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    Red Mars
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    Red Mars
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    Red Mars
    Ebook770 pages12 hours

    Red Mars

    By Kim Stanley Robinson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel • Discover the novel that launched one of science fiction’s most beloved, acclaimed, and awarded trilogies: Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterly near-future chronicle of interplanetary colonization.
     
    “A staggering book . . . the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.”—Arthur C. Clarke

    For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light onto its surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 27, 2003
    ISBN9780553898279
    Author

    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952. After travelling and working around the world, he settled in his beloved California. He is widely regarded as the finest science fiction writer working today, noted as much for the verisimilitude of his characters as the meticulously researched scientific basis of his work. He has won just about every major sf award there is to win and is the author of the massively successful and highly praised ‘Mars’ series.

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    Reviews for Red Mars

    4/5

    2,142 ratings87 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      It started well, becomes pretty tedious at times, but finished with a flourish. There were a lot pages spent on the relationships, especially the romantic aspects, that contributed to the tedium.

      This is really a story about how capitalism will devour anything it gets its hands on, regardless of the cost.
    • 3/5
      Well written, but I wasn't interested in the story.
    • 3/5
      This book reads more like a jumble of things that happen over 40 years or so than a book plot, which I suppose is intended to read more like history, but it gets a little dull at times. I think I might have liked it better if it had be 3 or so books with more traditional rising and falling narrative arcs, but then again it might have been a lot more tiresome that all the characters were kind of awful and hyper-focused on their own narrow interests.
    • 4/5
      One of the best of a crop of Mars exploration novels from the early 90s.
    • 4/5
      Red Mars was not what I expected. I thought it would be more of a space opera but it was too steeped in science to that alone. In that respect, it reminds me of The Martian. The science stuff was my favorite part of this story. I also liked how the author portrayed the different factions that formed on Mars. I think this is a realistic view of the future of Mars if the human race every colonized it.The thing I didn't like is that in some places the plot moved too slow. I think the author got side tracked sometimes describing how something worked. Still, I recommend this book to all lovers of Sci-Fi.
    • 3/5
      Red Mars is the Moby Dick of interplanetary SF novels. Just as Melville's classic tells you everything there is to know about whales and the industry of whaling, Red Mars does the same with Mars and its colonization.

      It took me over 3 and half months to digest this whale of a book. I liked the story, enjoyed the complex, driven characters, found the scientific and social extrapolation utterly convincing. But it was all such a darn chore to read.

      I sampled some of the other reviews on GoodReads to try to figure out why. Some of these reviews are even more tedious than the book itself (and that's saying a lot!)

      An ambitious and intelligent novel that is, to quote some critic, "much easier to admire than enjoy."
    • 5/5
      This should be Elon Musk's strategy guide to colonizing Mars. It's that detailed, science-based and fascinating. 
    • 5/5
      This was a fantastic read. The characters all felt real, and each moment of pressure was vividly felt, as well as each moment of peace. It makes me excited for a day when we finally go to Mars, but also makes me wary of the various issues that will result. (I'd say I'm a green, by the way. Make Mars habitable, but don't make it Earth 2)
    • 4/5
      I've had this Mars trilogy on my TBR pile for a while & have had the books waiting for me so it being summer, I decided to get to the first. I enjoyed following the main characters from the first 100 but I can't say that I particularly liked any of them. I enjoyed watching what motivated them especially when it came to the treaty negotiations in the final thirds of the book. The question of who and how a group is governed and managed plays throughout the book and with Earth in an ever tenuous situation, there's no way this is going to end politely or simply. In fact, things take a deadly turn before this ends and what comes next is in flux. Also, seeing new religious traditions take shape on Mars alongside those who've retained the faith and worship traditions they had when they were on Earth was interesting and well done.

      For me the book was best in the first and last thirds, the middle just felt unnecessarily ponderous and meandering. There was far too much time spent on the John/Maya/Frank ever shifting love triangle. They were,, none of them rendered so deeply as multifaceted characters to make it worth that much attention and it didn't influence or steer the real political and economic situation on Mars, so seriously, who cares? If I'm honest, I'm kinda looking forward to the next book because I won't have to be bothered with some of the main First 100. Most were as irritating as they were interesting and I'm just ready to meet some new people and see them take up the cause. The only one of the group that I wanted to see more of remained seriously remote and elusive most of this book but she finally showed up at the last page. The ending really gave me hope.

