What do you think?
Rate this book
The Greening of Mars
Explains how--by using current technology and scientific knowledge--the planet Mars can be made habitable
- GenresScience FictionFiction
215 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
106 people want to read
About the author
James Lovelock
36 books35 followersAlternate spelling of James E. Lovelock.
James Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City to Tom Arthur Lovelock (1873–1957) and his second wife Nellie Annie Elizabeth née March (1887–1980). Nell, his mother, won a scholarship to a grammar school but was unable to take it up, and started work at 13 in a pickle factory. His father, Tom, had served six months hard labour for poaching in his teens and was illiterate until attending technical college, and later ran a book shop. Lovelock was brought up a Quaker and indoctrinated with the notion that "God is a still, small voice within rather than some mysterious old gentleman way out in the universe", which he thinks is a helpful way of thinking for inventors, but would eventually end up as being non-religious. The family moved to London, where his dislike of authority made him, by his own account, an unhappy pupil at Strand School.
Lovelock could not at first afford to go to university, something which he believes helped prevent him becoming overspecialised and aided the development of Gaia theory.
James Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City to Tom Arthur Lovelock (1873–1957) and his second wife Nellie Annie Elizabeth née March (1887–1980). Nell, his mother, won a scholarship to a grammar school but was unable to take it up, and started work at 13 in a pickle factory. His father, Tom, had served six months hard labour for poaching in his teens and was illiterate until attending technical college, and later ran a book shop. Lovelock was brought up a Quaker and indoctrinated with the notion that "God is a still, small voice within rather than some mysterious old gentleman way out in the universe", which he thinks is a helpful way of thinking for inventors, but would eventually end up as being non-religious. The family moved to London, where his dislike of authority made him, by his own account, an unhappy pupil at Strand School.
Lovelock could not at first afford to go to university, something which he believes helped prevent him becoming overspecialised and aided the development of Gaia theory.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 25, 2025
What is it: that all-too-common thing, an effortless scifi utopia.
----
Why 2 stars: it is absolutely unfair of me to pick up Lovelock and Allaby's 1984 The Greening of Mars right after finishing Robinson's mid-90s Mars trilogy. But not for reasons that might seem intuitive. Both this book and Robinson's work were written after the Viking missions in the early 80s and before the swarm of missions in the late 90s that would significantly advance our understanding of Mars itself, so to some degree the two works are surprisingly similar in their understanding of and presentation of the red planet. Between the 80s and 90s perhaps the most important shift in technology was an advance in computing's role in everyday life, but Lovelock and Allaby anticipate that with shocking precision (this book's most accurate speculations, to my retrospect, are the page about e-commerce) and Robinson doesn't do much with the subject anyways, so again they remain relatively similar. I even wonder if Robinson had read this book within his own research, given particular facets of the terraforming process and Martian society that are almost exactly replicated between the two works.
No, instead, what sets the two works apart so drastically is, I think, simply a matter of rigor.
It's important to recognize that The Greening of Mars is not really a novel at all. It presents itself as one only in the shallowest sense. If you ask what "happens" in this book, it truly can be summarized as just: a Martian with an important briefcase takes a return ship from Earth to Mars to deliver said important briefcase. No characters, other than a few bits of self-exposition from the narrator; no arcs; no plot. And that's not inherently a bad thing (unless you're specifically looking to read a novel). But it does signal what this book actually is: a bit of science popularization. James Lovelock's name is attached largely because his ideas about self-regulating ecologies form the bulk of two chapters in the book, but the text, far as I can tell, is largely the effort of John Michael Allaby, British science writer and generalist. In their hands, The Greening of Mars is not a novel but an attempt to inspire the scientists of the 1980s to think about the way their various areas of research and effort might lead to a near future not only of improving the Earth but of settling another world.
In that work, I see two layers where a lack of rigor undermines the goal. One is an ease within the content of what's written; the other, an ease in the way it's written.
