Fiction 26 Nov 2003 23:06
Green Mars
Green Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
The second book in Robinson’s Mars trilogy, this is a very well written sequel that will glue you to the book until you finish it. If you liked the first one (Red Mars), of course. In fact, take this as a warning: do not read this book if you haven’t read Red Mars yet. Do not read this review, either.
The great thing about this trilogy, in my opinion, is that we follow a very credible effort at terraforming Mars not only from the technical side (the science and engineering of changing a world), but from the political and social side as well. We see what can become of the two worlds (Mars and Earth) and how a new Martian society could be, given what we have here now. Not many sci-fi authors go in this direction, and this is what really attracted me to these books.
And yet the technical side is not only not forgotten, but very well presented, with lots of details and “progress reports” on the results of the work of the characters. As you can probably guess, all this level of detail results in a somewhat long book (over 600 pages in the edition I read).
This part of the trilogy happens approximately 100 years after the First Hundred landed in Mars; still, due to the longevity treatment discovered in Red Mars, we still follow all the surviving ones (39 at the beginning of the book) while they do their best to make Mars into what they believe is right for the planet. Since they do not share a vision, they don’t all get along, obviously. In this book we see how the influence of the meta-nationals (huge companies who control entire countries back on Earth) try to take their power to Mars, and how the Martians (immigrants and natives) fight back, in a way different from the one that caused the tragic events at the end of the first book.
The trilogy ends with Blue Mars (the title of the book suggesting that the terraforming continued going well), which I will review as soon as I read it.
