Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Summary
A hundred colonists leave for Mars in 2026 aboard the Ares, chosen for competence and psychological resilience and then confined together for nine months, which is long enough for the factions that will shape the next two centuries to form before anybody lands.
The first section is a murder. John Boone, first man on Mars and the most popular human alive, is killed in the new city of Nicosia, and the novel then goes back thirty years to explain how the man who arranged it, Frank Chalmers, got there.
After that it is settlement: the first habitat dug in by Nadia, the argument over terraforming between Sax Russell, who wants a living planet, and Ann Clayborne, who thinks a four billion year old landscape has a claim of its own, and Hiroko's agricultural group, which quietly disappears into the southern highlands to build something else.
Then the transnational corporations arrive, the space elevator goes up, immigration becomes uncontrollable, and in 2061 the revolution comes and is crushed, taking the elevator down around the equator like a wire round a spool.
Robinson writes areology, engineering and political theory at length, and the characters exist partly to hold positions.
Maya Toitovna holds the human half together. She is the one everybody loves and nobody trusts, including herself, and Robinson gives her the mood swings and the political instincts in the same person.
Around six hundred pages, slow, technical and completely absorbing once it takes hold, with long stretches of geology, engineering and argument between people who will still be arguing two books later.
Best for readers who want the most serious novel ever written about settling another planet, and who can wait out an opening hundred pages of shipboard psychology.
Historical Context & Significance
Red Mars won the 1993 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the British Science Fiction Association Award, and lost the Hugo, which the two sequels then won: Green Mars in 1994 and Blue Mars in 1997.
Kim Stanley Robinson began it in the 1980s, before the missions that would confirm much of its geology, and revised as data arrived, which is why the areology has aged unusually well.
The trilogy became the standard reference for serious discussion of Mars settlement, cited by engineers and by advocates on both sides of the terraforming argument, and its central insight, that the hard problems are political and economic rather than technical, has become the mainstream position. Robinson has spent the decades since applying the same method to Earth, most directly in The Ministry for the Future.