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Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars: Kim Stanley Robinson Paperback – 1 July 2009

by Kim Stanley Robinson (Author)

1,521 ratings

Book 1 of 3: Mars Trilogy

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The first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson’s massively successful and lavishly praised Mars trilogy. ‘The ultimate in future history’ Daily Mail

Mars – the barren, forbidding planet that epitomises mankind’s dreams of space conquest.

From the first pioneers who looked back at Earth and saw a small blue star, to the first colonists – hand-picked scientists with the skills necessary to create life from cold desert – Red Mars is the story of a new genesis.

It is also the story of how Man must struggle against his own self-destructive mechanisms to achieve his dreams: before he even sets foot on the red planet, factions are forming, tensions are rising and violence is brewing… for civilization can be very uncivilized.

ISBN-10

0007310161
ISBN-13

978-0007310166
Edition

1st
Publisher

Harper Voyager
Publication date

1 July 2009
Language

English
Dimensions

12.9 x 4.27 x 19.71 cm
Print length

672 pages
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Product description

Review

‘One of the finest working novelists in any genre’
GUARDIAN

'If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’
NEW YORK TIMES

Praise for The Mars Trilogy:

‘One of the finest works of American SF’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘The ultimate in future history’
DAILY MAIL

‘Absorbing, impressive, fascinating… Utterly plausible’
FINANCIAL TIMES

‘A staggering book. The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written’
Arthur C. Clarke

‘Red Mars may simply be the best novel ever written about Mars’
INTERZONE

From the Back Cover

The Future History of Mars - Part One

1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the Moon.

2020: John Boone becomes the first man to set foot on Mars.

2027: The first mass-landing arrives on Mars.

It's the greatest challenge mankind has ever faced.

In 2027, the Ares, the biggest space-worthy craft ever built by man, reaches high orbit around Mars. Inside is a crew who will become the first one hundred people to land on the planet's surface.

Among them are the Russian team, led by the magnetic Maya Toitovna and radical socialist Arkady Bogdanov with their pragmatic engineer Nadia Cherneshevsky; Hiroko Ai - a Japanese biologist; and the Americans, led by Boone and the ambitious Frank Chalmers. Their mission: terraform a frozen wasteland with no atmosphere into a new Eden.

Their mission must succeed. The future of human civilization depends on it.

Start reading Red Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 1) on your Kindle in under a minute.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Voyager; 1st edition (1 July 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 672 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0007310161
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007310166
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 4.27 x 19.71 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 42,745 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 113 in Amazon Online Shopping
- 289 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- 292 in High Tech Science Fiction

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About the author

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Kim Stanley Robinson

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Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.

Customer reviews

5 star		53%
4 star		23%
3 star		12%
2 star		7%
1 star		5%

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

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Jezza

Sweeping technical-political epic, but with some very dull patches

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 August 2019

Verified Purchase

I wish I'd liked this more. It's very long, and while some of it is great - especially the political discussions, and the dynamics between the characters - there's huge swathes that I found unreadable, about Mars geology, or descriptions about technical solutions to problems. I'm sure other people have exactly the opposite reaction, loving the detail and bored by the politics. I'm sure that, as in The Martian, the point of the technical detail is to make the whole thing convincing, but as there, it doesn't work for me.

I note in passing that KSR (who is great, by the way - I heard him talk a few years ago and he's marvellous on climate change and politics) can imagine people moving to Mars without either nation-states or capitalism coming to an end...lots of the stuff on Mars is supplied by familiar corporations, though the big names that dominate our lives now - Google, Amazon, etc are of course not there. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

3 people found this helpful

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Chris Rust

Way too long, Good ideas but weak writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 December 2021

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My Kindle says I've read 68%. I can read no more.

Interesting ideas but very disappointing writing. I was not aware of him before but, when he spoke at COP26, people said he was a great writer of realistic Science Fiction which sounded good.

But it's tedious. Repetitive accounts of repetitive behaviour. Whole chapters of, "look at me, I know all this Psychology/Space Travel/Geology/Climatology/Younameitology and I'll drone on about it until you've entirely lost the plot."

