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    Green Mars
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    Green Mars
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    Green Mars
    Ebook862 pages15 hours

    Green Mars

    By Kim Stanley Robinson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The second volume in the bestselling Mars trilogy – and now part of the Voyager Classics collection.

    Mars can be plundered – for the benefit of a ravaged Earth. It can be terraformed to suit Man’s needs – frozen lakes form, lichen grows, the atmosphere slowly becomes breathable. But most importantly, Mars can be owned. On Earth, countries are bought and sold by the transnationals. Why not Mars too?

    Man’s dream is underway, but so is his greatest test. The survivors of the First Hundred – Hiroko, Nadia, Maya and Simon among them – know that technology alone is not enough. Trust and co-operation are need to create a new world – but these qualities are as thin on the ground as the air they breathe.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateApr 11, 2013
    ISBN9780007402090
    Author

    Kim Stanley Robinson

    Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952. After travelling and working around the world, he settled in his beloved California. He is widely regarded as the finest science fiction writer working today, noted as much for the verisimilitude of his characters as the meticulously researched scientific basis of his work. He has won just about every major sf award there is to win and is the author of the massively successful and highly praised ‘Mars’ series.

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    Reviews for Green Mars

    4/5

    34 ratings24 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Still very very dry but much more cohesive as a single story than the first book.
    • 5/5
      This should be Elon Musk's strategy guide to colonizing Mars. It's that detailed, science-based and fascinating. 
    • 4/5
      Love the terraforming and the beginnings of social changes that have resulted from this setting.
    • 4/5
      I prefer this book to the first, possibly because my expectations this time around were better aligned with the actual content. This is not a series about terraforming Mars, but it is the story of its colonization with terraforming as part of the background, together with a lot of political, economic and sociological turmoil. The big questions posed concern whether Mars' primary value lies merely its mineral wealth, or does it offer something more to human civilization and what form should that take? There are even strong proponents in the novel for surrendering the question and respecting the planet's natural state. You might take the sequence of titles in this series as a spoiler for how well that view fares.The sequel follows the model established in the first novel, devoting each section to following another character while feeding into the overarching story of what's being done to the planet, how its future is being determined and by whom. The author might easily have adopted one particular approach to Mars as his protagonist view, but instead he's presented a story that covers the entire spectrum of possible approaches and throws them into conflict with one another. As a reader I was perpetually re-evaluating which faction is right, and discovering it is easier to shift sympathies from one view of the story to another with each new section than it is to arrive at an easy answer. I expect by the end of the trilogy there will be a dominant faction or two, but at this rate it will come with knowing the full price that was paid and having seen other promising visions of Mars' future pass into nothing. It's harsh, but I like it.
    • 2/5
      Not as good as the first one. Preachier, and extremely slow paced. Took a while to get through, because I kept getting distracted by anything that wasn't this book.
    • 4/5
      This was stronger than Red Mars. Red Mars could introduce all the technology, so Green Mars could mostly just use all that to focus more on the people. Green Mars builds very much on Red Mars - it hardly stands on its own. And it hardly ends either. It's got a dynamic end that points ahead... well, I plan to read Blue Mars anyway!
    • 4/5
      Love the terraforming and the beginnings of social changes that have resulted from this setting.
    • 4/5
