Green Mars

Fifty years after the failed revolution that closed Red Mars, the survivors of the First Hundred are hiding in a polar refuge under assumed names while the transnational corporations that own Earth strip mine the planet they helped open.

The terraforming has taken hold. There is lichen, then moss, then trees at the bottom of the great canyons, and the air is breathable with a mask. A generation born on Mars has grown up tall, unimpressed by Earth, and entirely unwilling to be governed by it, and the novel's best character, Nirgal, belongs to it.

Robinson spends the book assembling a revolution properly: the underground congress at Dorsa Brevia, the argument between Reds who want the planet left as rock and greens who want it alive, the sabotage, the demographic pressure of a flooding Earth, and the question of how to seize a planet without repeating the massacre of the first attempt. When it comes, the second revolution is deliberately anticlimactic, and that is the point.

Sax Russell, the terraformer, is captured and tortured and loses the power of speech, and has to rebuild it word by word, in a section that is the finest writing in the trilogy.

Sax spends the book undercover as a mild mannered technician, having had his face surgically altered, and his gradual reconciliation with Ann, whose planet he has been dismantling for a century, is the long argument the trilogy is actually about.

At around six hundred pages it is slow, technical and heavy with areology and political theory, and it assumes you remember several dozen characters from the first book.

The pleasures are cumulative rather than immediate: a hidden city under the polar cap.

Read Red Mars first. Best for readers who want the mechanics of settling a planet taken entirely seriously, the constitution drafted with the same care as the atmosphere.