Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson

Reviewed December 10, 1996

ISBN 0-553-56073-5, LoC 92-21607

After a long time without reading anything, much less a good novel, I took a distant hint from my colleague Dr. Charley Dunn, to start into this new and modern Mars trilogy. I was looking for a good romp around the solar system a la Heinlein and wasn't disappointed. But, this is a much broader piece. The self-included reviews call it a good novel in addition to being science fiction but itÕs barely fiction, actually, much of it is 2001 A Space Oddesey class extrapolation of fact. Asimov and Clarke would be proud.

This is the type of "Future" (a forward look as opposed to a "History," a backwards look) that I had hoped to write on the visions of Dysan and others. His idea, that the Oort cloud might be more colonizable, using technologies of genetic engineering of plants, reflectors from indigenous asteroid or cometary material, and laser launchers has me craving to write up a modest integrator in GC++ and play around with it to generate the framework for some good stories, or novels, or sets of novels, "Futures" for the next 500 years, as if the progress to date of America were written from the perspective of 1450-1500. But I digress, that's a topic for another essay, and Red Mars is an excellent rendering of what early colonization of our only near, near-habitable neighbor might be. And, it doesn't suffer a bit from the Star Trek problem: that humanity fixed all their major problems once they moved into space. On the contrary, it is a frightening, realistic extrapolation of the technology and politics of today.

The narrative begins about 2/3 way through the novel where we meet two of the earliest colonization leaders in the dedication of a new domed city on Mars. They are John Boone and Frank Chalmers and both are speaking at an out-doors dedication ceremony, something relatively new to the planet. John is likable, vague; Frank is hard nosed. We don't really know anything about them, but as it develops, Frank, who is the first person for this section, feels that John is in the way of him really making something of the new planet and arranges his assassination. John dies and the prologue ends. One feels that they've just read the end of the book and know that they will now flash back through the supporting detail. Already riveted.

I'm impressed by the way the book is organized. Sections with interludes plus this teaser, really the climax of the whole book, right at the first, so you'll fully dread and anticipate the actual event when it does come up.

The rest is in fact chronological. We are among the First Hundred, the first actual colony that has no immediate intention of return to Terra on their way out. There is discussion of training, selection, introductions to many. This section is from the point of view of the Soviet leader, Maya Toitovna. She has a brief affair with Frank, the appointed American leader but then settles on John for most of the book. John Boone is a late addition, somebody else had to drop out and he applied to be the replacement. This was a bit odd. John was the First Man on Mars and had been out and back once already. He was already over his lifetime radiation limit. A natural leader, he was a natural rival, and also lifetime friend of Frank. Frank, as it turned out, had wanted to be the leader of the first colony and had arranged for John to be the First Man so as to clear him out of the way. This was now a complication. There's a lot more that I'm not going to relate here. Suffice it to say, Robinson handles characters well. There is much entertainment in various anecdotal events, like the simulations of Mars capture at the end of the cruise generated by another character, Arkady. The real one was a "Mantra Run," fortunately. Robinson, and most of my culture, is weak where I would be strong, astrodynamics, communications, and data processing. There's not much talk about the actual aerobraking, like even Clarke would do.

I spent most of the first section saying to myself "yeah, NASA is going to radically change course and join up 64 or more shuttle external tanks into a colony to fly 100 people to Mars. In your most ambitious dreams, bud. Robinson has the date for this as 2026. I'd say more like 2126, or never.

This is one of those books that you could read better with a dictionary aside. Perhaps I'll endeavor to read Green Mars in that mode.

The next section, The Crucible, is from the point of view of Nadia, the Russian chief engineer and troubleshooter. She's an exemplary, talented, and over-achieving engineer. Later in the book, she loses a finger in an industrial accident and earns the name, from her eventual lover, Arkady, "the nine fingered Queen of Mars," a fitting epithet. A group of them, Ann and Phyllis among them, make a rover trip up to the North Pole and walk around in the ice for the first, and last time, before Sax's efforts to terraform the planet melt all the dry ice away forever. Phyllis is the born again Christian capitalist. She's here to dominate the creation and get rich doing it. She holds Bible studies on the way out. Robinson clearly has Phyllis Schlafly in mind with her and goes pretty hard on her. Heck, at the end of the book, she's in an emergency escape rocket trying to regain civilization by looping around the solar system via Jupiter (weak still in astrodynamics). Sax is going to be the mastermind of terraforming. Ann is going to be his arch enemy in this. She wants to motor around Mars, leaving it as found, doing the fundamental Areology, staying to herself. This is me, in dream at least. But Sax is right, it's going to be terraformed ultimately, that's the touch of humankind, and he wants to be the one to do it. This is all had out in the narrative. Most of the Crucible has to do with setting up that first colony. Using all those supplies, including a Rickover reactor called Chernobyl. Motoring around in land vehicles or dirigibles doing things, exploring, setting out Sax's windmills to start the terraforming, and the subterfuge invasion of engineered algae with suicide genes built in (just in case...).

