Book Review: “Red Mars” from Kim Stanley Robinson
One of the best books I’ve read in 2021 so far is a Science-Fiction classic. I wanted to read something else afterwards but I had to continue with the second book, Green Mars, straight away.
I can’t believe two things: that this book was published in 1992, so years before “the internet” and over a decade before smartphones were a thing, and that I only read it now, in 2021.
Besides the one or odd “funny moment” (when one of the protagonists reflects back to the first manned journey to Mars in 2020), the book is nearly prophetic in its accuracy both of social and political unrest on earth, cultural and religious troubles among different tribes of humans as well as with mankinds ongoing obsession with Mars.
When “Red Mars” came out, Elon Musk was just a 22 year old student in Pennsylvania, one can only imagine that this book must have given him the one or other idea (or dream?) about the feasibility of a mars colony.
“Red Mars” is a strange book: clearly Science-Fiction, with a lot of seemingly well researched scientific elaborations spanning obviously from space travel, rocketry, and insights into life on a planet with a deadly athmosphere, low gravitation and very, very low temperatures, but also into fields like geography, geology, biology (people are terraforming Mars), and genomics; but also into less obvious fields like political, religious, and social sciences.
It is also clearly “non Science-Fiction”: it stands up to “normal” novels in the way the rich plentitude of characters is given space to develop deep story archs. It includes a lot of political developments and utopian re-imagining of what a new society, founded by scientsts on an alien world, might look like — always bearing in mind that for those humans staying on earth, Mars obviously is rather seen as a “free for all” resource, made to be exploited as brutally as possible by multinationals (called “transnationals” in the book) who wield more power than the UN or any national government on earth — a very, very prophetic and bone-chilling prophecy that seems not revolutionary in 2021, but was not at all that obvious back in 1993.
Definitely a book that should be on your “100 books to read before you die” list.
Can’t wait to finish the whole trilogy.
