It was just like coming on the shore of a sea. He can offer a detailed tour of the Martian countryside ('Three days later the bare rock ended, running under waves of blackish sand. The author's mastery of information never fails to impress. The stakes are high, the sides are shrewdly drawn, the players on both sides range from politically naive idealists to ambitious manipulators without discernible scruples. Robinson has all the makings of a philosophical novel of suspense. In the debate over terraforming and its consequences, Mr. No one can be sure that terraforming will succeed what is certain is that the effort will require enormous expenditures of time and energy and that, even if it fails, it will change Mars beyond recognition. Others are eager to get on with the job of 'terraforming' - changing the ecosystem so that human beings will eventually be able to live on Mars without special protective suits and breathing apparatus. There is a purity to the landscape, a cold, clean beauty that some of the scientists want to preserve. The Mars that the first arrivals encounter is empty of life. Robinson has thoroughly digested this material and woven it into the fabric of his narrative, which deals with the settlement of Mars by a hundred carefully chosen scientists who fight among themselves over the future of the planet, only to see all their visions overwhelmed by the needs and greed of later settlers. Without having set foot on Mars, we know a great deal about the atmosphere and surface of the planet.

Wells or Edgar Rice Burroughs or Ray Bradbury - has been relegated to myth and fantasy. The Mars of earlier science fiction - the Mars of H. In the last decade or so, space probes and other forms of scientific surveillance have greatly extended our knowledge of Earth's second-nearest neighbor in the solar system. Robinson is admirably ambitious this 519-page novel is the first of a projected trilogy about the colonization of Mars. Robinson's RED MARS (Spectra/Bantam, cloth, $22.95 paper, $11.95).Īs always, Mr.

This is even more difficult than it sounds. In books like 'The Gold Coast' (1988) and 'Pacific Edge' (1990) he virtually invented a new kind of science fiction, in which characters as richly drawn as any in conventional fiction inhabit near-future worlds evoked with as much verisimilitude as the contemporary settings of any conventional novel. The novels and short stories of Kim Stanley Robinson constitute one of the most impressive bodies of work in modern science fiction.

Mars trilogy