Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars is on WWE's Most Listed and Most Nominated Lists, so a couple of years ago when I found a nice clean copy very cheap in a used bookstore, I bought it. I put it on the shelf, where I would look at it from time to time and think "too long, later." Well, later has finally come because of the 35 Challenge. Since I bought the book based on reputation, I really didn't know what to expect. I have a high opinion of the book, but I liked the book's first sections more than I did the last.

Thinking about how to review such a long and ambitious work is a bit daunting, so I decided to ask myself to describe the book in five separate words. (For you Doctor Who fans out there, I was inspired by the test Madame Vastra gives Clara in "The Snowmen.") Of my five words, the first three are the adjectives--Impressive, Nuanced, and Surprising . My last two have to do with the book's length. They are a noun Driving and a verb Edit.

Impressive

Robinson's project, the book's scope, and his writing are all impressive. He grabbed me on the first page with his poetic description of Mars. In this section, he talks about what Mars has meant to us Earthlings: "And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place" (3). There are many places throughout the book in which Robinson demonstrates what Mars means to the many different characters. He juxtaposes the goals and dreams of the original one hundred settlers, showing that Mars means something different to everyone. The main way he accomplishes this is through the terraforming debate: some of the settlers think that they should adapt to life on Mars, living inside habitats and studying the planet; others think they should use science to transform the planet to meet human conditions. Robinson never portrays the characters' opinions of terraforming as simplistic binaries; the issue is complex, and so are the characters' positions.

What I find more impressive is his use of secondary characters to show how the vision of Mars held by the first one hundred settlers is vastly different from the vision of Mars held by the later immigrants, which leads me to the next category.

Nuanced

Through characters who only get a memorable scene scattered here or there, the readers see a wholly different perspective. The waves of immigrants who appear decades later bring with them ideas of Manifest Destiny, that compete with the ideals of the original settlers. These immigrants believe that they can "tame" Mars and live a frontier lifestyle, just like their cultural ancestors did. They bring them the same fantasies of a better life but don't understand that they can't live off the land the way the pioneers did in America. A crowd's response to one of the original settler's orientation speeches demonstrates this:

"Of course we'll get out [of the cities, the habitats] if we can," one man said to him boldly.

Others chipped in immediately. "They told us not to come here if we wanted to get outdoors much. It's not like that on Mars, they said."

"Who do they think they are fooling?"

"We can see the video you sent back as well as they can."

"Hell, every other article you read is about the Mars underground, and how they're communists or nudists or Rosicrucians—"

"Utopias or caravans or cave-dwelling primitives—"

"Amazons or lamas or cowboys—"

"What it is, is everyone's projecting their fantasies out here because it's so bad back there, do you understand?"

Robinson creates many similar scenes that communicate various reasons for Martian immigration and the many fantasies projected upon the red planet.

Surprising

This book is usually categorized as Hard Science Fiction; therefore, I was surprised by how important the soft sciences are in Robinson's plot. Machiavellian politics dominate almost every section. In addition, Robinson mixes in plenty of psychological theories and sociological gamesmanship. In my favorite of these moments, the psychologist of the original settlers puts forth his theory of behavior. It is a matrix of introvert/extrovert and stable/labile characteristics that explain the early medical theories of the humors (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic and sanguine personality types).

Driving and Edit

I enjoyed immensely the first four sections, roughly the first half of the book. The last half of the book is dominated by characters, singly and in groups, traveling across the planet. Here the plot bogs down significantly. Things stop happening at the pace they had before. Instead, characters drive around and think about terraforming, natural disasters and politics, and then they stop and talk to other people about terraforming, natural disasters and politics. As they drive around, Robinson describes the surface of Mars ad nauseum. It is big; I get it. It is stark; I get it. It is dangerous; I get it. I don't need pages and pages of descriptions of fin ridges, canyons, craters, moholes, plains, basins, cliffs, volcanoes, and arroyos to understand this. I believe The last four sections could have been cut by about a hundred pages, and the story would not suffer. At some point, readers reach a saturation point with excessive description, and I certainly reached mine.

Conclusion

The sections about traveling to Mars and creating a settlement are fantastic in my opinion. The later sections drag and the fact that none of his characters are particularly likeable starts to become a deficient. In the earlier sections, their personalities did not matter because what they were doing was so interesting.

I like the fact that Red Mars ends without a significant cliffhanger. There is both a sense of conclusion and a sense that the story of these people will continue in the next book, Green Mars. I respect the book's intelligence and complexity, and I will pick up the next two books when I find them in a used bookstore, but I'm not really in a hurry to read them. The Years of Rice and Salt is on my TBR shelf, so I will be revisiting Robinson before I revisit Mars.