      This might be the first time I've given a book I actually think was better than its predecessor a worse rating. The thing is, Red Mars may have been full of engineer fanfic and embarrassing cultural essentialism (Swiss colonists--on Mars, you know--who say things like "Outsiders. Ausländer." etc.), but it also advanced this really interesting future story of scientists and governments colonizing Mars and then coming up against corporations--"metanats"--and, of course, the same governments. It is the freaky future as seen insightfully but also of course in some wise atavistically from 1990 and it is fun. This one is fun too, but also deeper--the practice and the ethics of terraforming, or "areoforming"; the intertwined physiological and cultural changes of the Martian nisei and sansei and yonsei; the sad old crazy yet still brilliant yet empty brain thoughts--these being the most affecting passages in the book--of the first generation of colonists kept alive by genetic "treatments," colonization of space from the point of view of one of Swift's struldbruggs, trying to keep memories stretching back to the twentieth century all inside at the same time like stuffing the stuffing back into an overstuffed couch. Robinson's affection for his characters is one of the main things that keeps you reading--Sax "Saxifrage" Russell, the pure scientist of logical and ordered habits whose emotional life takes wing in his second century as he sees the Martian landscape blossom; Maya Toitovna, cosmonaut and leader of the initial 100 colonists, sense of self disintegrating under so many decades of learning and experiences and men and jockeying for power and going to fucking Mars, but still becoming, still unsure if she wants to be a lover or a fighter; Nirgal, the sensitive one out of the new Martian supermen or children of (pardon the expression) Aquarius. All these are goods, nestled into a bed of geology fanfic (moholes! Pistes! Volcanoes ten miles tall!) that is much more agreeable than the gee-whiz engineering stuff of the first volume. But the thing is that the main narrative in the first volume intrigued me in a way that the world building of this one doesn't--we get a corporate-titan(ifyoullpardontheexpression)-who-thinks-different and wants to pull us all into a post-national, post-transnational, post-terrestrial future, utterly banal, although Robinson does at least make fun of him a good piece; we get a Martian revolution that is inspirational yet also still banal, oh yes, these things are compatible, of course they are, my friend, but I wanted more: UN Security Council meetings, anti-Martian fulminations by talk show hosts, the Marxism of the 22nd century--I wanted more of this central epic that Robinson implicitly promised, instead of the fascinating meandering I got, which was frustrating though good and sometimes great.
    • 2/5
      I did keep going, but had to skip more and more. I don't demand a story-line in every book - but this one just did description - and with the sheer number of pages you would have thought he would have had space for a bit of story. If he was trying to do a Stephen Donaldson - he failed. But I still liked it. He has put a lot of effort into the science of Mars and I appreciate that. Now I am really conflicted because there is 'Blue Mars' to come - shall I venture it - or not? I really enjoyed 'Red Mars' but I don't want to wade through another one like this.
    • 3/5
      A good, and fast-paced volume in the Mars trilogy, the characters believable, and likeable. It doesn't really flag.
    • 4/5
      Green Mars is is very much a continuation of the story started in Red Mars, but the focus has definitely shifted from engineering to political philosophy. We learn that Earth is now dominated by mega-corporations who want to extend their influence to Mars, while the inhabitants of Mars want to push back this influence and institute self-government. However, the people of Mars face two major problems: overcoming the significant financial and military resources of the Earth corporations, and trying to figure out how they want to govern themselves given their myriad backgrounds, beliefs, and philosophies. The entire book really highlights these struggles; the focus of this book definitely contrasts with the ponderousness (and wonder) of Red Mars. However, while science and engineering have definitely taken a back seat in the story, I still found Green Mars to be very engaging and thought-provoking, just in somewhat different ways.
    • 3/5
      The first work of Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Red Mars, was an exciting story of discovery and survival that introduced the fascinating technical and philosophical issues surrounding the decision to terraform the red planet. In Green Mars the colonization of Mars is well established, the terraforming well under way, and the issues are social and political rather than technical (not that there isn't still an abundance of scientific information and debate presented to the reader). The key issue is Mars' relationship to Earth and the multi-national corporations which are now in charge. Is Mars to continue to be a colony whose mineral resources are siphoned off to meet the needs of the home planet, or is it to be an independent world building its own future?It is perhaps inevitable that the level of excitement in Red Mars cannot be sustained into the sequel. The important, and sometimes cataclysmic, events are now happening on Earth, to be learned of only second hand. And the vital issues are now not so much scientific as economic, a field in which the author seems less at home. In fact the economic basis for the massive effort involved in settling and terraforming Mars remains largely a mystery throughout the novel. So rather than a thrill ride into the unknown, Green Mars is a novel that invites sober reflection on the nature of economic imperialism and the perils of unregulated corporate capitalism. It also reflects, albeit from a vast distance, upon the dangers of population growth, economic stratification, and climate change. By means of dramatic medical advances, the author keeps the surviving characters from Red Mars around for several more decades so they continue to be the principal characters in Green Mars. They are not reintroduced, so it is advisable to read the two books as closely together as you can so you remember who's who. A peek ahead into Blue Mars reveals the same character names, so the entire trilogy is best treated as a three-volume novel.