      I'll definitely read the next because it feels like it's just getting to what has most got my interest. I'm looking forward to see the next generation get into the game as their only home has ever been Mars and I hope to see more of Earth's push. The corporations gambit and the response to it have altered the entire planet so, very interesting times. Recommended for fans of colonization science fiction.
    • 4/5
      I may have skimmed a lot of the sections on Martian geology, but I was pleasantly surprised by much of this book and will read the rest of the trilogy, but not all at once.
    • 3/5
      Original. I enjoyed the spots where something was actually happening, but it was very long-winded.
    • 3/5
      A look into a future where we have the technology to colonise and terraform Mars. And as usual, the complications are caused by the human dynamic of how a new society is formed by the first 100 scientists sent over and the conflict between the people who want to make Mars their home and the Earth corporations who just want to profit from it.
      I don't claim to be a science expert, so I can't say how accurate or plausible the science is, but it was an enjoyable read.
      However, I must admit that I did skim some pages at the end with long descriptions of the landscape because I just wanted to find out what was going to happen next.
    • 5/5
      Recall really enjoying this novel about the early stages of the colonisation of Mars.
    • 5/5
      Tasking himself with a novel about the colonization and initial terraforming of the red planet, the author clearly acquired a truckload of knowledge about how this work might unfold. There's plenty of science to be had which I'm incapable of evaluating, but it seems adequate in 2016 for a novel that was published in 1993 and taking place in 2026. I don't expect developments would move as quickly or smoothly as this novel's pacing requires them to, but otherwise it satisfied my inexpert credibility. To that extent, it met expectations. Where it surprised me was that it goes well beyond just being about applied science in the earliest days of the colony. The initial hundred settlers we get to know a sampling of are soon lost among the thousands who arrive to populate fast-expanding settlements, and the story expands to address psychology, economics, religion, multiculturalism, politics, the media, law and order - every aspect of human society is attended while exploring how events might unfold. There's also no shying away from the ramifications. Every hurdle becomes an ongoing complication in the plot rather than being magically resolved off-stage, which can be refreshing and taxing at the same time. Conveying the wonders of Mars is secondary to describing technology and how it is applied, and then also to the turmoil of a rapidly growing Martian society. The story runs hot and cold, fast and slow, with parts that fly past and more technical parts that slowed me right down. It felt like a bit of work to get through it, so avoid this if you're looking for light and breezy. A far cry from fantasy SF like Dune, this is an excellent capture of how things might really play out. It feels like a true glimpse into a possible future beyond what I'll live to see, unless someone comes up with that age-prolonging drug in time.
    • 5/5
      I finished this last night in the car and I am still in awe. This book takes Mars from its formation in the solar system to our colonization and terraforming of the planet. The author takes great care to present things from diverse points of view, we see through the eyes of both a character for whom our very presence on Mars is destroying it and who wants nothing more than to be alone with the planet exactly as it is and a character whose ideas for terraforming Mars are too radical even for the UN.
    • 2/5
      Everyone in the book is depressed or mentally ill. The one character who isn't insane is addicted to pills. Story doesn't flow.
    • 5/5
      A gorgeous look at the politics and practicalities of settling another planet. I found this story to be thought-provoking and insightful, with enough detail and real science to back up the plot and the characters. I didn't like all the characters, but each one was thoroughly portrayed, with consistent desires and motivations, each one believed that they were doing the best thing for the colony, and that is an impressive feat to pull off for any author.
    • 2/5
      Could have shaved off 100 pages of describing martian topology. Also strange choice to have assassination attempts on the protagonist as the subplot to the main plot about international deal-making. Like we can get 5 pages on what erosion does to canyon formation but if John almost gets killed we got less than a paragraph of emotional turmoil before we were back to contract disputes
    • 3/5
      Entertaining premise; interesting story. Way too much exposition.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic hard science fiction. Both insanely in-depth and outrageously grand in scope. Shame about the farcical characters (Hiroko going that extra mile), not as stupid as Neal Stephenson's town fair curiosities but past a certain point the matter of degree is irrelevant. That's not really important though as the story is driven by much bigger forces than a single character's actions and the cast is quite big so you're not stuck with any one of them for long.
    • 4/5
      Science meets politics in space. Loved the various protagonists & how the story progresses by following each for a while then jumping to the next. Each has his/her own fluahed character & internal dialog. Can be a bit tough at times though.
    • 4/5
      This one took me so so long to make it through, I feel like I have been reading this book in stops and starts for a couple years now. Really an impressive feat of imagination and detail, grounded in reality but encompassing remarkable ideas and concepts, occasionally I found it veered into boring, but there were always amazing twists and turns along the road that made it well-worth the effort. Looking forward to seeing what comes next in this saga.
    • 3/5
      Engaging enough to read the next book. It got a bit boring in the middle but it may have just been the pace I was reading at. The ending was fairly gripping though.
    • 5/5
      This book had a great story to tell, how we might go about colonising Mars.The author has managed to impart a science fiction vision of the way things could work in a believable manner. To this he has added a number of elements that make the story a great read. We have a cast of believable characters that have both good and bad aspects to their characters, we have the politics of how they wish to behave in what they see as a best-for-Mars view, often at odds from the instructions directed from Earth. Then there are the dynamics between the group of original colonists themselves and as time progresses how they influence the newer arrivals to Mars.The writing itself is well done and its use of words and grammar add a rhythm to the reading that underscores the mood of the story perfectly.A great read that delivers both a realistic science fiction premise for colonising Mars along with a great story of the human side of such an event.
    • 1/5
      I just finished reading Red Mars and was so disappointed. This book had so much potential going into it, but in short the characters suck. The main characters in Red Mars are all part of the first 100 people to colonize Mars. You don't get to meet all 100 of them (thank god), but out of the ones you do meet there is not one of them that is likeable. This lack of any characters to get attached to or even like a little makes reading Red Mars a painful experience. There are some good ideas about Mars, the technology to live there, and ways to terraform it all presented from characters that are just not enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      If Robinson were better at writing characters, this could have been a book I'd really love. It has an engaging sweep of a plot, it makes Mars feel more real and reachable than anything else I've read, and all the politics & ecology running through it feel at least possible, mostly plausible. But the characters are so painfully thin! Each is either a pure vessel for an ideology (and at times their arguments made me feel like I was reading the lefty Ayn Rand), or a nation profession combo caricature. By far my favourite parts of the book are the long sections in which Mars itself is the main character, because in those this flaw recedes. And the worst parts are the interpersonal drama because I could so readily slip into dropping the names altogether and just reading it as "Japanese gardener talks to Russian engineer", and so on.