Regarding the content, I'm comfortable setting aside "scientific accuracy;" this is, after all, a speculative work. Allaby and Lovelock are presenting only some pages of actually evidenced/observable research and many more pages of projected and imagined scientific outcome. Inherent in trying to inspire scientists to dream of a future for their work is a willingness to step beyond what science has currently proven. And there's a long history of speculative science proving again and again that the human intellect is excellent at present-tense observation and terrible at future-tense projection. So, suspend your expectations of accuracy as you'd suspend your disbelief in any fiction.
However, regarding the content, I'm less comfortable setting aside social accuracy. The speculations in this book do not confine themselves to science or technology, but include also society and culture. In order to discuss the possibilities of science, of course the authors must also discuss the possibilities of the contexts in which science is conducted, which in the 80s (as today) are bound up in a global economic and political system. It is in these sections (maybe a full half of the book, albeit scattered throughout), that the inaccuracy of The Greening of Mars stands out the most.
The easiest example to point to is a section very late in the novel describing a white, knighted, British, male, industrialist entrepreneur arranging a swords-into-ploughshares deal with America and the USSR to convert their respective military-industrial complexes from the production of missiles to the production of spacefaring vessels to aid in the migration to Mars. In that section, the authors write that this effort would be met with "immediate, unqualified, world-wide support" because humanity wished to exchange "the unpopular manufacture of weaponry" for "the popular manufacture of 'tools for tomorrow.'" The forty years since those words were written have certainly evidenced that, in fact, conflict is popular, and tomorrow is unpopular. But the critique here isn't based on the forty years since this book was written. It's based on the millennia of human history preceding it. I and the authors can both look back and see that the tools of tomorrow have disturbingly often been byproducts or afterthoughts from the advancement of violence. Perhaps looking not forty years ahead to the mid-2020s but instead forty years prior to the mid-1940s would point to the particular relationship science has so often had with war.
A later section about the Martian economy also comes to mind. It includes the claim "altruism is the most sensible behaviour and its benefits are clearly apparent." Were it so easy.
Regarding the writing of the work, stepping outside the content, The Greening of Mars is an almost unstructured book. It is structured insofar as the speculations it contains are gathered loosely around consolidated topics of interest and those topics are gathered even more loosely into chapters, but the reading experience of those chapters and topics is essentially unordered. Early chapters include discussion of the experience migrating in cramped solar-sail ships, the manufacture of which is detailed in one of the last few chapters. The warming of the Martian surface is addressed in the middle of the text, the composition of the atmosphere in a later chapter, but the use of freon to alter that atmosphere is introduced in the first handful of pages. Bits and pieces of Martian culture emerge only as tangents attached to other chapters, so comments about Earth's ecology as understood in the mid-80s might end with startlingly brief claims that Mars will never see any military personnel on its surface.
I'm not concerned about the breadth of scope here. In fact, that's something I actively praised in Robinson's Mars trilogy. But that breadth, crammed into two-hundred pages that seem to have been assembled only by the thinnest line of stream-of-consciousness "ah! I should talk about that next!" makes for a poor presentation of what actually drives human progress. We advance, in science and technology as well as in society and culture, by clarifying the systems within which we live and work. Systems; not topics. This is precisely the value of taxonomies and histories, of reportage and review, of analysis and synthesis. We relate areas of study to one another and to the stories of that study precisely because it is the relationships and the stories that help us make sense of what we otherwise witness as chaos. The Greening of Mars is often a kind of chaos, in which the relationships between any given topic of thought and the surrounding topics is generally left unaddressed and in which the development of any topic of speculation is rarely contextualized within the real history of science that enables that speculation.
It makes for a quick read in the worst way.
