Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64019 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-18
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Synopsis
The first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's massively successful and lavishly praised Mars trilogy. Mars -- the barren, forbidding planet that epitomises mankind's dreams of space conquest. From the first pioneers who looked back at Earth and saw a small blue star, to the first colonists -- hand-picked scientists with the skills necessary to create life from cold desert -- Red Mars is the story of a new genesis. It is also the story of how Man must struggle against his own self-destructive mechanisms to achieve his dreams: before he even sets foot on the red planet, factions are forming, tensions are rising and violence is brewing...for civilization can be very uncivilized.

Customer Reviews

Waste of time and money
Boring to read. Uninteresting characters. Not very good language. Too long. Very unlikely that we will send 100 scientist to Mars, at an enormous cost, without a really good way of controlling them.

Entertaining crash course in the practical side of planetary colonization
One of the most entertaining tours of physics, biology, sociology, and politics imaginable if you want to learn something from a novel as well as entertain yourself. Makes Asimov/Heinlein (I forget but one of them wrote something about colonizing the Moon...) look amateurish.

The thing that really struck me at the end was my usual puzzlement as to why there is no real political will these days for space colonization projects. Surely most of the voters out there would rather see governments pumping money into these kind of projects, that are highly unlikely to be privately financed, than the military when it is clear that eventually we will need a bolt hole somewhere. It was the government of the day that financed Columbus in his expedition not a corporation.

Is it just that NASA is rubbish ...?

It actually rates 6 stars!!!
Perhaps THE finest science fiction book I have ever read, and believe me I have read a lot of them. I am an avid sci-fi reader, having read anything from Star Trek & Star Wars to classics like Asimov, Clark & Herbert, to Philip K. Dick, Iain Banks, Ursula Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson etc etc etc... In all of these books I have found something to thrill my imagination. However, all of these authors usually emphasise one aspect of sci-fi, be it science, technology, philosophy, ethics, or simply genuine space opera with grand battles & laser guns. Nowhere have I found all of the above elements equally balanced. Robinson manages to create an account of a future Martian exploration that is simply breath-taking, both in conception and in execution.

Red Mars explores all posible aspects of a full-blown attempt to colonise Mars. Based on a solid, detailed & completely realistic account of the science and technology necessary for humans to colonise & terraform a new hostile world, Robinson goes on to explore the ethical, business, political, economical, religious and of course personal aspects of such an effort. What is amazing is that he manages to mesh everything into a coherent, albeit complicated, total, so much like real life itself that one cannot help but believe that once we decide to travel to Mars, that's how we are going to do it.

And he manages to do that without losing the human aspect! There are people among the First Hundred that we feel could live next door. Yes, they are brilliant scientists & cosmonauts, especially gifted and carefully selected, but they are also human like you & me, they have weaknesses, feelings, allegiances, preferences, agendas both obvious & hidden.... My personal favorites were Arkady, Nadia and Hiroko, but I loved the portrayal of each and every one of the characters, both good & evil.

I could go on writing pages, but I actually need only one word. The book is simply A MASTERPIECE. Read it, and then read it again (as I did). Because every time you read it, you will find something new to make you think, to make you laugh, to make you dream. Just read it.