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   Red Mars - Green Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
reviewed by Lynne Ann Morse
Original appearance: Albedo one issue ??, date?
and in CUBE, the 'zine of SF3
from Madison Wisconsin
Red Mars was a tough act to follow. But Green Mars succeeded, at least for me.
The timing of this review is especially poignant, coming as it does during the conjunction of Earth and Mars -- this made Mars especially visible, especially large and red in the winter sky, while I pored over the two books in search of my favorite bits to share. Red Mars covers a period in near future history, from when the first, carefully selected
colonists/scientists arrive. Red Mars takes the reader along on a bumpy ride -- the early hard work of setting up on the new planet, the changing relationships among the firstcomers, competing visions of Mars as it is found, its potential, and that of the colonists to remake their society. It is especially these conflitcting visions that power much of both books -- should Mars be left in its pristine state? Terraformed? Strip mined? Used as a bolt-hole for the rich owners of "transnationals" when the deteriorating situation on Earth becomes ever more harrowing? And who gets to decide, bureaucrats, a board of directors, or the locals themselves?
The climax of Red Mars is a truly brutal depiction of how far some people will go to defend what they believe is theirs, in shows of brinksmanship gone over the edge. The scale of the destruction matches the huge scale of the planet itself; while Mars is smaller than Earth, it lacks oceans and so the surface area is about the same as Earth´s, but with truly epic scale features, sometimes hundreds of times the size of their Terran counterpart. Accounts at the climax - of innundations from ancient aquifers suddenly freed, satellite-based laser attacks on tent-cities, the space elevator brought to ground with its cable wrapping nearly twice around Mars, the moon Phobos likewise knocked from orbit - could be read along side portions of the Book of Revelation as a seamless work on the theme, "The end of the world." Robinson deftly turns it to reminders of human suffering, when one character considers the dead, in a world where live-prolonging treatments have reached a new level of effectiveness. That character´s words, "They could have lived a thousand years," bring home to the reader the criminality of such waste.
Yet, the end of one thing is the beginning of another, and Green Mars opens in a secret hideaway, begun by a group of the first settlers determined to live on Mars while trying to live as Martian as possible. As paradoxical as it sounds, it works to create still more possibilites than a simple juxtaposition of national park or mining colony, or of Red Mars vs. Green Mars. Engineering on Mars is equally epic -- the space elevator, tethered between the planet and an asteroid, a huge "magnifying glass" to further warm the planet. But since human beings move among these places,
the story also returns constantly to the human dimension. In the second book the Mars-scape is no longer unchanging, the epic carries on in just how it changes, in response to human action. Also, though, the humans have to change in response to the limits they live with. In between, and nearly as intruiguing, are the variety of the protected habitats in which the humans do most of their living; I had a lot of fun watching how the competing visions of those involved with Mars then shaped even these places.
Some of the characters seemed to spring instantly to life, especially when viewed through the eyes of some other character in the book -- Robinson does this a lot. Others are harder to get to know; then again, there are so many characters, and so much happening on the planet, that an author mustpick and choose among the cast of thousands. Most of the time, individual characters do represent certain positions regarding Mars, but without becoming too cardboard. Especially touching is the effort of a socially dyslexic terraformer, who takes on an examination of the human values intrinsic in his beloved Science, all in an effort to bridge the gulf with the character who could be considered the original proponent of keeping Mars "red", or absolutely untouched by human activity. This philosophizing happens more than once, and always in character, over a wide range of topics -- religion, psychology, economics or "eco-economics," effects of lengthened life-span on memory...
The "edge" of Green Mars, the tension for the reader, comes both from the constant fear of being caught, and from the fear that a new attempt to free Mars of Earth´s business interests will repeat the destructive paroxysm from decades before. And to add to all the mining and security activites beyond the hidden world, a transnational of ambivalent nature sends an emissary, with the task, "Acquire Mars." Or rather, to acquire the human potential present in the underground itself... And while this is going on, some of the underground try to strike out at repressive measures with acts of "ecotage", sabotage specifically of the terraforming effort.
The fear of being caught materializes more than once. In a scene of pure horror with yet nothing happening right before the reader, one reads, "It was the hellish twisted spacetime of the all-night vigil, that most ancient of human rituals, where people fought without sucess to wrench meaning into each random catastrophe." This fear is transmitted to their descendents, when they see in broken bodies the proof that they have enemies on Mars. As the colonists and their descendents struggle to free Mars, the older ones go through their own individual coming to terms with the horrible events, and even their own actions, or those of their dearest friends, of the years before. It certainly makes me wonder, how Robinson will wrap it all up in Blue Mars...
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