    • 4/5
      My reaction to reading this novel in 1994. Spoilers follow.This was an excellent novel, but I didn’t like it as well as Robinson’s Red Mars, the first in the series. Part of that, I’m sure, is simply the wearing off of the first novel’s novelty. The landscape descriptions of this novel seemed more prevalent but less interesting than Red Mars. That may be due to reading two long novels with the same sort of thing in them. However, I think there are more descriptions of the evolving Martian landscape here than in the earlier book. Furthermore, this landscape is more Earthlike as compared to the sublime, alien desolations (particularly Red Mars’ scene where Ann Clayborne shows black garnet sand dunes to Nadia) of Red Mars which were so interesting. Also, this novel is much more characteristic of Robinson’s tendency to write what are, in effect, speculative essays with enough drama (and characters) to be labeled as fiction. Red Mars did not have a linear plot, had a book ending with John Boone’s murder, had a lot of inherent drama in showing the First Hundred splitting into murderous factions and ended with a destructive war. (Boone looms, like his murderer Frank Chalmers, large as a legendary figure over this book.) In short, it had drama and physical action. This novel’s plot is straightforward and much more cerebral. That's not a bad thing given the discussions of economics, politics, and history. (I still find Robinson’s economic ideals, particularly the ludicrous combination of capitalism and communalism silly (land, air, and water are common property as is human labor yet human labor’s fruits belong to the individual). It ends not with a violent revolution changing the political order on Mars. The model of the American Revolution is specifically rejected in Red Mars for, amongst other reasons, the vulnerability of the infrastructure that supports life on an unterraformed Mars and the inability of the land itself to support life. Rather, we have a “velvet revolution” on the model of those that toppled the Soviet Union – the authorities simply give up challenging massive civil disobedience. Where Red Mars ended with the violent destruction of human cities and Martian landscape, Green Mars ends with only the city of Burroughs being destroyed. Red Mars featured murder and war. The most violent incidents in this book – Maya Toitovna’s killing of Phyllis Boyle, Sax Russell’s rescue from the prison city of Kasei Vallis and its eventual destruction – are given very little space in a 535 page book. Most of this book is taken up with characterization and the exploration of political and economic ideas and landscape descriptions. I also think it would have been better served with a more detailed map. Robinson’s detailed landscape descriptions can be confusing – especially since he is no doubt drawing from detailed surface maps of Mars. There was much I liked here. Robinson skill in the “literary” school of writing is impressive as he is able, through technological and scientific metaphor (his use of this technique – so often associated with cyberpunks – is not as flashy but as extensive), symbolism, plotting, and character to carry his themes through a long book juxtapose them, and wrap them up neatly at the end. The tension between Red and Green visions of Mars runs throughout the book, is unresolved, and seems a more intractable difference than the various political/economic visions of Mars' future (as shown in a sort of constitutional convention in Dorsa Brevia – or, more accurately, a declaration of principles and independence). Robinson also plays around with his characteristic concern for history and its meaning. History is thought of, by Nadia, as possibly a Lamarckian process. A sort of Marxian (in the sense of man progressing through economic stages of development) vision of man’s political/economic past and future is laid out. (Robinson subscribes to the shopworn notion of a future improbably dominated by transnational and “metanational” companies though the end of his novel – where nations simply seize corporate property – points out its absurdity.) Robinson also nicely combines the psychological effects of longevity treatments (most of the First Hundred have problems remembering their early days on Mars) and speculation on the meaning of history in the character of Maya. She wonders what the use of longevity is if old people, like the young, can not use the supposed benefit of a long life – experience. Are old people damaged by life, their capacity for optimism and idealism crippled or