Kim Stanley Robinson

This story is set in the second half of the Third Millennium CE, and it concerns the arrival of a pioneering interstellar expedition to the exoplanet Aurora in the Tau Ceti system via a generation starship, followed by the return of the ship to Earth with a portion of its descended population. It is in seven long chapters, of which the bracketing first and last are in a limited third person voice with a viewpoint character named Freya, the daughter of the ship's de facto captain (really show more chief engineer, without even that title) on its final approach to Aurora.

The middle five chapters are in the voice of the ship's artificial intelligence, a bundle of systems including a core quantum computer, briefly personified as "Pauline," but ultimately referring to itself as "we, the ship." This novel was written before the 2020s chatbot revolution powered by large language models, and author Kim Stanley Robinson considerably overestimated the scrupulousness of machines in fabricating narratives, as well as the novelty of asking one to tell a story. But the resulting speaker is interesting and humane, allowing Robinson to mix in his usual variety of scientific exposition and philosophical reflection in a new and elegant way.

The agency of this computer system and its involvement in the political difficulties among the ship's inhabitants reminded me distinctly of Mike in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. There were also clever shout-outs to Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (79) and Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun (301) to position Aurora in a long science-fictional conversation.

I have read other reviewers who found the characterizations in this book lacking or unsympathetic, but my experience was to the contrary. As in Robinson's seminal Mars books or his Years of Rice and Salt, my reading discovered characters with real human inconsistencies, confused loyalties, and emotional depth.

Despite Robinson's care with scientific detail, he was in fact relatively sanguine about the terrestrial qualities of the Tau Ceti exoplanets, and he chose to disregard the dangers posed by the system's conspicuous debris disk in terms of meteoric impacts. But his conclusion about the habitability of exoplanets in general is extremely dire. He proposes an "answer to Fermi's Paradox" (191) that rests on the premise that biota from different stars are inherently toxic to one another, and he suggests that any species clever enough to travel between systems soon become too wise to do so.

This book is genuinely "hard" sf, both in the accustomed sense of attention to technical and scientific matters, and in the sense of difficulty of its message, which runs against the inertia of received sf metanarratives. It is pessimistic in many respects, and the middle of the book often gave me a feeling of dread about what must follow the difficulties described. But I was glad that I persevered, and I really enjoyed the final two chapters, which were both terrifically unconventional and in their own ways inspiring. show less

With Blue Mars, the author could easily have chosen to embroil its plot in civil war and strife among various Martian factions battling for control. What he opts for instead is something much more complex and hopeful: the working through of compromise and negotiation between opposing viewpoints that it takes a minor miracle to put in the same room together, let alone achieve any kind of lasting, workable agreement among. This is the far more difficult story to tell with any credibility, and show more the more rewarding one to read. There's less action this way, but some of this novel's greatest moments are the quiet ones in which characters reflect on trends and outcomes as they take stock of their surroundings, on Mars, on Earth and elsewhere.

The entire trilogy has been a wrestling between views that cannot all achieve their vision. The author proved he can move the story to any character's perspective on this problem and bring me to believe in that person's viewpoint. As much as I side with the terraformers and ultimately rooted for them, consequently I can appreciate the other views that were shared. My greatest frustrations are with the characters who can't or won't share this empathy (especially Jackie and Zo).

To my mind, the focus was always on characters' positions along the political spectrum rather than their individual stories, more geared toward exploring approaches and ideas for our future than moving its characters through a plot. I saw them primarily as symbols or little more than a thin fictional lens through which to explore how the settling of other worlds might play out. But I was surprised by how much I came to care about these characters after all. Even without intricate plots laid out for them, they led realistic lives with confusions, hopes and loves that I could relate to. And this ending gets so many things right.

The Mars Trilogy offers no simple solutions to complex problems. Instead it dives fearlessly headlong into that complexity, exploring all the layers. It comes up for air to provide the glimpse of a possible future that will never shed that complexity but one that doesn't have to end in chaos, anger and mutual destruction. show less

A spaceship containing around two thousand humans is engaged in multi-generational interstellar travel, a journey of 160 years, from Saturn to the Tau Ceti system. As the story opens, it is approaching its destination. The engineer, Devi, is trying to keep the ship running properly. She is fixing problems occurring due to the length of the trip, deficiencies in design, entropy, and mechanical stresses. Consumables are running low, and destabilizing forces (such as devolution and mutations) show more inhibit the ship’s ability to maintain a healthy balance of all compounds, nutrients, and lifeforms in the biomes. The deceleration and increased gravitational pull add to the stresses on both people and spaceship. Eventually, a landing party reaches Aurora, a moon in the Tau Ceti system. After this point, any further plot points would be spoilers.

The protagonists are Freya, Devi's daughter, and Ship, the spaceship’s Artificial Intelligence. Devi asks Ship to create a narrative about the trip. The spaceship’s computer is an emerging AI that needs specific instructions (has not yet learned everything it needs to create the narrative, almost like a human child). Ship gets only barebones guidance from Devi, since she has her hands full keeping the spaceship running.

Ship requests permission to focus the narrative on Freya, and Devi agrees, so the initial phases of the story are straight-forward, following Freya’s actions. Freya goes on an authorized “wander” to visit each of the twelve biomes. This construct has the benefit of giving the reader the needed details on the contents, environment, and structure of the spaceship. Ship occasionally inserts observations on its creation of the narrative. Over time, Ship assumes a unique personality of its own, and the narrative gets more complex. I particularly enjoyed the development of Ship.

Robinson examines themes such as the transferability of evolutionary advantages and the ability to terraform rapidly enough to support a colony. It is not a book about characters – they exist in service to the themes. It is more about the larger concept of social adaptation. It also covers psychological stresses, conflict resolution (and lack thereof), flawed human decision-making, and much more. If you enjoy lots of science in your science fiction (as I do), this is a great example. I will definitely be pondering the questions explored in this book for quite a while.

4.5 show less

This is the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars Trilogy. It imagines the initial human colonization of Mars, starting with a significant incident, then flashing back to relate the sequence of events that led up to that point. The narrative focuses on a handful of characters, primarily the pioneering men and women of the scientific community who are among the “first one hundred,” a mix of Americans, Russians, Arabs, and other international representatives. Eventually more show more people arrive from many different cultures, bringing with them different religions, beliefs, and customs.

The world-building is vivid, easy to picture. The technology is explained in detail. Beyond the scientific principles and world-building, I am impressed by the emphasis on the importance of human interactions and group dynamics. Each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view. The characters have their own personalities, agendas, jealousies, and ideas of how the new civilization should be organized. Differences in opinion will inevitably arise, requiring debates and decision-making. For example, imagine the different opinions on whether to terraform or not, and if so, to what extent. Should future arrivals, sponsored by corporations, be able to extract minerals and send them back to earth? What type of economics, politics, laws, and processes should be established? They split into factions based on opinions held in common.

I appreciate both the science and the emphasis on human foibles. It is almost overwhelming to imagine all the elements involved in starting from scratch to build a society, and the author does a masterful job. This book is almost sure to please fans of hard science fiction. I loved it! show less