Hiroko is an interesting figure. She's in charge of all the hydroponic stuff and has a cult following around her. She figures prominently throughout (the entire triology) in an intriguing way.

Life is tough. Fines (very fine dust particles) are in everything ("That's Life on Mars"), there are factions, people are sleeping around, there are loves and hatreds developing and redeveloping, the work is exhausting but generally things are pretty cool so far. (Damned cold outside!) UNOMA (UN for Mars policy, whatever) is still in charge, via radio with lightspeed delays. These people are all leaders in their fields, Nobel Prize winners and the like. Yeah, yeah, NASA would in fact send Mother Theresa to Mars since she's the best at what she does, if that doing were needed there. But no wonder the politics are like AMSAT, and more intense. And they all have to live and work together too.

Robinson is good at naming things, and people.

"Homesick" is a short section from the viewpoint of Michel Duval, the psychiatrist who, by having been shrink to the First Hundred through their selection and training, also came along. He doesn't really belong here, is homesick for Mediterranean France and is starting to hear voices and cry a lot. There's a technical section here that I found boring to plow through. Robinson wants to explain 50 future years of advances in psychology too. Michel keeps up his professional face, servicing Maya quite a bit, but he's not hiding his own illness from everybody. Then, a stranger (!) arrives. (He is the coyote, that makes one hundred one.) He is led off to the gardens where Hiroko and her following are in the heat of an orgiastic ritual, eating Mars dirt, growing babies. That night they all disappear. It's healing for Michel but we spend much of the rest of the book wondering where Hiroko and her growing nation are and why they are in hiding. This appeals to the hermit instinct....

Now things start to get bad. Colonies spring up everywhere, for many of the standard reasons: religion, profit, existence. The section Falling Into History is from John Boone's perspective. Traveling around with his First Man on Mars aura, he tries to lead into a new future, to pull things together into a utopian society (though the section begins with him nearly being killed by an act of sabotage). I'm oversimplifying here but that's the gist of it. We see neat technologies (gliders, Moholes, and such), meet some new characters doing mining and prospecting, mapping, running utilities, tapping aquifers and so forth. We catch up with some of the First Hundred in their careers. Ann camped out in a rover, about to have a baby at age 60 with her like-minded, protectively following consort Simon. Phyllis is talking about commercializing mining, making it possible with the elevator, dropped from an Areosynchronus asteroid that is steered in for the purpose. (Robots do all the tough work, like building thousands of miles of the stuff for years and years.) Sax is buried in work at his terminal. Atmospheric pressure is up from 3-4 to about 50 millitorr and the biggest dust storm ever occurs in a natural attempt at self-correction.

The other piece of sci-fi that I didn't believe (the first being the likelihood that NASA would actually do something like this) was the discovery that you could give a person a DNA/RNA treatment that would regenerate their bodies to about age ten. All the First Hundred have this done. They might live 1000 years! Who knows? The implications on earth, where things are (as is often the case in Sci Fi where our perspective is non terran, like Babylon V or Martian Chronicals) "getting really bad" are about as expected. There is already overpopulation, there is already sharp class dissolution. One can only imagine the effect this development would have. "You realize, this changes everything." It seemed to me at first to be cheating, a way to run the characters lives long enough to actually finishing terraforming, but; read on.

They decide to pump up the system by bringing in an asteroid. A big party is held on Olympus Mons to watch. Many of the First Hundred are there. Hiroko shows! John is the clear leader. He's working on things. There are forces from earth that are going to overwhelm them, multinationals, the FBI, etc., but they're still hoping to do something different on Mars, though this is impossible, all the Martians being the same race who had made earth so miserable. The party breaks up, they all head down the hills to continue their work. John is headed off to a dedication of Nicosia, one of the new domed cities. We've been dreading this moment foreshadowed from the beginning.

