1992
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
SPOILER ALERT
Red Mars is super-great, hardest-of-the-hard science fiction.
It is the first book in Robinson’s Mars trilogy and it follows the experiences of the first hundred human colonists on Mars through their difficult first few decades of settlement. It is so practical and so thorough in its details that you can completely imagine it happening in real life. And you can picture yourself there, standing on the frozen, rocky Martian surface with them.
Robinson's “First Hundred” settlers were all carefully selected by their various governments for their technical expertise, diversity of skills, and psychological profiles. They trained together for years in Antarctica in preparation for setting up the first permanent Martian colony. After landing on Mars, they begin building ingenious living quarters, transportation systems, greenhouses, and power plants.
A small group also begins an unauthorized, clandestine effort to introduce Antarctic lichens and other hardy living organisms to the planet to start oxygenating the atmosphere.
Every detail in this book is totally realistic, from the heated pressure suits they have to wear on the surface, to the different types of structures they choose build as homes, to the machines that extract ores and elements from the air and rock.
The colonists’ inevitable arguments and power struggles are equally believable. The longer the First Hundred stay on Mars, the more they separate into the “greens,” who want to terraform Mars to make it livable for humans, and the “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it is.
Meanwhile, as each colonist is trying to create or preserve their own preferred version of Mars, Earth has become dangerously overpopulated and in serious economic trouble. The multinational corporations on Earth who funded the original colonization effort now naturally want to exploit Mars’s resources for Earth’s benefit, and they start sending up more people to do so. Many of the original colonists need the corporations’ support to do their work, but even many of the more Earth-friendly of them are resistant to this complete exploitation.
Corporate representatives eventually build a space elevator to make it easier for ships to make the trip between Earth and Mars. The elevator is a giant cable stretching from a high point on Mars’ equator up through the atmosphere to the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid which has been captured and moved into geosynchronous orbit above the surface station. Passengers and cargo use elevator cars to go up and down the cable between the asteroid and the planet's surface; ships only have to dock at the asteroid and don’t have to burn fuel to get in and out of Martian gravity.
The elevator is great for commerce and immigration. But to many of the First Hundred--especially the "reds"--it symbolizes all that is bad about the direction Mars is going. Eventually, the anti-corporate resistance organizes a revolution, which is unsuccessful and results in the corporations taking over Mars in a military crackdown, but during which they are at least able to bring down the space elevator. The collapse of the elevator is beautiful; it is tremendous slow-motion destruction on a gigantic scale.
To complicate the Earth-Mars conflict still further, a group of doctors on Mars develops treatments which can prolong life by hundreds of years--and they start giving the treatments to their fellow First Hundred colonists. They keep this secret as long as they can, but eventually Earth finds out. This causes chaos on Earth; some politicians want to keep the treatments exclusive, knowing that giving them to everyone would only worsen the population problems, while others say that the treatments are a human right and should be available to everyone for free.
Regardless of what is good for Earth, the age treatments are great for the reader, because they mean that some of the original First Hundred colonists will be able to live long enough to see the fruits of their labors in Robinson’s fantastic later books, Green Mars and Blue Mars.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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