I have to compare this with writers like Ursula le Guin and Brian Aldiss, who could tackle huge themes deftly and evocatively. Neither was afraid of difficult theory, LeGuin wrote a whole novel (The Dispossessed) which was famously a practical handbook for Anarcho-Syndicalism but it never read as a political textbook.

Aldiss created a complex imaginary planet completely unlike ours, which you understood very well at a scientific level despite almost all the text being an account of interesting human lives.

And why so long? One third of a trilogy and it weighs like War and Peace. It needed a less indulgent editor, cut 75% and it might have started to work.

And the sex. Several candidates for the bad sex awards here. My benchmark for good writing on sex is Ian Dury's line - "What happens next is private, it's also very rude." There's rarely a need to say more, unless you are serous about writing erotica, which this is not.

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Alex Avrio

Not as good as I hoped

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 December 2016

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This started as a good conceptual SciFi, but for me it soon got bogged down in the fairly dry politics between different factions of colonists. This facet was interesting for a bit, but I felt it was overly long and meandering, and would have preferred a little more focus. Ultimately I felt I got a little bogged down in it, and didn't feel this lived up to the classic status it is often assigned.

14 people found this helpful

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mat

Epic, Ground Breaking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 August 2018

Verified Purchase

I'm sure other reviewers will be more articulate than I on what an achievement this book truly is.

All I can say to add to this is that this book, this trilogy, opened my mind to subjects I had not considered, to psychological personas and political considerations not open to me before. Its almost psychic in its ability to discern future trends.

It is ahead of its time by a wide margin, only now are the technologies described coming into use, the politics and the environmental disasters into existence, what an insight.

The writing has excellent storytelling which makes you want to turn the page. Its a beautiful, uncomfortable and very logical insight into what may happen in the future.

Al I can do is recommend it to everyone.

3 people found this helpful

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Dr. W. L. Lyon

My Introduction to SF Years Ago

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 August 2020

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I'd never read SF - then I got the Mars trilogy and became a fan. I think it's accurate - if we wanted to transform Mars to a livable planet, this seems like what would happen. (People who know a lot more about science than I do, to whom I gave the trilogy, tell me it is accurate.) But I loved it, and loved discovering SF. (I'm being asked to review this now because I bought the trilogy as a birthday present for a grandson... I have a bad habit of giving books I love to people I love...)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 October 2017

Verified Purchase

The Mars mission seems now to be so close to home that this book has a virtually contemporary feel. The mission will be of enormous public interest. I found this book quite easy to read - it is a very compelling subject. This is no longer really Sci-Fi and I am sure everyone involved with the mission will or has already read it. As well as covering a wide range of the physical challenges we will face, it is also a very human story touching on psychological complexity which will invariably play a role.
A key theme and one of great interest is how society will evolve given what is in effect a clean canvas. But how much baggage are we importing from our Earthly culture? What of those primitive instincts we harbour? KSR goes a long way in speculating on these questions. I was rather sorry to see all the progress made in colonising Mars go up in smoke as the `Terrans`, ( a rather apt sounding word for the powers back on Earth), want to step up mineral exploitation amidst rebellion from the Martians. However KSR manages his own veering from utopian into dystopian without too much disruption and with some fascinating calamitous occurrences although the plot did seem to evaporate a bit towards the end.

One person found this helpful

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Ajay

Ambitious in scope, often turgid in delivery

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 December 2020

Verified Purchase

Approached this with huge anticipation and enthusiasm and the first chapters did not disappoint. However, something got lost along the way, with overly long and drawn-out sections following some of the main characters around. Also, I found the descriptions of the different cities and landscapes on Mars didn't evoke a sense of transportation to those places. They never really left the page. Easy to see some of the seeds of later sci-fi like Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem in there, and clearly an important treatise on the economics and politics of settling new territories and worlds, which will no doubt serve as a template for the real-life version of events. Just wish it was a more absorbing story.

One person found this helpful

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