The moment that John is assassinated, things happen all around Mars that would remind you of "the curtain in the temple was torn from top to bottom!" You've come to identify so with John that it is hard to believe that he's gone. Through the rest of the book, you can't believe that he won't somehow be brought back. They really need him! But he isn't. He's not the Christ, he's just the First Man on Mars. This Apocryphal description drifts off into an exaggerated account of John's life on Mars, already legend, then to the story of how Big Man squashed Paul Bunyon and Blue Ox into the turf. Features on Mars are clearly the markings, features, and droppings of these gargantuan figures. It would have been nice to have had a Mars Globe in the other hand (the dictionary in the first), but too much of a bother, given the pace of the action.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. As in the prologue, we're in Frank Chalmer's first person. He's killed John just when things are starting to spin out of control. The UNOMA treaty is being renegotiated, settlers are crowding into the tent cities around the base of the elevator like Ellis Island. There are riots and strikes. Sabotage escalates. They need John. Frank realizes this most acutely. Maya re-attaches herself to him for a while, but then in a spat they separate again, still remaining an official couple nonetheless. After a bunch of around the clock treaty work, Frank wanders off in a Rover and lives with some prospecting nomads for a time. There are those who know what Frank has done. This is further sobering. He reunites with Maya to go to Nicosia to see Arkady and Nadia, but he's already off looking on their screens and talking like a revolutionary. Maya can't believe that Nadia doesn't have "better control" over her man. "Just like Maya," thinks Frank.

There's this radio thing called the "common band" and the "First Hundred band," etc. Is Robinson inventing something, not understanding something, or just hoping for better future cell coverage?

Descriptions of Americans are unfriendly too, and deservedly so. Their decadence, orgies, cruelty (running pigs brought for food out until they froze stiff, for example) are all too believable.

So "Guns Under the Table" ends. John is gone and everybody is in trouble. The revolution for independence, chaos, is starting. Robinson titles the last two sections in Japanese, without explanation. Guess I'll have to go see Gordon Woods to find out what it's all about.

Terra nears superior conjunction (when the planets are on opposite sides of the sun). Sabotage cuts off news, local and terran. Terran news doesn't cover Mars much anyway, things are bad enough down there and the links are broken, after all.

Senzeni Na finds the revolution well under way. We see Arkady's right arm spontaneously ignite in a sabotaged city, but don't know until the end of the section that he will be discovered as a pile of ash in the remains. One of the many ways to destroy a Martian town is to virus the environmental controls to run the oxygen content up to about 40% then throw a spark someplace. Nadia wanders around in airplanes, rovers, and by other means looking for others of the First Hundred, picking up other assistants, avoiding floods, fixing things (programming robots and leaving them to finish the work) everywhere she goes, trying to clean up the results of the revolution... and look for Arkady. A Clara Barton of engineering in the Martian Revolt. They fly over floods, visit various cities or disorganized outposts. People are just doing whatever destructive they can, given the opportunity. They pick up Ann and Sax (at different places).

Someone releases the end-asteroid from the elevator while they watch. Ann is horrified, she hasn't heard from her son Peter who was stuck up there waiting for space on a car (so many military and police coming down now). Phyllis and her transnational buddies are slung out of the ecliptic and the elevator starts to fall. What drama! It wraps around the planet twice. Everybody on it and in its path is killed. It trenches, it comes in with white heat and sonic booms. The final crack at the end leaves little but rubble and areoquakes. Our heroes have survived, but what is going to happen? They visit a prison city and see a naked, frozen guard propped up outside. This is the main news flash on earth. One of the places they don't try going in.

At length they reach a city that is still intact and find others of their comrades. Some others are going to join them but as they come up the road they are fired on from Phobos by police and killed. There's a theory that the First Hundred are leading the revolution. Nobody ever has a theory that anarchy is just anarchy. Another, waiting for them in the airlock, dies a horrible, cold death. People from the First Hundred who might have lived a thousand years are dropping like flies.

Nadia gets furious and rummages around in her purse for the transmitter that Arkady gave her "just in case." ... on the event of John's assassination. She goes outside and pushes the button as Phobos zooms past. Rockets ignite on the forward side. It is deorbited. Mars now has one moon, and a bunch more hot, glowing rubble on the equator. More people die.

