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Red Mars (Mars Trilogy) Paperback – November 23, 2021

by Kim Stanley Robinson (Author)

4.2 6,681 ratings

Book 1 of 3: Mars Trilogy

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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.

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“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”
Highlighted by 1,405 Kindle readers
Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.
Highlighted by 1,222 Kindle readers
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
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Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
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Defend a weak new neighbor to weaken the old powerful ones, as Machiavelli had said.
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“Absorbing . . . a scientifically informed imagination of rare ambition at work.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Tremendous . . . a high-water mark in novels of Earth emigration.”—The Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Galileo’s Dream. In 2008 he was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment.” He serves on the board of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.

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“And so we came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West—it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.”

All lies, Frank Chalmers thought irritably. He was sitting in a row of dignitaries, watching his old friend John Boone give the usual Boone Inspirational Address. It made Chalmers weary. The truth was the trip to Mars had been the functional equivalent of a long train ride. Not only had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with nothing but the naked raw material of their selves. But John stood up there waving a forefinger at the crowd, saying, “We came here to make something new, and when we arrived our earthly differences fell away, irrelevant in this new world!” Yes, he meant it all literally. His vision of Mars was a lens that distorted everything he saw, a kind of religion. He would spout the same nonsense in private conversation, no matter how you rolled your eyes.

Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built freestanding on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons. For the Mars veterans in the crowd it was giddy stuff: they were on the surface, they were out of the trenches and mesas and craters, they could see forever! Hurrah!

A laugh from the audience drew Frank’s attention back to his old friend. John Boone had a slightly hoarse voice and a friendly Midwestern accent, and he was by turns (and somehow even all at once) relaxed, intense, sincere, self-mocking, modest, confident, serious, and funny. In short, the perfect public speaker. And the audience was rapt; this was the First Man On Mars speaking to them, and judging by the looks on their faces they might as well have been watching Jesus produce their evening meal out of the loaves and fishes. And in fact John almost deserved their adoration for performing a similar miracle on another plane, transforming their tin-can existence into an astounding spiritual voyage. “On Mars we will come to care for each other more than ever before,” John said, which really meant, Chalmers thought, an alarming incidence of the kind of behavior seen in rat overpopulation experiments; “Mars is a sublime, exotic and dangerous place,” said John—meaning a frozen ball of oxidized rock on which they were exposed to about fifteen rem a year; “And with our work,” John continued, “we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story”—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

John finished with this flourish, and there was, of course, a huge roar of applause. Maya Toitovna then went to the podium to introduce Chalmers. Frank gave her a private look which meant he was in no mood for any of her jokes; she saw it and said, “Our next speaker has been the fuel in our little rocket ship,” which somehow got a laugh. “His vision and energy are what got us to Mars in the first place, so save any complaints you may have for our next speaker, my old friend Frank Chalmers.”

At the podium he found himself surprised by how big the town appeared. It covered a long triangle, and they were gathered at its highest point, a park occupying the western apex. Seven paths rayed down through the park to become wide, tree-lined, grassy boulevards. Between the boulevards stood low trapezoidal buildings, each faced with polished stone of a different color. The size and architecture of the buildings gave things a faintly Parisian look, Paris as seen by a drunk Fauvist in spring, sidewalk cafés and all. Four or five kilometers downslope the end of the city was marked by three slender skyscrapers, beyond which lay the low greenery of the farm. The skyscrapers were part of the tent framework, which overhead was an arched network of sky-colored lines. The tent fabric itself was invisible, and so taken all in all, it appeared that they stood in the open air. That was gold, that was. Nicosia was going to be a popular city.

Chalmers said as much to the audience, and enthusiastically they agreed. Apparently he had the crowd, fickle souls that they were, about as securely as John. Chalmers was bulky and dark, and he knew he presented quite a contrast to John’s blond good looks; but he knew as well that he had his own rough charisma, and as he warmed up he drew on it, falling into a selection of his own stock phrases.

Then a shaft of sunlight lanced down between the clouds, striking the upturned faces of the crowd, and he felt an odd tightening in his stomach. So many people there, so many strangers! People in the mass were a frightening thing (as they were individually)—all those wet ceramic alien eyes encased in pink blobs, looking at him…. Usually when he spoke to an audience he picked out a few faces and the rest became visual filler, but with the sunlight coursing over his shoulder they all caught at his eye at once, and it was nearly too much. Five thousand people in a single Martian town! After all the years in Underhill it was hard to grasp.

