Blue Mars

The third and final volume of the Mars trilogy, and it begins where a normal series would end. The second revolution has succeeded, Earth's grip is broken, and Mars is free, which leaves several hundred pages for the much harder question of what to do next.

So this is a book about constitution writing. Delegates argue in a tent on the slope of Pavonis Mons about property, water rights, immigration from a flooded Earth, and whether a planet can be owned at all, and Robinson gives the process the detail most novels reserve for battles. He is entirely serious that the committee stage is the interesting part.

Around it, the terraforming reaches its conclusion: air you can breathe at low altitude, a northern ocean, sailing, farms. The surviving members of the First Hundred are past two hundred years old on longevity treatments, and the treatments are failing in a way nobody predicted, producing a quiet epidemic of memory loss among the people who remember the beginning.

Ann Clayborne, who has opposed every change to the surface for two centuries, gets the closing argument and something like peace.

There are long journeys purely for their own sake: a sail down the new northern sea, a walk on Olympus Mons, a return to a drowned and overcrowded Earth that reads as horror after two books of open space.

At around seven hundred pages it is the slowest of the three and the most essayistic, with extended passages of geology, economics, longevity medicine and psychology, and readers who wanted the revolution of the second book often stall here.

What it is doing instead is unusual and worth the patience: describing a society that works, in detail, without pretending the arguments ever stop.

Read Red Mars and Green Mars first. Best for readers who want a utopia argued for rather than asserted, and who enjoy a committee meeting that decides a planet.