The city depressurizes. (By now, people are going about in their walkers with their helmets just in case.) There is confusion. In the confusion the coyote appears and leads them to Michel Duval in a rover! The few who are still alive (Frank, Nadia, Ann, Simon, Sax, Michel and a young assistant to Michel) drive off in the fog and head down a canyon. Thus starts Shikata Ga Nai, whatever that is.

The mezzanine interlude to this section has Ann's son, Peter Clayborne (I just noticed that the father is "Simon"...) finally on his trip down the elevator when it is broken loose. He and several others scramble to the emergency suits and out the airlock where they soon find themselves drifting near the areosynchronus point without hope of rescue. But, in a stretch that can only happen in a series of novels, a couple of revolutionary women on their way to the south pole where many are trying to gather, find him (and no one else) and carry him off back to the planet. Ann and Simon won't know this for some time. By the pace and precipice of the action, you think, maybe never.

The rest of the book is the escape of this small band in a couple of rovers and the neat technologies that allow them to hide their progress from other neat, established technologies. Their adventures are harrowing and exhausting. An aquifer breakout flood inundates the canyon they are in. Much of the road is gone; they have to hug cliffs. Going is slow. Ann is catatonic at first. Her Mars is gone. Nadia, now a confirmed widow isn't much better, but she participates. Sax spends all his time on his laptop, figuring and monitoring the effects of multiple cataclysms on his beloved terraforming effort. Then, as the others become exhausted, Ann comes in and pulls her own weight, doing some of the driving, some of the scouting. Mars is big. It has as much land area as earth, and they're crossing a significant piece of it in the middle of a big flood.

One of the rovers is lost. They load up the other and carry on. There are arguments about whether to wait out the flood. They can't, not enough provisions, not enough cover. Ann is driving one day and in a slip of concentration drops a wheel into a hole. With a crest in the flood coming, Frank, swearing all the while, helps push them out. They are driving uphill under water for a while and are, by a hair's breadth, saved. But Frank is gone. Maya is inconsolable.

They go on in exhaustion, finally out of the flood plain, until they reach Hiroko's original settlement, hidden under a boulder. Poles hold the boulder up for ingress then go back down. The rovers always looked like rocks from above. Nobody lives here now, but there are ample supplies. They restock and head back out after much needed rest. Nearing the end of their journey, Ann steps outside and hikes up a hill one morning, switches off her suite heater and waits to fall asleep, ending her despair. She is saved by Simon kicking her in the head and dragging her back in. She is a basket case.

At length they reach Hiroko's new settlement under the southern ice pack. Peter is there and is reunited with his parents. It's like arriving in Shangri La, a happy ending, for the few survivors and others whose stories we haven't followed. And there's mother Hiroko. "This is our home now, we make our future here." Or some such.

From the advertising trailer, we know that Peter will be a central figure of some sort in the next book, Green Mars.

I've been out of serious reading for about ten years of manic other activities. I was drug out by AMSAT around 1986, shortly after finishing my BSEE, then had my MSEE to work on every evening until just this year. (I did some serious reading in the AMSAT aftermath of late 1991.) This should not be allowed to happen again. I should be reading about two books like this per month, at least, and I'm trying to get back into a program of doing so. I won't be reading Green (and then Blue) Mars immediately, I want to save and savor them, being a rare type. I have Infinite in All Directions, Les Miserables, and others in the queue before that in any case. Breadth....

This has been a good book. (There's no author, not even the Bible, about which I wouldn't say, "yeah, yeah" at something!) Through the reading (which I purposefully stretched over a couple of months in alternation with other reading, part of the "savoring" strategy) I experienced numerous emotions, beyond the ones intended by the author. I was energized in a way that I haven't been in years, not since AMSAT days if not before, by a vision. I was angered at NASA, my nation, and my world for not wanting more to head in this direction. I was depressed; this is the series of books that I envision writing. Mars is a high ground for such a set. How much room is there in this market? (Well, for me, plenty. If there were fifty in this series (let's see, Yellow, Purple, Crimson, etc....) I'd follow them all like I did Star Trek's up until this season.) Robinson is an excellent writer (I'm thinking of reading others of his novels, but not until I'm through with this trilogy), he's probably been a prodigy since youth.

I look forward to Green Mars, Blue Mars and my own exploits.

Postscript June 2007: IÕm not going to be a novelist myself. There are plenty and IÕm best at other things, like the astrodynamics.