Kim Stanley Robinson
1996
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
SPOILER ALERT (For Red Mars and Green Mars)
This is the third book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy
about the colonization of Mars. It is, on the whole, not quite as
awesome as the first two books in the set, but it has its own strengths.
After the more than one hundred years of construction, terraformation, feuds, sabotage, and war that were described in Red Mars and Green Mars, Blue Mars rewards
the colonists’ perseverance (and yours) with a Mars that is now warm
enough that its ice is melting and forming oceans. Plants and animals
are rapidly adapting to the Martian environment. And, at sea level,
humans can breathe the air without special equipment.
The
people of Mars have turned the planet into a habitable world and have
created a unique system of government with which to manage themselves.
They actually are now doing much better than the people of Earth, who
are dealing with environmental catastrophes and political chaos.
Robinson
is an absolute master of the super-hard science fiction that makes up
his Mars trilogy. He describes in minute, realistic detail what the
colonization and terraforming of Mars could be like, and at the same
time understands the emotional reactions the colonists might have to
their situation. There are two themes in Blue Mars that particularly show how wise Robinson is about what people would feel at this point in their progress.
One is the colonists’ need to have some ritual way of looking back and celebrating what they have accomplished. All
three of Robinson’s Mars books explore the complicated tensions between
“greens,” who want to change Mars to make it habitable for humans, and
“reds,” who want to keep Mars as it originally was. Obviously, by the
time of Blue Mars, the greens have won. But the reds get a victory of a sort when everyone agrees on a set altitude on Olympus Mons
above which nothing will be grown or built and the atmosphere will be
preserved in its original state. Greens and reds (and everyone in
between) begin to use this zone as a remembrance space; once a Martian
year, they hike up and build a city of temporary tents like those used
by the first colonists and they spend a while there remembering what it
was like in the beginning and thinking about the friends who have died
along the way.
The other theme I really liked was the effect of super-long lifespans on the minds of the First Hundred colonists. In Blue Mars,
fewer than 35 members of the First Hundred survive; the rest have been
killed in accidents, murder, and battle. Those remaining have all taken
the life-extending treatments invented in Red Mars and are now over two hundred years old.
There
are a number of side effects of living this long. For example, as time
passes, the original colonists find they have more and more in common
with each other and less and less in common with either the newer
colonists or the native-born Martians. This makes them tend to draw
together, even if they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum
or if they originally hated each other.
Another side effect is
that even though their brains are perfectly functional, so many things
have happened to them that they start to forget or misremember the
details of events from a hundred and fifty years ago when they first
arrived. Sometimes they say they feel like their early experiences
happened to someone else, not themselves. And some of them are unable to
keep up with the constant changes that surround them and retreat
emotionally, living only in the past.
In general, Blue Mars is
a good conclusion to Robinson’s Mars trilogy. There are a couple down
sides to it, however. For one thing, it is extremely long, even compared
to the first two books. And also much of the last part of the book
deals with the expansion of human space colonization into the rest of
our solar system, which I found more abstract and less interesting than
the original colonization of Mars.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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