This all seems like a harsh critique of a relatively innocent, albeit maybe a bit naive, work of speculative science popularization from forty years ago. But I think it's worth evaluating because here we are, forty years since the publishing of this book, having taken only the smallest steps towards the sort of progress that Allaby and Lovelock present. I can't help but think that perhaps we're in need of inspiration that grapples actively with the fact that industrialist entrepreneurs and geopolitical superpowers have priorities for the use of science that are not, in fact, the pursuit of a better tomorrow. And I can't help but think that perhaps we're in need of inspiration that grapples actively with the fact that the breadth and complexity not only of the universe we live in but of our ways of living within it require diligent and effortful communication to achieve the kind of clarity that might, at last, make apparent the benefits we could pursue.
----
Try this instead: interestingly, the best example I can point to of science popularization having a significant, documented impact on inspiring a generation of scientists comes from visual arts. The paintings of Chesley Bonestell have been noted by multiple generations of NASA scientists as influencing their desire to work in space sciences and technology, as he showed them a version of space that did not look like fiction but like reality.
----
Why 2 stars: it is absolutely unfair of me to pick up Lovelock and Allaby's 1984 The Greening of Mars right after finishing Robinson's mid-90s Mars trilogy. But not for reasons that might seem intuitive. Both this book and Robinson's work were written after the Viking missions in the early 80s and before the swarm of missions in the late 90s that would significantly advance our understanding of Mars itself, so to some degree the two works are surprisingly similar in their understanding of and presentation of the red planet. Between the 80s and 90s perhaps the most important shift in technology was an advance in computing's role in everyday life, but Lovelock and Allaby anticipate that with shocking precision (this book's most accurate speculations, to my retrospect, are the page about e-commerce) and Robinson doesn't do much with the subject anyways, so again they remain relatively similar. I even wonder if Robinson had read this book within his own research, given particular facets of the terraforming process and Martian society that are almost exactly replicated between the two works.
No, instead, what sets the two works apart so drastically is, I think, simply a matter of rigor.
It's important to recognize that The Greening of Mars is not really a novel at all. It presents itself as one only in the shallowest sense. If you ask what "happens" in this book, it truly can be summarized as just: a Martian with an important briefcase takes a return ship from Earth to Mars to deliver said important briefcase. No characters, other than a few bits of self-exposition from the narrator; no arcs; no plot. And that's not inherently a bad thing (unless you're specifically looking to read a novel). But it does signal what this book actually is: a bit of science popularization. James Lovelock's name is attached largely because his ideas about self-regulating ecologies form the bulk of two chapters in the book, but the text, far as I can tell, is largely the effort of John Michael Allaby, British science writer and generalist. In their hands, The Greening of Mars is not a novel but an attempt to inspire the scientists of the 1980s to think about the way their various areas of research and effort might lead to a near future not only of improving the Earth but of settling another world.
In that work, I see two layers where a lack of rigor undermines the goal. One is an ease within the content of what's written; the other, an ease in the way it's written.
Regarding the content, I'm comfortable setting aside "scientific accuracy;" this is, after all, a speculative work. Allaby and Lovelock are presenting only some pages of actually evidenced/observable research and many more pages of projected and imagined scientific outcome. Inherent in trying to inspire scientists to dream of a future for their work is a willingness to step beyond what science has currently proven. And there's a long history of speculative science proving again and again that the human intellect is excellent at present-tense observation and terrible at future-tense projection. So, suspend your expectations of accuracy as you'd suspend your disbelief in any fiction.
However, regarding the content, I'm less comfortable setting aside social accuracy. The speculations in this book do not confine themselves to science or technology, but include also society and culture. In order to discuss the possibilities of science, of course the authors must also discuss the possibilities of the contexts in which science is conducted, which in the 80s (as today) are bound up in a global economic and political system. It is in these sections (maybe a full half of the book, albeit scattered throughout), that the inaccuracy of The Greening of Mars stands out the most.
