panguitch's Full Review: Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars
Red Mars is one of those books people talk about in a way that makes you feel like a bumpkin if you haven't read it. I may still be a bumpkin, but I've read it now, and I can understand the hype. The first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy about the colonization and re-creation of the Red Planet is ambitious in scope, unabashed in its speculative science, and unflinching with its characters.
Published in 1993, Red Mars puts 2027 as the year a permanent colony will be established on Mars. 100 of Earth's brightest have passed through years of qualifying processes to earn a role on the Ares which will voyage nine months before reaching Mars. Awaiting them are previous shipments of supplies and equipment, everything from bulldozers to a nuclear reactor.
Physicists, geologists, botanists, engineers, and, yes, even such Golgafrinchans as politicians and journalists, are giddy with the sense of making history. But nine months is a lot of time to fill. The inevitable intrigues and conflicts that spring up in the Ares hothouse don't end when the colonists touch down and set to work. Moreover, Mars's days as a scientific outpost are short-lived. As the years and then decades pass and increasing multitudes follow their trail to Mars, the first hundred's conflicts are magnified. The messy phenomenon known as humanity grasps Mars ever more firmly to its bosom.
Robinson shifts his viewpoint between the book's eight sections, deeply inhabiting various members of the first hundred, allowing for some rich characterization and making the core of the novel very personal, underneath its layers of social action and science setting. The characters struggle with their personal relationships in a thickening soup of debate between "Reds" and "Greens" over terraforming and the escalating tension between nation-states, transnational corporations, and political ideologies.
Large swathes of the novel are distinctly environmentalist or Marxist or both (some "eco-economists" argue that their calculations are better able to determine the value of human occupations than is the market), and the most charismatic characters advocate revolution of some sort, though this is principally a vision of starting human society anew, given the opportunity and/or responsibility of a new world. In opposition to these idealists stand corporate goliaths, represented by cardboard characters, eager to strip mine Mars into oblivion.
Though cliched, this conflict is certainly serviceable, and has aged better than the American/Russian dominance portrayed in the early parts of the book--it's easy to see that Red Mars was written before the dust of the Cold War had settled. More importantly, Robinson's portrayals of these scientists fighting for their differing models, theories, and worldviews is a rich treatment of Homo scientist.
Robinson's speculative science is rigorous and he doesn't shy from including figures. His social criticism is intriguing and challenging, without being propagandistic. And most of his diverse characters are compelling, though several suffer from a dull lassitude. More than anything, this is the story of Mars, with the planet as protagonist, a Gulliver beset by human Lilliputians, struggling to bind it to their contradictory purposes.
Unfortunately, Red Mars almost feels self-aware of its epic nature, and indulges in repetitive passages that not only communicate to the reader the vastness of the planet's geography and the diversity of its personalities, but seem intent on forcing the reader to experience them as directly as the characters do. Along with this occasional overkill are passages, like the entirety of Part 4, which I'm not sure are necessary. The theorizing was interesting, but I don't know if the psychologist's reductionist classifications of the rest of the cast's personalities adds much to the story.
Despite these occasional strains on my bumpkin's attention span, Red Mars is a remarkable book. This isn't an adventure story. But if you enjoy a broad, historic sweep of action and don't mind some dense passages and some that are leisurely, even repetitious, Red Mars deserves your attention.
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of t...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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