Kim Stanley Robinson is not an easy author to read or to love. Some of his novels can be counted among my favorites (The Years of Rice and Salt), and others (The Gold Coast, Forty Signs of Rain) I simply hated — or couldn’t even get through to the end (Fifty Degrees Below). Even the books I loved required a lot from me: they are thick, dense and epic, layered with so much hard science and social science that they can sometimes read like textbooks rather than novels. But with Robinson’s best books, the effort is worth it. Red Mars is a good example.

Robinson’s epic about the colonization of Mars (the first book in a trilogy on the subject) covers a lot of ground. Sure, it tackles the myriad technical problems involved in colonizing such a hostile planet, including how to build a space elevator for easier transport of settlers and exploitation of Mars’s resources. But from there, Robinson takes on even more weighty themes: the clash between those coming to Mars to try to create an entirely new way of life and those back on Earth who want to retain control; cultural conflicts among the various ethnic and religious groups spreading out to Mars; the discovery of an innovative medical procedure that greatly extends the human lifespan and the implications for an over-populated Earth; all climaxing in a planetary revolution propelled by all of these issues.

This is a ponderous book with a lot of big ideas. It may be a bit overlong — sometimes it seems as if all the characters do is drive around by themselves for great distances over the barren Martian landscape — but those sections may be excused by the action of the rest of the novel. Robinson actually helps us believe that living on Mars is something we can achieve, while showing us that these advances will probably only exacerbate our very human problems. ( )

I very much appreciated the complexity of this narrative. It is neither a simple quest plot (though colonization of Mars could easily fall into that), nor the more subtle character study of the human species in extremes. Robinson instead treats them all; through seven POV characters, and decades, Robinson puts a mirror to human endeavor, avarice, ingenuity, and endurance, all while introducing the reader to a stark landscape, such as we will never see in our lifetimes (given current NASA projects).

My only complaints are with the constant feeling of false starts (which I must admit, may be more my genre expectations that a weakness in the text), and the not-actually-subverted treatment of Asian and Arabic characters as alien, or inscrutable.The focus on Americans and Russians of both genders, and word-choice in other-wise neutral passages makes the assumed audience very noticeable, and the passages concerning Muslims and the Middle East unfortunately date the text, not just that it was published before there was an agreed-upon spelling for "Muslim" in mainstream English, but also their assumed bargaining position in the more political portions of the story.

For fifteen years old though, it's not holding up badly at all. ( )

This is the third Robinson title that I've read and it will probably be the last. I appreciate the grand scale of the book and its insight into the sociology of the colonists. I think, as a textbook, it may be instructive at some time in the future. I should say that I enjoy character-driven science fiction and this is nothing if not that. However, as an entertaining novel it falls short. It drags in many places. There are a lot of holes in the plot and in the underlying assumptions - the speed with which the colony becomes self-sufficient, the ability of one group to move out on their own with very few resources and no reasonable way to create their own - these oversights bothered me. I like that the characters are not black and white and are fleshed out quite well. But even here some of their actions seem to make them into caricatures. Without giving away any plot points I don't think Frank's actions toward John are explained nor do they seem consistent with his personality. Arkady, who we don't know very well, seems to go to extremes. I think Robinson needs the characters to represent various viewpoints and often sacrifices realistic personalities when he does so. The book gave me a lot to think about but I had enough problems with it that I don't plan to read the rest of the trilogy. ( )

Rereading after 15 years this first book in Robinson's magisterial Mars trilogy, I was struck once again by the immense amount of planning and research that must have gone into it. This volume is actually fairly pessimistic, but there are many grace notes that point the way toward Robinson's more usual hopefulness. ( )

A hundred hand-picked colonists travel to Mars; they create a loose-knit scientific settlement, not unlike one of the Antarctic bases, and set to work. Their little utopia slowly begins to chafe against later settlement; twenty years down the line, there are half a million people on Mars, terraforming and industrialising is underway, and the power is shifting into the hands of the multinational corporations. By an authorial sleight of hand (a life-extension treatment), our original protagonists are still around, and we see them schisming and splintering over how best to respond to it. Fifteen years further on, and there are restive shantytowns of migrant workers clustered around the cities, with power firmly in corporate hands. A strike, a riot, and suddenly a spasmodic and messy revolution. Some of our protagonists are ringleaders, some are trapped in it; but none of them can control it.

There's a nice pattern to it; the journey and the settlement, a growing and flourishing society, and then it begins to decay under outside pressures. After attempts to shore it up fail, we go back down the same path; settlement is replaced by destruction, with the painstakingly built townships wrecked, and our viewpoint characters are forced to flee in desperation, on a new and harder journey, through the irrevocable effects human terraforming has had on the planet. It's not a happy end, but it's a convincing one - and there is a sequel, after all.

Mars is beautifully described - Robinson has a certain way of writing about desolation, and it comes across well. The last section, a long journey across the changing planet to safety, really brings this out; you get the feeling that this is a real place, not a fictional construct.

I'm pleasantly surprised on re-reading; some elements I only vaguely remember seem a lot more prominent. The whole quasi-mythical status of the First Hundred, for example; the passage of people reminiscing about John Boone, which quietly shifts from "where were you when he died?" through ever more ludicrous stories - two of which we know to be untrue - until the stories switch to Paul Bunyan retellings, and the shift is complete. The background of the characters is interesting to re-examine - the First Hundred are explicitly stated to be mostly American & Russian, with a few foreigners; the settlements later are said to be from a wide range of countries, but we only ever seem to see a close focus on the Arabs (and occasionally the Swiss). I'm not sure why, but I suspect deliberate authorial choice to only write what he was comfortable with trying to get right. No-one seems to be excessively stupid or uncharacteristic, though it would have been nice were Hiroko and her farmers not quite so clichédly enigmatic.

All this aside, it caught me, this third or fourth time through, for an entirely unexpected reason.

There's a scene mid-way through the book where Boone, the first man on Mars, reflects on growing old. He was born in 1982, and is now in his sixties. I first read this in, what, 1999-2000? My generation landing on Mars in 2020 was just about conceivable. Now... well, we're debating whether or not we'll fit a sample-return mission in by that year. Of course, it's obsoleted itself before then. It's post-Soviet, but at the same time not really; the Russians and Americans are still effective superpowers, and there's passing talk of "the Commonwealth" in that weird federal-state way people expected the CIS might turn into. It's a little sad, to have it presented like that. It might still happen; it might even happen somewhat like this, barring the changes to Mars we've learned over the years. But it won't ever happen to us like this.