The easiest example to point to is a section very late in the novel describing a white, knighted, British, male, industrialist entrepreneur arranging a swords-into-ploughshares deal with America and the USSR to convert their respective military-industrial complexes from the production of missiles to the production of spacefaring vessels to aid in the migration to Mars. In that section, the authors write that this effort would be met with "immediate, unqualified, world-wide support" because humanity wished to exchange "the unpopular manufacture of weaponry" for "the popular manufacture of 'tools for tomorrow.'" The forty years since those words were written have certainly evidenced that, in fact, conflict is popular, and tomorrow is unpopular. But the critique here isn't based on the forty years since this book was written. It's based on the millennia of human history preceding it. I and the authors can both look back and see that the tools of tomorrow have disturbingly often been byproducts or afterthoughts from the advancement of violence. Perhaps looking not forty years ahead to the mid-2020s but instead forty years prior to the mid-1940s would point to the particular relationship science has so often had with war.
A later section about the Martian economy also comes to mind. It includes the claim "altruism is the most sensible behaviour and its benefits are clearly apparent." Were it so easy.
Regarding the writing of the work, stepping outside the content, The Greening of Mars is an almost unstructured book. It is structured insofar as the speculations it contains are gathered loosely around consolidated topics of interest and those topics are gathered even more loosely into chapters, but the reading experience of those chapters and topics is essentially unordered. Early chapters include discussion of the experience migrating in cramped solar-sail ships, the manufacture of which is detailed in one of the last few chapters. The warming of the Martian surface is addressed in the middle of the text, the composition of the atmosphere in a later chapter, but the use of freon to alter that atmosphere is introduced in the first handful of pages. Bits and pieces of Martian culture emerge only as tangents attached to other chapters, so comments about Earth's ecology as understood in the mid-80s might end with startlingly brief claims that Mars will never see any military personnel on its surface.
I'm not concerned about the breadth of scope here. In fact, that's something I actively praised in Robinson's Mars trilogy. But that breadth, crammed into two-hundred pages that seem to have been assembled only by the thinnest line of stream-of-consciousness "ah! I should talk about that next!" makes for a poor presentation of what actually drives human progress. We advance, in science and technology as well as in society and culture, by clarifying the systems within which we live and work. Systems; not topics. This is precisely the value of taxonomies and histories, of reportage and review, of analysis and synthesis. We relate areas of study to one another and to the stories of that study precisely because it is the relationships and the stories that help us make sense of what we otherwise witness as chaos. The Greening of Mars is often a kind of chaos, in which the relationships between any given topic of thought and the surrounding topics is generally left unaddressed and in which the development of any topic of speculation is rarely contextualized within the real history of science that enables that speculation.
It makes for a quick read in the worst way.
This all seems like a harsh critique of a relatively innocent, albeit maybe a bit naive, work of speculative science popularization from forty years ago. But I think it's worth evaluating because here we are, forty years since the publishing of this book, having taken only the smallest steps towards the sort of progress that Allaby and Lovelock present. I can't help but think that perhaps we're in need of inspiration that grapples actively with the fact that industrialist entrepreneurs and geopolitical superpowers have priorities for the use of science that are not, in fact, the pursuit of a better tomorrow. And I can't help but think that perhaps we're in need of inspiration that grapples actively with the fact that the breadth and complexity not only of the universe we live in but of our ways of living within it require diligent and effortful communication to achieve the kind of clarity that might, at last, make apparent the benefits we could pursue.
----
Try this instead: interestingly, the best example I can point to of science popularization having a significant, documented impact on inspiring a generation of scientists comes from visual arts. The paintings of Chesley Bonestell have been noted by multiple generations of NASA scientists as influencing their desire to work in space sciences and technology, as he showed them a version of space that did not look like fiction but like reality.
January 29, 2019
There is an old expression that in science fiction few things date more than visions of the future. Having heard about this 1980s work via an episode of BBC Radio 4's We Are The Martian series (itself produced as part of that British radio channel's 2017 Mars season), I was intrigued by it. Having tracked it down, this book by Gia hypothesis creator James Lovelock and science writer Michael Allaby was every bit as intriguing as it seemed but, also, frustrating.