      Overall I enjoyed the book enough to keep reading, but found it frustrating enough that I went and read the synopses of the other two in the trilogy because I can't see myself getting around to reading the actual books. The strengths of it left me wanting to hear speculative non-fiction from Robinson, but his weaknesses as a writer of fiction undermined this book pretty badly for me.
    • 3/5

      Read it for the first time in 1993.

      Going into this book 20 years later, the feeling I had was one of trepidation. Would the book have stood the test of time?

      And the answer is: Unfortunately no.

      One of the things that I've noticed almost from the onset was a huge dissonance (I don't remember spotting it 20 years earlier, but now I did): Why plan the mission without firmly establishing at least some sort of general idea about what sort of terraforming might be done?

      I cannot imagine spending hundreds of billions of dollars to send Men to Mars without a proper plan in place. It was quite inconceivable more than 20 years ago, and it still is.

      Also at times I had the impression that there were things Robinson just didn't want to bother to develop. The name of Underhill" pops up out of nowhere in the middle of a paragraph inside a chapter with no explanation at all. You'd think the naming of the first settlement would be somewhat more momentous.

      It just doesn't seem like there was much of a story present at all.

      Great swaths of the book consist of characters wandering around being lonely and accomplishing nothing, though it hardly feels like there's much character development to speak of.

      hen they wait until after they arrive on Mars to have some big, nasty row about terraforming? Surely this would be an issue that would have been hammered out well in advance of anyone leaving orbit?

