Green Mars

Green Mars is the second volume in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. We are now approaching fifty years since the first settlers landed on Mars. The First Hundred were cut down to size in the aftermath of the failed revolution of 2061, and the survivors live either in hidden settlements or under false identities. The changes wrought by CO2 fixing organisms are beginning to show results, and mining the hidden aquifers and other sources of water ice offers the possibility of seas and rivers on the Martian surface. And new generations of native-born Martians are coming of age and have their own ideas about their world and what to do with it.

In this novel, we meet new characters, and we see something of the situation on Earth, caught show more in the throes of megacorporation rivalry that is expressed in open warfare. But then catastrophic climate change intervenes, and Mars suddenly takes on a new significance as a possible bolt-hole for those with the resources to make the journey and the benefit of the longevity treatments to enjoy their new-found security. Various factions on Mars see that as a threat. Events move on from there.

Despite that summary of the broad action of the novel, do not think that this is a novel of thrills and intrigue. It remains a story about sciency people doing sciency things. There is a lot of political theory in this book, as well as a continuing and loving description of the evolving Martian biosphere. The characters are drawn quite broadly, though there is no need for detailed pen portraits in a novel extending over more than 500 pages; rather, Robinson lets the characters speak for themselves through their words and actions. One of the main proponents of terraforming Mars, Sax Russell, has his own section of the book, entitled “The Scientist as Hero". Suffice it to say that there is more science in this than heroism. Yet this section ends with one of the novel's action sequences, where Russell is outed as one of the First Hundred, demonised by the megacorporations as instigators of the 2061 rebellion; is captured, tortured and then rescued by other Martian pioneers.

Another section of the novel is named “What is to be Done?”, which some will recognise as the title of one of Lenin's key tracts on the evolution of revolutionary politics. It recounts the events of a conference of the various underground groups to decide on a political agenda for an independent Mars, and will test the tolerance of many readers for rules fetishism. But those readers who have had any contact with political or campaigning movements will recognise the processes, the debates and the factionalisms on show here, and find themselves in familiar territory.

Although this is the middle book of a trilogy, it doesn’t have “middle book syndrome”, because it talks about key events in the evolution of the new Mars. By the end of the book, people are able to survive on the surface of Mars with only facemasks and warm outer clothing, though this is an extreme measure forced on them by a man-made disaster; but it is a pointer to the future.

I've made this book sound very dry. But it held me gripped. Then again, I've lived a big part of my life in a political environment and can relate to people planning, and influencing, and debating to make things happen. Yet the author also shows us people relating to the beauty of Mars; the whole argument in this book as in the previous one, is the conflict between those who wish to leave Mars as untouched as possible and those who want Mars to become habitable for people – the Reds versus the Greens. And Robinson is quite happy to stop and show us how people react to their new environment. One of the inventions in Red Mars was the areophany – a ritual involving dance and the recitation of the names of Mars in all the different languages of Earth. At the end of the conference I referred to earlier, one of the First Hundred, widely regarded by her colleagues as the high priestess of the emergent Martian biosphere, makes a ceremonial appearance involving this areophany, to remind all the delegates of just what it is that they should be working towards, and I found myself getting a little emotional.

I am coming to the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is probably the work that modern science fiction should be judged by. It doesn’t do a lot of things that readers demand of novels nowadays – no easily relatable characters, no journey of self-discovery, no obvious life lessons or personal revelations. But it speaks very directly about how we should think about our lives, the economy, the environment, and how each of those things interacts with the others. By placing the action in a setting where the environment is what we make it, and extremely fragile to boot, it makes us think about how we would behave if our very ability to walk around in the open air was something to aspire to rather than something we take for granted. So many things follow from that premise.

