Cities form, science advances, cultures evolve. But peppered throughout them all, you get to see the history of Mars unfold.
Nirgal buys some land and takes up Martian farming. Arkady and Nadia get lost in a dust storm. Many of the chapters read like self-contained stories -some more interesting than others. It can sometimes feel like there is no plot. For John Boone, it’s the challenge of synthesizing all the incoming cultures into a single, unifying martian culture. For Sax Russell, it’s the drive to terraform Mars as fast as possible.
For Ann Clayborne -a geologist-come-areoligist from the First Hundred -it’s the untouched geology (areology) of the planet that fascinates her. With each character, we get a deep dive into the topics and issues that they find interesting. The books alternate between the perspectives of a handful of characters -each of them playing a unique role in Mars’ history. Which, it turns out, has it’s own name, areology. While I loved the attention to detail, I did have to slog through the odd dry chapter featuring long descriptions of martian geology. The books are incredibly well researched -sometimes annoyingly so. It begins in the near future with “the First Hundred” on they their way to settle the red planet, and ends almost two centuries later. The series -Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars-tells the story of humanity settling on Mars. The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is hard science fiction at it’s finest. There’s nothing I love more than a science fiction book with good science. Technology is not just magic with another name. Where authors aspire to be accurate with their depiction of reality.
When I read science fiction, I prefer to read hard science fiction.
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