      What about the fact that the 1st 100 settlers waited until arriving on Mars to start bickering? How could the 1st 100 have been chosen so badly?

      The answer given is not convincing, ie, apparently everyone lied horribly during the recruitment phase because they wanted to get there... WTF??? What kind of behaviour assessments were given to this guys??

      What about Maya? What was the purpose of including her thread in the book? It serves no purpose, except as the love triangle Boone/Chalmers/Maya.

      The only redeeming fact about the book is the Science. For that 3 stars.

      "
    • 4/5
      The two best writers that I've discovered in the past two years, Francis Spufford and Tim Kreider, both praise Robinson's Mars trilogy with great enthusiasm, but I found the atmosphere a little thin. To be sure, not only is the science convincing and detailed, the scenery is vivid, and the characters have a depth and versimilitude not often seen in hard-core SF novels. The trouble is that while Robinson has the imagination to create a convincing array of disparate characters, he doesn't have the power to inhabit them. All of the characters, whether manic, depressive, bluff, cold, or impulsive, are described as from a distance, in the same dispassionate authorial voice — even in the sections told from their points of view. This makes the story less thrilling than it has every right to be. It's particularly troublesome in the chapter given over to the perpetually aggrieved Frank Chalmers, Every story benefits from a great villain, but Chalmers' fury seems petty and dyspeptic, impossible to respect.An epic of Martian terraforming and colonization is a grand prospect, especially when even at the close of the first book it's becoming clear that nobody here is going to build another Earth, but that an entirely new kind of human society—and a new race of people—is being born. But it would be so much better to be among these people, as a reader, than it is to be merely observing them with a dry, emotionless perspective, however godlike the vision.
    • 3/5
      I recently decided to broaden my reading horizons into the realm of science fiction, which I am not very well read in. It isn't that I particularly have any aversion to sci-fi, it's just that I am largely unfamiliar with the genre, and I always find myself unsure of where to begin. I did a bit of cursory research on a good sci-fi starting point, and this book came up. I have to say, it looked promising - highly acclaimed and well known, with a plot that sounded fascinating.A large group of qualified people are chosen to become the first colonists of Mars. The story follows their voyage through space, their first months on the red planet and how they adjust to life there, and the problems that inevitably arise as they continue to live and work there over the years.This book was nothing like what I expected it to be. The main focus of the plot was politics rather than colonization - endless, droning, tedious politics. If you think that it sounds difficult to make the lives of people on Mars boring, that was exactly my thinking as well. But as the book went on (and on), I soon realized that Robinson had found a way to make this marvelous storyline into just that.The writing was dry and unfeeling, and to be honest this book was a chore to get through. I’m surprised that I managed to make it all the way to the end, though I did take an unusually long time to finish it. At times, during brief descriptions of the landscape and sunsets of Mars, I felt a glimmer of interest. But these were usually over within a sentence or two, to return to politics.My other big problem with Red Mars was the characters - who were dreadful. They argue and quarrel over a great many things, all of them seeming to be matters that would have already been heavily planned for. Now that they are on Mars, carrying out the most expensive mission in history, the fate of such massively important decisions is to be left in the hands of two people whining and fighting? It seemed very suspicious.One of the characters to get the most attention was Maya, described as a virulent Russian beauty - made to seem a sort of femme fatale tigress. But I just couldn’t see it - sure, the author and the other characters can tell us that that’s who she is, but I didn’t feel like the actual character was written so strongly. She came across as more indecisive and ditzy to me. There was some sort of very drawn out and unconvincing love triangle that never drew me in, and the sex scenes seemed ridiculous (a man describes a woman’s breasts as “magnets to his eyes,” for example). At one point in the book, possibly in an attempt to explain to the reader why all of these characters were so whiny and awful, Robinson reveals that there was a personality test that they were all required to take before being accepted into the mission - but guess what? Every single one of them admits that they lied on it. In fact, they gleefully say that they answered every question the opposite of how they felt. And so, here they are, squabbling and pouting their way around Mars.I wanted so much to find an epic science fiction novel that brings to life another world and evolving culture. It’s out there - it’s just not this one.
    • 5/5
      Recall really enjoying this novel about the early stages of the colonisation of Mars.