On the one hand I loved the science and technology, but then on the other the author's philosophizing sometimes really gets in the way. I read the book, and then re-read it sometime later after I thought about the fact that it was written by a pretty leftist guy in the late-eighties/early-nineties, which is a oft-ignored period in actual space history. If you consider it in that context it shows an honest reflection of a growing belief that it was the end of exclusive con...more

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About Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer, probably best known for his award-winning Mars trilogy.

His work delves into ecological and sociological themes regularly, and many of his novels appear to be the direct result of his own scientific fascinations, such as the 15 years of research and lifelong fascination with Mars which culminated in his most famous work. He has, due to his...more

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“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.” — 15 people liked it

“We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia.” — 7 people liked it

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Red Mars (Mars Trilogy #1)

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