Red
Marsby Kim Stanley Robinson
Reviewed by Bill Dynes
Red
Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Reviewed by Bill Dynes
Red Mars is the first of a trilogy, followed by Green Mars and Blue Mars. In a way, the novel is a victim of its excesses -- too many characters, too broad in its time span, too many assumptions left unexplained. But in spite of those weaknesses, the novel deserves the attention it has gotten (it won the 1993 Nebula Award).
Mars itself has been an almost permanent player in the history of science fiction, and Robinson's handling of the exploration and colonization motifs is among the most plausible and scientifically accurate of recent efforts. In part, that explains the sprawling nature of the work; the terraformation of a planet is going to take a long time.
But the science here is simply the backdrop to a story about how people with vastly different political, scientific, and ecological ideologies interact. And since the characterizations of the novel are rarely particularly complex or deep, the novel's really about how those ideologies themselves interact. The conflict between the Red and Green parties on Mars reflects the struggles here in our own time between first and third world nations, between business and ecologists, or between practical and theoretical science. In all these struggles, one of the salient questions is how do we cope with the responsibilities that we have been given as inhabitants, some might say caretakers, of our world?
The novel resists casting these various conflicts as either-or dichotomies; Mars, once humanity has reached it, will never be wholly what it was, regardless of which political or scientific ideology wins out. Without the money and people brought in by the space elevator, other kinds of exploration couldn't be carried out. Again, we're faced with people asked to make choices from among a conflicted collection of options. Those options may at times be mutually exclusive -- should we or shouldn't we colonize Mars? But it's when the options fade off into bewildering shades of gray that things really get interesting!