Foolishly he tried to tell the audience something of this. “Looking,” he said. “Looking around … the strangeness of our presence here is … accentuated.”

He was losing the crowd. How to say it? How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still somehow better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?

Of course he could never say it. Not at any time, perhaps, and certainly not in a speech. So he collected himself. “In the Martian desolation,” he said, “the human presence is, well, a remarkable thing.” (They would care for each other more than ever before, a voice in his mind repeated sardonically.) “The planet, taken in itself, is a dead frozen nightmare” (therefore exotic and sublime) “and so thrown on our own, we of necessity are in the process of … reorganizing a bit” (or forming a new social order)—so that yes, yes, yes, he found himself proclaiming exactly the same lies they had just heard from John!

Ridiculous. But lies were what people wanted; that was politics. Thus at the end of his speech he too got a big roar of applause. Irritated, he announced it was time to eat, depriving Maya of her chance for a final remark. Although probably she had known he would do that and so hadn’t bothered to think of any. Frank Chalmers liked to have the last word.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Del Rey (November 23, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593358821
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593358825
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #30,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #305 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #378 in Exploration Science Fiction
- #1,300 in Science Fiction Adventures

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Kim Stanley Robinson

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Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.

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Tor Snyder

Amazing book

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2024

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An incredible blend of science and fiction. It's quite long but I was ready for Green Mars aa soon as I finished.

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Leighland Feinman

Part one of a comprehensive opus on Mars colonization

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2012

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I'll not mince words: Kim Robinson's books can be long slogs through dry, technical material. It's his writing style, detailed and full of depth. That's not going to fly with some people. Sometimes, even if you love it, you'll have to put the book down and walk away for awhile. But the Mars series is so powerful, so well done, and so relevant that I would classify it as one of the 'important' works that everyone needs to read.

But these books have rich, complex characters who remind me of the people I've met throughout my career in science and business. They have full histories and their interactions are complex and always-evolving. The series follows the same characters over hundreds of years (their lives are extended through science!) and thus allows the reader to follow the colonization and terraforming efforts on Mars over a long course of time. The first settlers, who are our viewpoint characters, have children and fight and die and exist in a greater context of cultural tides that ebb and flow and affect how they think. You, the reader, experience these changes along with them, feeling their sorrows and their triumphs.

It's a difficult journey. It feels tedious at times. But it is exceptionally realistic and well-researched. If people were to go to Mars in the next two decades, to settle there, this could be a lot of what it would look like. And interestingly, many of the cultural undercurrents are very relevant to the political discussions going on lately about just how much power and influence corporations ought to have. It's worth reading for that, if you feel you can handle the bits where Robinson waxes poetic about katabatic winds and Martian geography.

Red Mars itself focuses on the initial colonization, and how the first decisions made by the settlers can have effects that last hundreds of years. It's a complicated book, full of engineering, politics, and change. I hope you enjoy it.

4 people found this helpful

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T. Phillips

The Excellence of RED MARS

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2020

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I thought RED MARS was a sensational read, stimulating, imaginative, rigorous, intelligent and sophisticated in applying contemporary science and politics to a story about the future colonization and ‘terraforming’ of the ‘red planet.’

So enthusiastic am I, that I am dismayed by some of the negative notices on the first pages of this review section. I can only assume that readers who were disappointed expected something more on the order of a space opera like “Star Wars,” with it’s black hats and white hats and Ming the Merciless-style villains. I can appreciate a good space opera, it’s an old and loved SF staple, and I spent the early part of Covid lockdown compulsively reading through the eight part The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (the ninth and last book is due out in 2021, and it’s a TV series carried on Amazon Prime. The rights to dramatize Robinson’s MARS trilogy are apparently held by Spike TV). The Expanse is a space opera full of plot, violence, action, drama and incident. It’s an engine in full throttle that rarely lets up and it’s wonderful escapist reading. And I recommend it to those readers who have trashed the Mars Trilogy. It may be more like what you expected.