There are billionaires who want to settle Mars in their lifetimes. It is widely assumed that the Mars trilogy has been part of their essential background reading. Yet Robinson's research has been so thorough that the scale of capital outlay needed to support a Mars colony is clearly shown to be immense, well beyond the capacity of even a billionaire to facilitate. There is a “tech bro” in Green Mars; he is painted as a fairly benevolent character, but he is an outlier within his own billionaire community. And those who see this book and the other volumes in the trilogy as a blueprint ignore at their risk that this book, in particular, describes the formation and the rise of the “Mars Underground”; and that when people make plans, other people have the capacity to derail those plans just through their natural reactions. If we are to have a future as a multi-planet civilisation, there will be points in our future that will seem very much like the events of Green Mars; but they will take their own direction and events will never fall the way people think they will. No plan survives first contact with reality. Green Mars shows us that, and anyone who sees this book as some sort of guide to the future would do well to bear that in mind. show less

I prefer this book to the first, possibly because my expectations this time around were better aligned with the actual content. This is not a series about terraforming Mars, but it is the story of its colonization with terraforming as part of the background, together with a lot of political, economic and sociological turmoil. The big questions posed concern whether Mars' primary value lies merely its mineral wealth, or does it offer something more to human civilization and what form should that take? There are even strong proponents in the novel for surrendering the question and respecting the planet's natural state. You might take the sequence of titles in this series as a spoiler for how well that view fares.

The sequel follows the show more model established in the first novel, devoting each section to following another character while feeding into the overarching story of what's being done to the planet, how its future is being determined and by whom. The author might easily have adopted one particular approach to Mars as his protagonist view, but instead he's presented a story that covers the entire spectrum of possible approaches and throws them into conflict with one another. As a reader I was perpetually re-evaluating which faction is right, and discovering it is easier to shift sympathies from one view of the story to another with each new section than it is to arrive at an easy answer. I expect by the end of the trilogy there will be a dominant faction or two, but at this rate it will come with knowing the full price that was paid and having seen other promising visions of Mars' future pass into nothing. It's harsh, but I like it. show less

I'm still digging this portrayal of humanity's fledgling expansion beyond Earth: the various terraforming efforts driven and sabotaged by the competing, world-conquering corporations and the many nuanced groups/individuals who have embraced Mars as their home -- especially the generations of those born on the red planet, evolving into a new species! Curious to see what a "free" Mars coalesces into -- can capitalism really be escaped; are pharonic projects still feasible; should humans (of whatever flavor) dream and mold on a cosmic scale?

“Technically he weighed about forty kilos, but as he walked along it felt more like five. Very strange, even unpleasant. Like walking on buttered glass.”

This is my favorite feature of hard science fiction, the little minutiae that make the imaginary scenes not merely believable but also visceral; more vivid to me than riding on a dragon’s back and such. I like Kim Stanley Robinson’s conception of a Mars in the process of terraformation where global warming is actually a good thing!

Green Mars is the second book of KSR’s famous Mars trilogy, it follows on from Red Mars 50 years later where terraforming is in full swing. Many of “The First Hundred” characters (original colonists) from Red Mars play a significant part in this show more second volume, even the dead ones are often mentioned. The main story arc of Green Mars concerns terraformation and the fight for independence from Earth (bound to happen). Interestingly a faction of the Mars population, many of whom were born on Mars and have never been to Earth, are against terraforming and want to preserve Mars in its natural state. This is “The Reds” faction, their objection is (I think) for aesthetic reasons and to preserve what they perceive to be the purity of the pre-colonized planet. Their opposition comes from “The Greens” who want to fully terraform Mars so people can walk freely on the surface as we do on Earth.

Aside from the epic story arc the novel is very much a character study, to the detriment of my enjoyment of the book. The central characters are quite well developed, believable and complex individuals; the problem is that what they get up to is often not very interesting at all. There is a fascinating character named Sax Russell whose personal story is very dramatic at times and he ends up much the worse for wear. However, there are many pages where he is basically pottering around, studying plants, lichens, ice etc. This kind of narrative is very dry and my mind started to wander after a few such pages. Then there is Maya Toitovna who spends a lot of the novel inside her head, being very angry, resentful and unreasonable until she eventually works out her psychological problems. There are simply too many pages focused on her angst, which becomes quite tiresome, especially as I don’t personally identify with her problems

Green Mars has several protagonists (four or five I think) and the common problem with multiple points of view in a novel is very much in place here. Some characters are more interesting than others, and even the interesting ones spend too much time ruminating on issues, personal, scientific or philosophical; dragging the narrative down in the process.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an uncommonly good prose stylist for a hard SF writer. He comes up with pithy lines such as “It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.”; and almost lyrical passages like “In the first hour of the day all the ice glowed in vibrant pink and rose tones, reflecting tints of the sky. As direct sunlight struck the glacier’s smashed surfaces.”. However, he seems less interested in pacing and storytelling than to explore the issues that interest him, people, power, politics etc. I think he did a better job balancing the storytelling and the serious issue in Red Mars. Green Mars starts off well, gradually grinds to a halt, occasionally livens up with danger and explosive action, only to grind to a halt again. To be honest by the end of the book I have already lost interest.

Having read two volumes of the trilogy so far and really like the first one I am ambivalent about reading the final volume [b:Blue Mars|77504|Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3)|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388181161s/77504.jpg|40711]. It will be a shame not to read it having come this far, but at this point I don’t really know if I have the fortitude to plow through another volume so dry the book itself needs to be tarraformed. show less

O segundo livro da trilogia da terraformação de Marte continua incrível, com sua mistura de personagens realistas, ficção científica cientificamente muito bem informada, perspicácia política e generosidade intelectual ampla. Ademais, salta aos olhos aqui o papel central de Sax Russell, um dos 100 colonizadores iniciais que eu menos desenvolvi empatia no primeiro livro, e um arco de redenção pra Maya Toitovna. Acho brilhante o ritmo em que a narrativa alterna descrições da paisagem e dos projetos científicos envolvidos, com as tensões políticas envolvidas em fazer de Marte um lugar para se viver bem, a despeito das giga-transnacionais e a mesquinharia humana em geral. Recomendadíssimo. E ao que parece vou acabar show more considerando a trilogia como um todo uma obra prima.

Livro ganhador do prêmio Hugo para novelas, 1994. show less

This was stronger than Red Mars. Red Mars could introduce all the technology, so Green Mars could mostly just use all that to focus more on the people. Green Mars builds very much on Red Mars - it hardly stands on its own. And it hardly ends either. It's got a dynamic end that points ahead... well, I plan to read Blue Mars anyway!

This might be the first time I've given a book I actually think was better than its predecessor a worse rating. The thing is, Red Mars may have been full of engineer fanfic and embarrassing cultural essentialism (Swiss colonists--on Mars, you know--who say things like "Outsiders. Ausländer." etc.), but it also advanced this really interesting future story of scientists and governments colonizing Mars and then coming up against corporations--"metanats"--and, of course, the same governments. It is the freaky future as seen insightfully but also of course in some wise atavistically from 1990 and it is fun. This one is fun too, but also deeper--the practice and the ethics of terraforming, or "areoforming"; the intertwined physiological show more and cultural changes of the Martian nisei and sansei and yonsei; the sad old crazy yet still brilliant yet empty brain thoughts--these being the most affecting passages in the book--of the first generation of colonists kept alive by genetic "treatments," colonization of space from the point of view of one of Swift's struldbruggs, trying to keep memories stretching back to the twentieth century all inside at the same time like stuffing the stuffing back into an overstuffed couch. Robinson's affection for his characters is one of the main things that keeps you reading--Sax "Saxifrage" Russell, the pure scientist of logical and ordered habits whose emotional life takes wing in his second century as he sees the Martian landscape blossom; Maya Toitovna, cosmonaut and leader of the initial 100 colonists, sense of self disintegrating under so many decades of learning and experiences and men and jockeying for power and going to fucking Mars, but still becoming, still unsure if she wants to be a lover or a fighter; Nirgal, the sensitive one out of the new Martian supermen or children of (pardon the expression) Aquarius. All these are goods, nestled into a bed of geology fanfic (moholes! Pistes! Volcanoes ten miles tall!) that is much more agreeable than the gee-whiz engineering stuff of the first volume. But the thing is that the main narrative in the first volume intrigued me in a way that the world building of this one doesn't--we get a corporate-titan(ifyoullpardontheexpression)-who-thinks-different and wants to pull us all into a post-national, post-transnational, post-terrestrial future, utterly banal, although Robinson does at least make fun of him a good piece; we get a Martian revolution that is inspirational yet also still banal, oh yes, these things are compatible, of course they are, my friend, but I wanted more: UN Security Council meetings, anti-Martian fulminations by talk show hosts, the Marxism of the 22nd century--I wanted more of this central epic that Robinson implicitly promised, instead of the fascinating meandering I got, which was frustrating though good and sometimes great. show less