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Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson, 1993

Review is copyright © 2021 by Wil C. Fry

Published: 2021.02.27

Home > Book Reviews > Kim Stanley Robinson > Red Mars

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry, 2020

★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

Winner of the 1994 Nebula Award for best novel (and runner-up for the 1993 Hugo), Red Mars opens the Mars Trilogy with the story of humanity’s initial efforts to colonize and terraform Mars. It is somewhat epic in scope, covering 35 years of the colonial effort (from 2026 through 2061). The viewpoint (always third person) switches from character to character throughout the book, giving the reader perspectives from at least six (that I counted) perspectives.

 

Praise

Most of the story is very engaging. Descriptions of the setting are vivid (if sometimes overly verbose and repetitive). To my limited knowledge, the science here is accurate (as of 1993, anyway — we’ve learned a lot about Mars since then), and the projections and/or predictions of future technology are reasonable enough.

In real life, in 2021, NASA is working on getting humans to Mars for the first time and — while I was reading this book — landed its latest rover, Perseverance, on the red planet. A year ago, my family and I walked through some mockups of proposed Mars landers while visiting the Johnson Space Center near Houston. And, if you ask my parents what I said I wanted to be when I grew up, the earliest career aspiration I ever had was “first man on Mars”. I remember wanting that as early as four or five years old, and I held to that dream until I was 18 or so.

Even without those real-life connections, I think there’s a lot here for any reader. Not only descriptions of how the colonization effort took place, but how the colonists got along with one another, the frictions between them, the changes they made once they were far enough from Earth to realize no one could stop them, and the way the politics and personalities of the First Hundred shaped their efforts.

There were some interesting turns of phrase, occasionally, and paragraphs that made me think. For example:

“Anyway, that’s a large part of what economics is — people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

—page 297

“It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.”

—page 418

 

Points Off For...

I was surprised at how much criticism I piled up during the course of reading this novel, given that it’s a Nebula winner and consistently gets high praise from reviewers.

First was the beginning. It opens slowly and confusingly, with one character walking around and talking to people. He’s angry, sad, jealous, but we don’t know why. There are no character introductions. Eventually the reader realizes that the first chapter actually belongs more than halfway through the book. I identified page 382 as the place where Chapter One should have been inserted. It’s written as if the reader has already read that far, is familiar with the characters and politics, and so if you haven’t then it all seems like a waste of time. Twenty-three pages of confusion, and then a SPOILER, right at the end of the first chapter: John Boone dies! So, for the next 350-something pages, we know Boone is going to die, and who did it. Very strange way to start a book. I recommend starting at Chapter Two, which is the beginning of the story, and then skipping back to read Chapter One much later.

Though I liked the changing perspective, seeing the colony through the eyes of different characters, I felt the style changed too much between each perspective. It felt as if different authors actually wrote those chapters, following different instructions. The changes were jarring and distracting, and kept the book from feeling like a cohesive unit.

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? It was too much.

There were a few mistakes that I thought an editor should have caught. For example, on page 262, the author is describing an underground facility and says: “say a story was 10 meters”. Well, 10 meters is about 33 feet, which is a possible height for a building story, but it’s much more likely he wrote 10 feet and later changed the unit to meters but forgot to convert 10 feet to “three meters”. Another example: on page 564, he says “they moved at night without headlights”, but the very next paragraph describes the rover’s driver as viewing the landscape lit by “cones of light” — a phrase he’s used previously to describe headlights.

Weirdly, though most futuristic gadgets are well described (often overly described), Robinson introduces a “lectern” very early as something a character was carrying. I thought a lectern was a weird thing to be carrying in a spaceship. Several more times it’s mentioned without description or context. Once, a character reads notes “in” his lectern. Again, odd. After 400-odd pages, it becomes clear that “lectern” is some small electronic device; Frank reads and writes in his, for example, and then puts it in his pocket. What? Finally, on page 456, we get a bit more info: the lectern is a device that holds 100,000 books (though newer models can hold 100 times that: 10 million), and the user can mark passages and make notes. So, basically it’s an e-reader of some kind, and future people named it after a piece of classroom furniture.

Then there are some crazily unnecessary sentences that might have stopped some readers in their tracks. Like this one from page 217:

“It was not a simple matter, and Michel had spent a fair amount of time at his computer screen sketching one kind of combinatoire after another, using the two different systems as the x and y axes of several different grids, none of which told him much. But then he began moving the four terms around the initial points of a Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry, which proposed that no simple dialetctic was enough to indicate the true complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to acknowledge the real difference between something’s opposite and its contrary; the concept ‘not-X’ being not quite the same thing as ‘anti-X’, as one saw immediately.”

Taking the book as a whole, I think it could have easily been 40% shorter without losing anything important. If an editor had removed all the repetive descriptions (yes, Frank is “swarthy”, and yes, the dirt on Mars is reddish), endless descriptions of driving rovers for thousands of kilometers, the overly lengthened arguments between characters about whether Mars should be left as-is or terraformed (no one, not even scientists, talks like these people do), and the entire chapter about the psychologist who is clearly bonkers (which probably would have made an interesting, but separate, short story), then the book would have been tighter, more enjoyable, and less like a “write a thousand words a day” project.

 

Conclusion

This was worth reading. For some reason, I was convinced I’d read it before, back in the mid-1990s, but upon re-reading, I’m now sure this was my first time. Not a single paragraph felt familiar. If I read a book about colonizing Mars in the 1990s, it wasn’t this one.

If nothing else, it draws the reader in — most of the time — and makes you feel like you’re there. I think it would have felt even more immersive if I hadn’t been so distracted by real life at this time. I read part of this during the worst ice/snow storm of my life, so the passages about the bitter cold, extreme weather, and absolute dependency on certain equipment for survival were particularly poignant.

I haven’t read the other award contenders for 1993/4, so I can’t give an opinion on whether this was truly the best novel.

 





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