Red Mars

"Red Mars is a classic, the first in a 1990s trilogy, followed by Green Mars and Blue Mars. It’s about how humans would colonize Mars. This is something that people love to lionize. It’s the next step for a species, going to Mars and living there. One thing I’ve got to tell you about these books up front: they love exposition. It is a rule of science fiction that you should not get bogged down in exposition, in just telling the reader stuff, because people mostly care about people. They want to know what people do, what people think, how people feel. If you’re going to give the reader information, a good rule of thumb for writers is to have a character care about the information, so that you can use that character’s emotions as a way in. Kim Stanley Robinson does not give a f*** about that. He will just tell you stuff for pages about the geology of Mars, about what chemicals can be found on the planet, and how they could be used to change its atmosphere, about politics and economics. And for me, it works. I enjoy reading that stuff. I don’t always agree with his political views or his characterizations of different kinds of people, but I respect the effort. And what I respect most is his willingness to say, ‘Why do we want to go to Mars?’ Is it intrinsically good, making more of ourselves, making Mars more suitable to humans? I think many people would agree, not without good reason, that a plane of rock without life on it has no intrinsic value. We should just do whatever we want with it. It’s not like there’s a species there that depends on it for its habitat. It’s just dead matter. And Kim Stanley Robinson has characters who say, ‘No, for intrinsic philosophical and spiritual reasons, this place is more valuable left alone than it would be if we made it livable for humans.’ That’s not a philosophical stance I personally find easy to support, but reading characters who support it and feel very powerfully that it’s important is valuable to me. Red Mars is not all about people arguing over whether we should touch a rock. It’s soap operatic. There are weird love triangles, and people being assassinated, and terraforming on a vast scale – they melt the ice caps on Mars, and characters get caught in the flood and have to try to survive… It’s dramatic and large-scale. But at the core of it is this question: what right do we have to the natural world? What’s going to happen to us if we go to this other planet and change it to suit us? A big part of the book I haven’t touched on at all is that Earth wants to control these Martian colonies and use them for stuff, whether it’s getting resources or as a place to dump unwanted population. And that, of course, leads to war. It’s not the Robert Heinlein kind of war – in his book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , the moon is a libertarian paradise, and Earth tries to control it, but the clever people on the moon figure out how to stop it. In Red Mars, the revolutionaries, like many revolutionaries in real life, are facing a huge, powerful, established state that wants to control them. It’s similar to The Quiet War by Paul MacAulay, which is about Earth trying to reconquer humans who live around Jupiter and Saturn: it recognizes the very centralizing power of the state. It doesn’t try to suggest that we’ll go to Mars and build super lasers with Martian diamonds and fight off the Earthers and have a new society. We bring our problems with us. The actual details of how to invade Mars itself and destroy it are now scientifically out of date. I just find the people involved so vivid and their ideas so strongly expressed that you can’t help but care about them. It was also a huge influence on Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri , one of my favourite video games ever."

"Yes. So this is also part of a trilogy. It’s really hard to pick books that are standalone about space colonization because they’re all so sweeping: they’re about civilization itself. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote this classic trilogy, Red Mars , Green Mars , and Blue Mars . It’s hard sci-fi so it’s really focused on explaining it as realistically as possible—fans of books like Andy Weir’s The Martian would really like this trilogy, I think. The only sci-fi he adds is he invented this life-extending technology, so his original 100 settlers can live long enough to see multiple generations, which lets the characters stick around a bit. Hard sci-fi is normally not my favorite genre—I want a little more depth into the characters—but he does such a fantastic job of looking at the different ideologies that you would see if you were creating a settlement on a new planet. So some of characters are settlers who are excited about terraforming and they want to turn Mars into a Green Mars—that’s where the name comes from. They want to make it as habitable as possible, as fast as possible. “Fans of books like Andy Weir’s The Martian would really like this trilogy” At the same time, you have other characters, geologists in particular, who want to preserve the pristine Martian environment, the Red Mars. They create these political factions. There is even political violence about this. And this is happening at the same time as they are all trying to figure out the actual politics of, ‘How do we govern ourselves? Are we part of Earth? Do we want to be independent?’ It’s all the normal stuff you would expect but, at the same time, this ethical argument over the intrinsic value of Mars itself, which I think doesn’t get talked about enough when we are talking about mining or terraforming. I find it fascinating. There are also some great examples of how these kinds of violent conflicts would play out. So one night—I’ll try to do this as spoiler-free as possible—one of the dome habitats is attacked by someone cranking up the oxygen, which makes everyone feel really good and happy, and then they light a fire and basically the air catches on fire because it’s over oxygenated and it kills everyone. It’s really horrifying but also, it’s a really fairly plausible, low-tech way of attacking a space habitat. I really enjoyed those kinds of details. I don’t want to say ‘why isn’t anyone talking about this?’ because there are people talking about this. Philosophers have argued about potential alien life on Mars, which would raise its own ethical problems. But there’s also a question of, ‘Do we want to terraform and thus irreparably change a landscape that has been there longer than any of us? Do rocky, lifeless landscapes have an ethical intrinsic value that means that they deserve to be protected?’ This is a controversy within philosophy, and between cultures, of how much personhood does a piece of the land have, and does that deserve protection? How does that value compare to the value of life? How do the different levels of life, like microbes versus plants, versus animals, versus humans, how do we rank those? I think these are issues we are going to be arguing about as humans, long into the future. I think that’s definitely an appeal, especially in the US. Americans are very culturally obsessed with the idea of the frontier. You can study this in history: there was a whole frontier thesis by historian Frederick Jackson Turner that said once our frontier closed, once we got to the West Coast and didn’t have any other land to grab up and kill the natives on, then we changed as a society and our culture, somehow. Historians debate that but certainly, in so many of our stories, there’s the idea of the frontier. “Space is the final frontier” is part of one of our biggest pieces of science fiction culture: it’s at the beginning of every Star Trek episode. A lot of people also love to talk about space as a blank slate, which I think is not accurate because it’s a blank slate now but once we get there, we are bringing all of our baggage with us, which I think is what so many of these stories expose. Yes. I think part of it is that humans can naturally think about small communities and the dynamics of small communities, but it’s really hard to think about how to help 8 billion people thrive. These global problems are really overwhelming to us. And if we could go back to a hundred people on the planet, how do we keep them all happy and safe with each other? That’s just easier to think about. But if there’s one thing humans do, we scale up our population given the chance, so we will have to figure this out in space eventually too."