Mars has long intrigued writers of speculative fiction but many of the novels set on the red planet, from Edgar Rice Burroughs's extravagant fantasies to Philip K. Dick's characteristically offbeat visions of a desert Mars, have paid little attention to the genuine science that might lie behind any future manned missions there. Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy, of which Red Mars is the first, is the finest attempt in contemporary SF to imagine how the colonization of the planet could progress. Beginning with the arrival in the 2020s of the pioneering colonists, the First Hundred, the narrative follows the gradual progress of the Martian settlement as it grows from tiny outpost of Earth to self-contained world. The readers see the shifting alliances and antagonisms between the first settlers, the growth of a political and scientific debate between those who wish to move ahead with terraforming the planet and those who advocate a more cautious approach to meddling with Mars's natural environment, and the tensions that arise when further settlers arrive to join the First Hundred.

Robinson's imagination is clearly stirred by the potential of manned travel to Mars. His descriptions of the Martian landscape and the changes effected by man’s intervention are breathtaking in their lyricism and attention to detail. He wants his book to be as scientifically accurate as it can be but there is much more to Red Mars than just scientific speculation. His characters are rounded and believable people, caught up in extraordinary, pioneering circumstances, whose political alliances, arguments and interrelationships are brought vividly to life. Hard science, weird geology and convincing psychology combine in what is a remarkable, epic account of the formation of a new world and a new society. This, the reader comes to believe, is what the future colonization of Mars could well be like.

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