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Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson, 1994

Review is copyright © 2021 by Wil C. Fry

Published: 2021.09.12

Home > Book Reviews > Kim Stanley Robinson > Green Mars

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry, 2021

★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

Winner of the 1994 Hugo Award for best novel (and runner-up for the 1995 Nebula), Green Mars is second book in the Mars Trilogy, set about 50 years after Red Mars and following up on humanity’s efforts to colonize and terraform Mars. Like the first book, Green Mars is told in the third person, switching from character to character throughout the book. While the first book felt more like an epic, covering 35 years of the colonization effort, this second one spans a much shorter time period — though still a decade or more. Like the first one, this one largely concerns the Mars inhabitants’ disagreement with the policies of large Earth corporations who try to exploit Mars for profit, and this one too ends in a planetwide revolution attempt. (The revolution in Red Mars failed, while the one in Green Mars succeeds, though at great cost.)

 

Praise

Parts of the story are very engaging, and descriptions of the setting are vivid and detailed (but perhaps even more repetitive and overly verbose than in the first book — we get it, Mars is unlike Earth). To my limited knowledge, the science here is again accurate (based on what was known of Marsh in the 1990s, anyway), and the projections and/or predictions of future technology and societal change are reasonable enough.

This one was missing some of the mistakes I caught in the first book.

 

Points Off For...

A lot of what held my attention in the first book was missing from this one. The bulk of that was the descriptions of how the colonization effort took place, the dangers inherent in the enterprise, the strict protocols necessary to keep everyone alive, the resulting friction among the first one hundred humans on the planet, and the way the attitudes of the First Hundred toward Earth began to change the longer they’d been away. This book did include many of those same characters (due to newly developed treatments, people now live well into their 100s), but now they are simply very old people on Mars, a handful among hundreds of thousands.

And, unfortunately, most of my criticism of the first book stands true for this one as well — again surprising me, given that both books won big awards and consistently get high praise from reviewers.

Again, the beginning was incredibly, startlingly weak. In the first 20-something pages, the reader is introduced to a dozen or more school children — people who were born on Mars, in hiding in a secret habitat beneath a polar ice cap — and learned what their days were like. The main ones were Nirgal and Jackie, but nothing really happened. And, for the next 40 pages or so, Nirgal rode around in a rover visiting various underground hideouts in the southern hemisphere of Mars, meeting people. That’s it! The book didn’t begin to get interesting until page 70 or so, when Art Randolph was introduced, and even then many dozens of pages were required to get Art connected to the story.

Again, some chapters are entirely in italics. Italics are nice for emphasis, or media titles, or perhaps even an entire paragraph, occasionally, to set it off from the rest. But five or six pages at a time?

And again, Robinson introduces the “lectern” without description or explanation. If one hasn’t already taken in the description on page 456 of the first book, one would have no idea what a lectern is (because he’s not using the word to mean lectern, but as a digital device small enough to fit in one’s pocket and can hold many millions of books’ worth of information).

And I think this one is worse than the first one about unnecessary length. Perhaps 75% of the book could have been cut without reducing any significant information. Where the first book repeatedly described Frank Chalmers as “swarthy”, this one uses the same tactic for Art Randolph. If you don’t remember that Art is swarthy, the author will remind you a few paragraphs later. If you don’t recall that Art is a big man, the author continues to describe him that way. No editor worth a paycheck should have let that go on. Perhaps in an effort to inform the reader about how alien a landscape Mars truly is, the author goes on and on with the descriptions of rock formations, regolith, fines, cliffs, lava tubes, and so on. There are nearly endless descriptions of rover trips. When the various factions of the revolutionaries meet for a “congress”, we’re treated to fifty pages or more of one character walking from one working group to the next and overhearing dozens of arguments and conversations, many of which are repeated throughout this section. For about twenty pages, Maya rides a train and reads old articles about Frank Chalmers (who died in the first book). And none of this adds anything to the tension, to the reader’s understanding of the story or characters, or anything.

The book also suffers from the Unusual Repeating Word problem, and not just with “swarthy”, but even more so with piste (which in real life refers to a marked ski run or mountain path for other winter sports but in this book apparently reverts to its original French definition of “track” or “trail”).

 

Conclusion

I don’t think this should have won any awards. I can say that I haven’t read the other contenders for the year(s) in question, but if they weren’t better than this, then they shouldn’t have been on the list either. The only reason I kept going was because I’d paid money for the book and didn’t want to feel I’d wasted that money. I do not plan to read the third book in the series (which apparently also won the Hugo).

I was reminded of the several times I rented old movies because they’d won Oscars, thinking that might be some guarantee of enjoyment (yes, I actually have been that naive) and so ended up watching The Deer Hunter.

 





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