Kim Stanley Robinson: The Martians (1999)

Edition: Voyager, 1999
Review number: 737

This collection of short stories, all previously unpublished, were written to fill out Robinson's famous Mars trilogy after that had been finished. They mainly concentrate on the period covered by Blue Mars, the last and poorest novel of the three, which is a bit unfortunate, and most of them read like rejected sections from the novel, which is more so.

A small number of stories stand out. The most interesting are written from the point of view of Michel, the psychologist who accompanied the original colonists to help them continue to work together as a team. In them, however, the project is cancelled because of his report on the acclimatisation trials in Antarctica, which were used to decide on the final group from the short listed candidates. Then, years later, he meets Maya, who would have been the leader of the colony once more; they talk about what might have been if the colonisation had gone ahead.

If Robinson had published short stories as he had been writing the novels, they would probably have been better; I am sure that magazine editors would have prompted him to improve them, and filling out the earlier novels would have been more interesting. Something else I would have been interested in would have been non-fictional essays describing the relationship between the science described in the trilogy and current research. This sort of thing might not be to everyone's taste, but I am sure that it would be fascinating to many of the fans of Robinson's kind of hard science fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Blue Mars (1996)

Edition: Voyager, 1996
Review number: 626

The final volume of Robinson's Mars trilogy is set furthest into the future, and covers the longest period. The work that has gone into terraforming Mars has borne fruit, and by the middle of the ninety or so years described in the book it has become possible to walk outside unprotected in the low-lying parts of the planet.

Thanks to improving longevity treatments, there are still some of the original First Hundred colonists alive, and the book concentrates on them as the story of the Martian inhabitants develops, through a series of crises mainly concerned with the relationship between overpopulated Earth and Mars. Blue Mars follows on directly from the ending of Green Mars, as the planet becomes an independent political entity in the wake of the second revolution.

Blue Mars is easily the least impressive of the trilogy. This is because it is the most remote from the present day, which makes it more distant from Robinson's strengths as a writer. The plausible, detailed, and interesting science of Red Mars is its main virtue. The further away from today's science that the story goes, the more Robinson has to resort to fairly vague generalisations; the more he tries to concentrate on character (his major weakness); and the more he writes about politics (where he tends to sermonise). There are two very long and tedious sections which really drag the novel down: the political arguments leading to the drafting of the Martian constitution (an attempt to imagine a post-capitalist socio-economic structure which turns out to basically embody the US constitution with a weaker president), and the search to discover a cure for the memory problems experienced by the oldest of those given multiple longevity treatments.

It is a pity that this trilogy ends with its weakest novel, particularly when it began so well.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Green Mars (1993)

Edition: HarperCollins
Review number: 560

The second of Robinson's trilogy continues the story of the colonisation of Mars where the first left off. The series fits very snugly into an established science fiction tradition; colonisation of other planets has long been a favourite theme in the genre. As the years pass, we have come to know more about the other planets in the solar system. Conditions on Mars, for example, have gradually become understood to be harsher and harsher, so that Edgar Rice Burroughs could write about a dry and warm Mars with a breathable atmosphere, while Robert Heinlein could still write of a planet on which a human could walk unaided by insulation and breathing apparatus for a few hundred yards. Both of them envisaged a planet inhabited by ancient civilizations. It was really the Viking and Mariner probes which showed that this was not the case, and that Mars was far colder, more barren and had less water than had previously been supposed.

At the same time, the technology which could be used to colonise a planet has advanced, as well as our idea of what could be done. This has meant that there is space for a new vision of Martian colonisation every few years, each with greater detail and less vagueness compared to its predecessors. Robinson may well stand at the end of this line; the beginning of the process as he describes it is generally close to current technology. Most of the extrapolations are small and obvious enough, at least in the first two books (which take the story up to 2127). The possible exception to this may be the gerentological treatments, drastically increasing the span of human life (at least, for the rich and important). Since the main uses of this are not germane to the colonisation process (it's major purpose is structural, to make it possible to have a group of characters who span the entire trilogy), it is not a particularly important issue.

The importance of the trilogy as a whole is clear, but the stature of the second part is distinctly (and inevitably) lower than that of the first. In Red Mars, the scene is set, the major characters introduced and the terraforming process set off; the challenges to be faced and overcome are in many ways greater. The main issues here are political, as those living (and, indeed, born) on Mars become more and more bitterly opposed to the rapacious exploitation of Martian resources by the ruthless metanational corporations of Earth. Robinson hands the character based political interaction far less well than the astronomy and engineering of Red Mars - a traditional failing of science fiction writers.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars (1992)

Edition: HarperCollins, 1992
Review number: 488

Stories about the colonisation of the other planets in the solar system have long been among the staples of the science fiction genre. Robinson has created a compelling update of this theme, which has been comparatively unfashionable in recent years - as it has become more apparent just how hostile to Earth's lifeforms the other planets will be. Robinson's Mars is the lifeless, frozen desert revealed by space probes; the problems faced by the initial colonists (the "First Hundred") are those of survival in an environment far more dangerous than Antarctica, rather than relations with natives (as has frequently been the theme of earlier novels of Martian and Venusian colonisation).

Earlier writers used their colonisation stories to highlight concerns about social issues important to them which seemed relevant to their theme - imperialism, revolution in former colonies, civil rights. Robinson does much the same, with a different set of issues: environmental over-exploitation, the power of multinational corporations and over-greedy capitalism, the way that developed countries act as predators on the third world (the word is used by Robinson).

The story of the first colonists, from their training session in Antarctica to the space flight itself to conflicts between different ideologies among the First Hundred and back on Earth leading to sabotage and unrest, is told as a series of quite lengthy independent episodes which concentrate on about ten of the Hundred. These characters, obviously created to represent different political and social viewpoints, are well drawn, all of them imperfect, most sympathetic.

Robinson benefits both from today's greater knowledge about Mars - even in the seventies, stories were still being written in which human beings could survive unprotected on the surface for periods of several minutes - and from more detailed ideas about how terraforming could be carried out. This provides a background which is convincing though pessimistic (particularly in its Malthusian analysis of Earth's society). Red Mars has deservedly become one of the best known science fiction novels of the nineties.