Intriguing because of the vision it portrayed. How to get to Mars and colonize has been a favorite topic for writers for decades, "the next logical step after Apollo" to paraphrase Robert Zubrin. What Lovelock and Allaby's slim book (the edition I read ran a mere 166 pages) does is present a brief history of Martian colonization that began in the 1980s and runs someway into the future. Sir Travers Foxe is the entrepreneur who sets things in motion, using former nuclear missiles and CFC carrying machinery to start the process. Told from the perspective of a future Mars based human on the return journey from Earth, our unnamed narrator takes the reader on a journey through the history of the Mars colony and the science behind it. Grounded firmly in real science, it is hard not to be amazed and what might have been if someone like Elon Musk had shown up a couple of decades earlier.
And it's here that this slim book becomes frustrating. Lovelock and Allaby's book isn't a conventional science fiction novel which, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. What it more resembles is something like HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come, a "future history" heavy in ideas but lacking anything a reader can firmly catch onto such as characters and events. The problem with writing such a book is how quickly it dates and how naive it can seem, especially with predicting an early end to the Cold War and nuclear weapons. There are lots of intriguing details from how the greened Martian air affects vocal ranges and the entire final chapter, yet all are guilty of breaking that old maxim that one should show, not tell.
Further, the flipside of being so firmly rooted in real science is that there are times when it feels like one is reading a textbook rather than either a novel or a work of popular science. Even more so when it goes on for pages at a time about chemical processes, how solar sails work, and so forth. The resulting read is detached and dense despite the relatively short page count.
Indeed, that might sum up The Greening of Mars rather neatly. There are many fascinating ideas presented by Lovelock and Allaby in their vision of how not to terraform the Red Planet but make it friendlier for humanity. And yet those ideas are buried in a work that is less than inviting and at times difficult to approach. While of interest to Mars nuts, it isn't hard to see why the book has fallen by the wayside in more recent times.
Intriguing because of the vision it portrayed. How to get to Mars and colonize has been a favorite topic for writers for decades, "the next logical step after Apollo" to paraphrase Robert Zubrin. What Lovelock and Allaby's slim book (the edition I read ran a mere 166 pages) does is present a brief history of Martian colonization that began in the 1980s and runs someway into the future. Sir Travers Foxe is the entrepreneur who sets things in motion, using former nuclear missiles and CFC carrying machinery to start the process. Told from the perspective of a future Mars based human on the return journey from Earth, our unnamed narrator takes the reader on a journey through the history of the Mars colony and the science behind it. Grounded firmly in real science, it is hard not to be amazed and what might have been if someone like Elon Musk had shown up a couple of decades earlier.
And it's here that this slim book becomes frustrating. Lovelock and Allaby's book isn't a conventional science fiction novel which, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. What it more resembles is something like HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come, a "future history" heavy in ideas but lacking anything a reader can firmly catch onto such as characters and events. The problem with writing such a book is how quickly it dates and how naive it can seem, especially with predicting an early end to the Cold War and nuclear weapons. There are lots of intriguing details from how the greened Martian air affects vocal ranges and the entire final chapter, yet all are guilty of breaking that old maxim that one should show, not tell.
Further, the flipside of being so firmly rooted in real science is that there are times when it feels like one is reading a textbook rather than either a novel or a work of popular science. Even more so when it goes on for pages at a time about chemical processes, how solar sails work, and so forth. The resulting read is detached and dense despite the relatively short page count.
Indeed, that might sum up The Greening of Mars rather neatly. There are many fascinating ideas presented by Lovelock and Allaby in their vision of how not to terraform the Red Planet but make it friendlier for humanity. And yet those ideas are buried in a work that is less than inviting and at times difficult to approach. While of interest to Mars nuts, it isn't hard to see why the book has fallen by the wayside in more recent times.
February 26, 2018
It is interesting, somewhat outdated but still relevant read.
Read
June 9, 2019I have the german edition: Operation Marsbluete
February 24, 2025
Very dated. We have learned so much about Mars since this was written that it made the storyline very hollow to me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews