Red Mars

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, the first volume of Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, was published in 1992. I have read the paperback volumes several times (every three or four years or so), and I have listened to the audiobook four times now. The audiobook is narrated by Richard Ferrone and is long at 23 hours 51 minutes.

The trilogy is hard science fiction in which all of the science and technology is plausible. The timeline of this book is 2026–2061.

Each of the eight parts of the book has its own viewpoint character, with the story told by an omniscient third-person narrator except for short expository sections told by a first-person plural (“we”) narrator.

Part One: Festival Night

The book opens in medias res with a festival celebrating the construction of the first town on the surface of Mars. The population of Mars has grown through immigration beyond the first hundred colonists to many thousands, with more than five thousand in the new town.

During the celebration, Frank Chalmers, the viewpoint character, manipulates the assassination of his rival, John Boone, by a gullible person whom Frank kills with a slow-acting poison to cover up the crime.

I am annoyed by this beginning. I prefer a linear narrative rather than having to go back and read something again that is out of place to understand the references. Since the new reader has no perspective on the characters in this part, the story doesn’t make much sense. I think this is a narrative trick that is taught in MFA programs.

Part Two: The Voyage Out

This part begins at the beginning with a review of the year of training in Antarctica during which time the hundred colonists were chosen from one hundred fifty-odd finalists. The individuals were watched and evaluated, and they trained in secondary and tertiary professions. Fifty men and fifty women were chosen: thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty from other countries. The average age is forty-six.

The voyage begins in 2026. (Here in the real 2026, a human voyage to Mars exists only in the addled dreams of the erratic billionaire Elon Musk.)

Maya Toitovna is the viewpoint character for Part Two. The colonists depart Earth orbit in the interplanetary ship Ares. Maya and Frank are the designated leaders of the Russian and American contingents. John Boone, who was on the first expedition to Mars and the first human to step onto Martian soil, has good looks, charisma, and natural authority through his fame, connections, and influence.

The colonists establish routine on the ship, which will take nine months to reach Mars. The engineers run frequent training simulations of the upcoming landing on Mars, with Arkady Bogdanov as the training specialist. Arkady occasionally adds instrument failures or catastrophic external events such as collision with an asteroid to make the simulations more interesting.

Many of the colonists form initial relationships, some of which don’t last long. There seem to be no same sex relationships or nonbinary characters. Maya and Frank have a brief affair, but Frank’s behavior makes Maya uneasy, and she ends the sexual side of their relationship, but not directly. The writing is good here, and I felt sympathy for Maya except that I felt that her judgement was poor in allowing the relationship to start.

Robinson explores topics such as orbital mechanics, world lines, Christianity in scientists and the difference between faith and science, and perceived power.

A solar radiation storm occurs, and the crew must take shelter from the radiation; the colonists wear radiation dosimeters, and Robinson provides a good explanation of why radiation is dangerous.

The colonists discuss the selection process and how many — perhaps all — of the them lied on the standardized tests to hide their weaknesses. It is a widely acknowledged mystery how Arkady, who is often disruptive, was selected.

Maya sees the face of a stowaway through a bottle in the farm, but she can’t find him. She doubts her reason and tells no one.

The crew begins to prepare for the landing on Mars, and they choose teams for the various functions needed on Mars. The majority of the engineers, medical, and farm people, sixty colonists in total, are designated to establish the initial base on the plains of Ophir Chasma, a canyon that is part of canyon system Valles Marineris.

Another team is chosen to begin transforming the moon Phobos into a space station; Arkady leads this group. A third team will travel to the northern ice cap to mine ice. A fourth team will carry out a geological survey of the planet.

Maya and John begin an easy and open relationship; Frank is resentful.

Ares enters orbit around Mars. The Phobos team leaves for that moon, and the first team of five, including Maya, begins its descent to the Martian surface.

At this point, the reader is most familiar with Maya, John, Frank, and Arkady. The other colonists appear briefly in scenes, but we don’t have a good idea of who they are. We know from Part One that Frank Chalmers is resentful of John Boone’s charisma and power.

Robinson is not afraid to wade into the technical details; many readers find them boring, but for me as a scientist, I find the technical details fascinating. Robinson has clearly done a great deal of research.

Part Three: The Crucible

This part begins with a description of the formation of the planet Mars.

The colonists arrive on the surface of Mars and begin building their base, Underhill. This is one of my favorite parts of the trilogy. Nadia Cherneshevsky, the viewpoint character, is competent, energetic, skilled, and a friend to everyone. Robinson delves into the gritty details of building the base, where Nadia is the chief trouble-shooter: “Building things was her great talent.”

Maya’s insecurity grows as she has problems in her relationships with Frank and John. Robinson does a real disservice to this character. No one with these traits would have passed the screening. A real life Maya, having been selected as one of the First Hundred, would not be so insecure and neurotic. For a space feminist viewpoint on Maya’s portrayal, listen to the Hugo, Girl! podcast, episode 75 from December 4, 2024.

We learn more about other colonists. Arkady continues to challenge the status quo with radical but occasionally practical suggestions. Nadia enjoys working with Hiroko Ai, the leader of the farm group, who is brilliant and always a couple of steps ahead.

Nadia loses her left little finger in a construction project.

Ann Clayborne persuades Nadia to go along on the expedition to the northern polar cap. Robinson again gets to immerse the reader in the details of geology and trip logistics. The amount of detail makes this very realistic. Nadia watches a beautiful sunset with Ann Clayborne. They climb onto the surface of the polar cap. Eventually they travel to the Martian North Pole. Ann is unhappy about the impending terraforming of Mars and the loss of the polar caps and the pristine landscape. Nadia is changed by this trip, having a new perspective on the wildness of the planet.

Arkady and his teammates come down from Phobos. Arkady makes recommendations for beautifying the base, the buildings and the grounds. “Now we are ready for the art of architecture.”

This part expands the dispute between Ann and Sax Russell, a scientist working on the terraforming of Mars, about preserving Mars versus terraforming the planet. There is a debate about the possibility of Martian life and whether terraforming should not go ahead since terraforming will likely wipe out any indigenous life. But no evidence of Martian life has been found so far, making it increasingly unlikely that there are indigenous living organisms on Mars. A strong argument for terraforming is that humans cannot live on the surface without a thicker atmosphere to protect them from radiation. Plans are apoproved for terraforming.

The bioengineers are selecting for lichen that will grow on the hostile Martian surface, using genetic engineering to improve “resistance to cold and dehydration and UV radiation, tolerance for salts, little need for oxygen, a habitat of rock or soil.”

Arkady and Nadia fly a dirigible and drop heater windmills on the landscape. The windmills are designed to convert wind energy into heat to warm the Martian atmosphere. (I find this thermodynamically dubious.) Nadia discovers that secret compartments in the windmills contain the genetically engineered lichen; they are unknowingly seeding life across Mars. Arkady and Nadia are overtaken by a dust storm (common on Mars), and with difficulty they escape. They begin a relationship during this trip.

At the end of this part comes the notification from Earth that hundreds more immigrants are scheduled to arrive and that terraforming should begin immediately.

I like this part because there’s lots of travel and lots of scientific and technological detail.

Part Four: Homesick

This part begins with a description of the lichen and other lifeforms that are beginning to live on and adapt to Mars. The descriptions of molecular biology, unfortunately, are partly correct and partly technobabble since Robinson doesn’t have a strong understanding of the science. Unfortunately, he can’t resist using the stale trope of Frankenstein’s Monster.

Michel Duval, the only psychiatrist among the first hundred colonists, is desperately unhappy. Part of his job is dealing with Maya’s mental illness. It’s surprising how incompetent Michel has become, but he is burned out from his duties.

Michel is the only speaker of French among the First Hundred, which is surprising since French science and engineering should have produced more members of the colonists. Michel spends long hours watching television so he can hear his mother tongue.

Michel explores the pseudoscience of classifying people’s personality types and discovers that he has reinvented the four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.

Hiroko’s people rescue Michel, and he goes with them to an undisclosed location in the southern hemisphere where they can live without interference. We learn that Hiroko has already mothered many children.

Part Five: Falling Into History

This part, the longest of the first volume, begins with a description of the progress being made in molecular biology, including an experiment that has successfully prolonged the lives of laboratory mice via DNA repair treatment.

John Boone is the viewpoint character of this part. Many more people have now arrived on Mars from many nations of Earth, and they are busy working on terraforming projects. John is visiting a mohole project run by Japanese engineers when an unknown saboteur causes a robot dump truck to fall to the bottom of the mohole, nearly killing John and the workers there.

John Boone begins traveling around Mars trying to find out who is sabotaging the terraforming projects. He visits Ann Clayborne’s group of areologists, where he learns that Ann is pregnant. John hears rumors about a mysterious person named Coyote, including that Coyote was on Mars before John Boone.

John Boone is making use of AIs similar to what we have available now in 2026.

John Boone regularly doses himself with a new drug, omegendorph, which seems to provide a chemical bliss without the side-effects of addiction.

John visits Sax Russell, and we get a description of Russell’s terraforming team and a good description of Sax himself. I enjoy the descriptions of the biology labs because they remind me of when I was a molecular biologist. I am nothing like Sax Russell, but I would have worked for him if I were on Mars.

Robinson does a nice job of balancing the extreme opinions of Ann Clayborne, who wants to preserve Mars untouched, and Sax Russell, who wants to transform the planet completely. This tension lasts through all three volumes of the trilogy.

I am entranced by the descriptions of the Martian landscape in this part.

People, including John and Maya, begin receiving the life extension therapy. It is not known how long the therapy will extend lives.

Construction of a space elevator begins. Mining of precious metals on Mars cannot be profitable until the space elevator is built because it’s too expensive to objects out of Mars’s gravity well. Megacorporations, the transnationals, begin asserting more power on Mars by importing their own security forces. The Mars treaty will expire in a few years, and irresistable economic and political forces threaten John Boone’s vision of a new society. A planet-wide dust storm begins that lasts for several years.

Robinson, through John Boone, explores multiple cultures that are not European. My eyes glaze over when there are discussions of religious beliefs.

John is politically naive. He visits Arkady on Phobos, and Arkady opens John’s eyes to what is happening economically and politically as capitalistic greed takes over Mars. Arkady mentions guns under the table, which becomes the title of Part Six.

Near the end of this part, when there is a gathering celebrating the entry of an ice asteroid into the Martian atmosphere, Hiroko and her group, including Coyote (who was the stowaway on the Ares), arrive for the reunion. John accuses Coyote and Hiroko’s children of carrying out some of the sabotage.

Late in this part is the mention of a pending celebration of a new tent city. We know from Part One that it is during that celebration when John Boone is assassinated.

Part Six: Guns Under the Table

This part begins with the reactions of various characters to John Boone’s death. It is mentioned in an offhand way that Boone’s killer died soon after the murder from slow-acting poison, which we know from Part One was administered by Frank.

Frank Chalmers is the viewpoint character of this part, which begins with the negotiation of a new treaty that attempts to balance the needs and desires of all parties. Frank is forced to accept many compromises.

A developing problem is that because of the new life-extending therapies, the population of the Earth is projected to spiral out of control, having reached ten billion by 2060 but with extended and unknown life expectancy. One of the biggest drivers of population growth is the falling death rate.

On the real Earth here in 2026, statistics indicate that we are already past the peak number of births per year, and projections forecast that because of the falling birth rate population decline will begin by 2080, even assuming life expectancy increases to 100 years. (See After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso.)

Earth is exhausting its resources, and it wants to export its excess population to Mars and import resources from Mars. Mars is suffering from having to absorb too many immigrants. Mining and mineral extraction on Mars increase. UNOMA, individual nations, and transnational corporations ignore the provisions of the new treaty, and Mars is relatively powerless as oppression increases.

This part ends with the first explosions of revolution.

Part Seven: Senzeni Na

Although “senzeni na,” which in English means “what have we done?” sounds like a Japanese phrase, it is actually the name of a South African anti-apartheid folk song.

Part Seven, for which Nadia is the viewpoint character, is the most thrilling part of Red Mars. Arkady Bogdanov’s followers and many other groups, presumably including Hiroko Ai’s followers, initiate a spontaneous and consequently a poorly organized revolution against the security forces of the United Nations (UNOMA) and the transnational corporations. But the Martian population is vulnerable since the tent cities of Mars are easily punctured through the use of lasers and other weapons, and many people die in the attacks, including Arkady and other members of the First Hundred.

The space elevator and the base on the moon Phobos are centers of control for UNOMA and the transnational corporations. The revolutionaries, some having prepared for a long time, are able to bring down the space elevator; the cable wraps nearly twice around Mars, causing spectacular destruction along the equator from the force of its impact. After learning of Arkady’s death, Nadia deorbits Phobos by activating braking rockets that Arkady and his group had installed as a defensive measure on the little moon.

Peter Clayborne, the son of Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier, is on the space elevator when its descent is initiated, and Ann and Simon cannot learn if Peter has survived.

Coyote, Michel, and other members of Hiroko’s group rescue Sax, Ann, Simon, Nadia, Maya, and Frank using cars disguised as boulders.

Part Eight: Shikata Ga Nai

The title of Part Eight is the Japanese phrase, shikata ga nai (仕方がない), which in English means “it cannot be helped.”

This part begins with Peter Clayborne’s rescue from the space elevator.

Ann Clayborne is the viewpoint character for remainder of this short part. This part contains mostly action. Ann is a viewpoint character again in Green Mars and Blue Mars, in which she becomes a more interesting and sympathetic character.

Kasei, Michel, Sax, Ann, Simon, Nadia, Maya, and Frank begin driving towards the southern ice cap in boulder cars. In a moment of inattentiveness, Ann gets the boulder car she’s driving stuck on a high rock near a fast flowing river of water, ice, and debris. Frank gets out to put a traction pad under one of the wheels, freeing the car, but he is swept away from a sudden rise in the river. The remaining seven finally reach Hiroko’s refuge under the ice cap.

General Notes

We get internal views into Frank, Maya, Nadia, Michel, John, and Ann.

Maya Toitovna, the Russian leader, is portrayed as beautiful, manipulative, self-centered, and emotionally insecure. As I mentioned earlier, women tend to despise Robinson’s portrayal of Maya as sexist and unfair. Maya’s behavior with Frank and John becomes tiresome.

Frank Chalmers is the male character who is equivalent to Maya in some ways. His personality is unpleasant. He, too, is in a position of power, but despite the selection process he turns out to be manipulative and insecure; he is much less influential than John Boone, and he knows and resents it. Frank’s character is partly redeemed by his accidental sacrifice in freeing the boulder car.

John Boone, through fame, competence, and personality is a natural leader. John is laid-back and unconcerned with many of the disputes and arguments among the colonists. I knew people like John Boone at UC Berkeley.

Nadia is my favorite character. An engineer with expertise in construction in cold climates, Nadia is extremely good at her job, and she is loved and admired by all. Nadia is Maya’s best friend, but she sees through Maya.

We see Arkady Bogdanov through Nadia’s eyes. Arkady, who has wild red hair and a red beard, is the radical, the trickster, the disturber of the peace, the mischief-maker, a Loki, with extreme ideas that are wildly unrealistic but still influential.

Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell are two characters set in opposition to one another. Ann, a geologist who loves pristine landforms, wants to preserve Mars as it is, and she hates the plans to terraform the planet. Sax’s role is to direct and accelerate where possible the terraforming activities.

We learn a little about Hiroko Ai, an expert in the design of enclosed biological systems. We learn through Michel that Coyote, the stowaway, is associated with Hiroko, and we learn that Hiroko’s group has been giving birth to many children. But Hiroko’s group departs to a secret location in the southern hemisphere, emerging once briefly to join the celebration described in Part Five.

The fun parts of the book for me are the parts where the settlers are building things (especially Nadia) and the scientists are working on the initial steps in terraforming the planet. I also like the areology (the Martian equivalent of geology) and the extensive descriptions of the Martian landscape. I’m not so interested n the developing political schisms among the settlers. But the First Hundred are all extremely intelligent and productive.

The destruction of the space elevator makes a thrilling event in the trilogy. As we learn in Green Mars, its destruction helps start a sort of dark age on Mars, which is suddenly isolated from Earth and barely able to meet its own needs. In the Apple television show Foundation, the space elevator of Trantor is also destroyed.

Many people dislike these books as containing (1) characters they don’t like; (2) too much boring political discussion; or (3) too many technical details. Parts of these books have each of these problems for me, too, but overall I have enjoyed reading them many times.

Red Mars was nominated for a 1993 Hugo Award for best novel, but the co-winners were two equally excellent novels, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I admire all three books.

Rating: Five of five stars (excellent)

Resources

In their Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary podcast, professors Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang read and discuss the Mars Trilogy and the sequel, The Martians. They produced fifty-one episodes from April 2018 through December 2019.

Read A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith to learn why it is extremely difficult if not impossible for humans to colonize Mars.

Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t seem to have his own website, but he does have a Facebook page.

A good resource for the writings of Kim Stanley Robinson is kimstanleyrobinson.info. That site’s timeline for the Mars Trilogy is fairly accurate but inaccurately conflates some events.

Hachette Book Group is the publisher of Robinson’s later books.