RED MARS has all those things and much more, but done in an entirely different style. Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer of elegance, restraint, and cool observation and his vision of the colonization of Mars feels meticulous, realistic and credible, which is no easy achievement. It’s not an entertainment machine, it’s a means of thinking about the political, scientific and philosophical ramifications of space travel. He takes the crosscurrents of nationalism and volatile politics and extrapolates what those could mean to a space colonization of Mars. His vision is thoroughly believable, which is all the more remarkable since it was written during the elder Bush administration. This is not a dull book. It is full of varied characters, passion, action and violence. There is plenty of story and plot. There is also a sense of the awe-inspiring grandeur of an alien world and the deep fervor it inspires in its colonists.

It is cerebral, so be prepared for a rigorous (not passively languorous) book that makes demands on readers. If traveling down various byways of science isn’t for you, stay away from RED MARS rather than criticizing a genuine achievement that happens not to be your style

41 people found this helpful

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Igo Hummaan

Challenging Read, Would Benefit from Illustrations

Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2022

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If you are looking for a Mars colonization story that covers every aspect of what such an endeavor might look like, down to the level of finest detail, this is the trilogy for you. Everything is described, including but not limited to: the tools used for building and fixing various elements; how the colonists shower; chemical compounds they have to manufacture to create concrete and other materials; and a healthy dose of love interests and "office politics". It doesn't quite fit the mode of a "Space Opera," but it is ambitious in what it attempts to convey, both on the level of world building and human interaction.

That said, it's a challenging read because the work-up to the main conflict and action takes time. It's fair to say the story would've benefitted from a more aggressive editor, cutting back on some of the exposition and every day dialog. The author wants us to know what it would literally be like to live and work on Mars with a collection of strong personalities, but the truth is as readers, it's better to be spared some of the more mundane or tiresome details. Making a work of fiction too much like real life, is not necessarily a virtue.

What would also benefit the story are a few well-placed illustrations or line drawings, showing us (instead of telling us) what some of the complex habitats, rovers, and other components actually looked like. It can be difficult to actually picture the things the author talks about at points. In fact, at points I felt this work might be better experienced as a trilogy of 2-3 hour movies or an HBO mini-series, marrying the detailed story with some impressive visuals.

Overall the quality of story-telling is good but I've rated this three stars for the amount of effort required to get through, and the lack of visuals where warranted.

19 people found this helpful

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Cliente Kindle

Empolgante livro de ficção

Reviewed in Brazil on May 11, 2023

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Gostei bastante da forma como a trama se desenrola e as características de cada personagem aparecem e evoluem ao longo da estória. Nos faz nos empolgarmos como o desfecho que dos dramas individuais de cada personagem e nos deixa com vontade de continuar lendo para sabermos mais.
A forma de exploração e assentamento em Marte é bem plausível assim como as questões éticas a cerca da terraformação do planeta. O livro foi escrito há bastante tempo e embora a ciência tenha avançado bastante em alguns temas em relação à data de publicação, o livro continua atual.

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Ohan Hominis

Science-first science fiction. Incredibly researched.

Reviewed in Germany on August 6, 2023

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Robinson is absolutely brilliant. The amount of research that has gone into making this book as accurate as possible is really remarkable. Plot is admittedly secondary. It's a degree of realism that's hard to find.

One person found this helpful

Alina

Para nada lo que esperaba

Reviewed in Mexico on October 11, 2019

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La verdad es uno de los libros más aburridos que he leído, esperaba mucho y no lo recibí, además esta muy largo.

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Rui

Profound and beautifully written

Reviewed in France on September 2, 2017

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Red Mars is a jewel of a book.
It is a completely believable tale of man's colonization of Mars, placed in the near future.
Aside from a beautifully written prose spiced with numerous poetical moments, it is replete with scientific and engineering ideas on what the human colonization of new planets will look like, which is what true science fiction is about.
But it is also a profound exploration of human nature - its misery and its greatness - and of how it will withstand, or not, the expansion to space and new worlds.
I was afraid it would be too close to our present to be truly interesting, but it turned out to be one of the greatest books I have read,

3 people found this helpful

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YU LIU

Amazing

Reviewed in Australia on April 11, 2022

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Amazing level of details from so many different aspects, I love it. It make me stop and wonder sometimes. Definitely worth reading.

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