Kim Stanley Robinson
1993
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
SPOILER ALERT
This is the second installment in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It is a sequel to Red Mars,
the extremely realistic story of the original hundred colonists’
landing and their first few decades of settlement on the red planet.
In this book, the population of Mars is growing fast. Some of the growth
comes from immigration from Earth, as it always has, but much of it now
also comes from children born on Mars. The native children tend to be
physically different from Earth people – taller and leaner, better at
loping around in the lower gravity.
Martian political conflicts still abound and are even more complicated.
Most importantly, since Mars is now run by transnational corporations,
there are all kinds of resistance movements across the planet trying to
organize a second revolution.
There is also still a basic tension between the “greens” (who want to
terraform Mars) and the “reds” (who want to keep Mars in its original
state). The greens are winning by default, having released some
unauthorized lichens which have adapted to the atmosphere and have taken
off. Since it would be next to impossible to bottle this up again, the
reds are getting increasingly hostile and reactionary.
Robinson tells the story while switching among the points of view of
several different people. Sometimes we follow Sax Russell, one of the
first hundred colonists and a terraforming proponent. Sometimes we
follow Ann Clayborne, another original colonist and one of the most
ardent reds. Sometimes it’s Nadia Chernyshevski, a genius at
construction who has built many of the power plants and major
settlements and only reluctantly gets involved in politics. And
sometimes it’s Nirgal, one of the native first-generation Martians.
This technique is great because after living in the shoes of all these
different people, you find yourself being sympathetic to all sides of
the political debates. You realize there is no clear-cut easy answer to
any question about development. You see why they fight, and you also see
how they can actually find common ground and work together sometimes.
I think my favorite characters are Nadia, who is very practical and
realistic, and Sax, who was one of those who originally started the
clandestine seeding of the planet but who learns a lot from Ann and goes
through a lot of changes of heart over the next hundred years.
I found the politics less interesting than the biology, however. While
all the bureaucratic conflicts are going on, the “greening” of Mars is relentlessly
underway. The lichens that the first colonists distributed have started
to produce oxygen and are mutating into new varieties. As the book goes
on, we begin to see leafy plants and bushes and finally animals –
insects, centipedes, and birds. Robinson is so good at this hard, realistic, imaginable SF. I
just loved the unpredictable and very, very slow but inexorable transformation of Mars.
Toward
the end of the book there is a catastrophe on Earth when a huge chunk
of Antarctic ice breaks off and begins to melt. Sea levels rise,
destroying many coastal cities. I had a difficult time watching Earth descend into
poverty and chaos while up on Mars people were still able to make and re-make
their own societies. It reminded me a little bit of the story in Ray
Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles where the population of Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war and the only humans left are the lonely colonists on Mars.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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