Like Nadia, I want to wildly dance for joy on the Martian dust. I want to walk on its surface under the red sky and feel the thin cold wind, and this is a book for Mars geeks by a Mars geek. I've got this big wall poster of Mars, laid out in all its plucky glory - the Tharsis bulge, the big volcanoes, the massive flood erosion systems. When do we leave?' My wife might talk me out of it (she hates the cold), but if I didn't have obligations to family, I'd be there in a heartbeat. If someone from NASA told me that I could go to Mars, and there was only a 50/50 chance I'd survive, I'd be like, 'That good, huh? I'm sold. Or at least, I love the idea of the planet Mars, because I've never been there. This is a book you'll either love or you will hate. To begin with, I should come forward with my biases. I wish I could bump this up to 3.5 stars, which more reflects what I feel about it. I just finished reading this for the second or third time. It shows a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves and friendships will form and fall to pieces-for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.īrilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in evolution, creating a world in its entirety. Massive tunnels, kilometers deep, will be drilled into the mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth. The colonists orbit giant satellite mirrors to reflect light to the surface.

For the genetic alchemists, it presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life and death. For others it offers an opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness. John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers and Arkady Bogdanov lead a terraforming mission.

Now, in 2026, a group of 100 colonists is about to fulfill that destiny. For centuries, Mars has beckoned humans to conquer its hostile climate. In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of a trilogy chronicling the colonization of Mars.įor eons, sandstorms have swept the desolate landscape.

Ksr mars trilogy