do they benefit from wisdom bought by experience? When she begins to suspect Chalmers had Boone killed, she finds herself having to read history books to find out what was really happening with her lovers – and she finds the books of little help, filled with bad information or observations that bear little resemblance to her life. What lessons can be drawn from history when the accounts of it seem to have so little truth in them and the memories of even those who lived history are so unreliable?The “Scientist as Hero” section would, in other hands, be a daring tale of revolutionary espionage as Sax Russell goes underground with an assumed identity to spy on the transnationals. Here, though, it is merely a fascinating portrayal of a man who sees everything through rational, scientific eyes – a man forever classifying things, calculating results, even calmly observing and noting his own emotions of fear and sexual attraction. (He does a fair job of trying to escape after Boyle discovers his identity.) I liked seeing the world through his calm, curious eyes, and I liked his transformation into “the mad scientist” of the revolution, motivated in part by his “rational” conclusion that the current political setup on Mars and Earth can not sustain itself and his pain and brain damage at the hands of security force torturers. He develops a formidable passion for building weapons, a scientific and aesthetic love of Mars and the life slowly taking it over, and a desire to rid the world of government thugs like those who tortured him. I also found the book’s other mad scientist, Ann Clayborne, fascinating though I disagreed with her radical Red agenda. (She goes from being merely vigorous opponent of terraforming to an active saboteur of it.) She reminded me – particularly when she’s at her most mad in “The Long Runout” section of this book and “Shikata Ga Nai” in Red Mars, her most withdrawn and melancholy – of schizophrenic Pris Frauenzimmer in Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You. The resemblance may not be coincidental since Robinson is quite familiar with Dick’s work having done a PhD dissertation on them. The First Hundred still are the most interesting: Nadia for trying to prevent another destructive war, Maya for being a charismatic, though old revolutionary. While this book features just as many – if not more – massive engineering projects, they seem less interesting though more grand. I think this is because so many are off stage or not directed by the familiar First Hundred (now the First Thirty-Nine). (Indeed Maya stands in awe of the “pharonic” powers of engineering the young Martians take for granted.) I liked that young Jackie and Maya can’t stand each other because they are so similar though neither realizes this. Of the new, younger characters diplomat Art Randolph – a more cheerful, optimistic version of cynical Chalmers – and Nirgal are the most interesting. (Though I expected Robinson to do more with Nirgal’s freakish ability to sense the exact temperature and raise the temperature on parts of his body.) I liked the ending where Robinson neatly wraps up several themes. The process of aeroforming the mind and culture – the Martian landscape changing men’s minds and cultures and politics and economics – is neatly linked with the other process going on throughout the novel: the terraforming of the planet. This is all done when the inhabitants of Burroughs must flee into the Martian desert and walk the surface with only coats and filter masks and not walkers and helmets. A new social order has been born and its members embrace the new Martian landscape on more natural terms, a unity of Martian civilization is reached or, at least, made closer. A new type of Mars – its future – politically or climatologically – uncertain, has been born. This is something biblical about the trek away from the soon-to-be-destroyed Burroughs, a flight from slavery to the old order, a walk to the promised land.
    • 4/5
      In the second book of Robinson's Mars trilogy the terraforming of Mars continues. The remaining of the "First Hundred" and their followers are living (mostly literally) underground in various communities. The whole terraforming story and the descriptions of the mars fractions is fascinating and beliveable but the book has a huge weakness. Sometimes it's utterly boring... Regularly repeating endless descrtiptions of the surface of Mars, long philosophizing leading nowhere...It's a shame because as I said before the basic plot's great.
    • 3/5
      Like most sequels, I found Green Mars to be less enjoyable than its predecessor. Red Mars was an adventure--the colonization of Mars--filled with plenty of sci-fi background. Green was just as geeky, but "explore strange new worlds" was replaced by meetings, politics and Martian spirituality. (spi-fi?) --J.
    • 3/5
      The sequel to Red Mars is unfortunately not quite as exciting and a bit more difficult to get through. What could be tolerated in the first book – the endless descriptions of driving around on Mars, the minutiae of Martian geology and terraforming – I was less tolerant of in its sequel, and more inclined to skip ahead. But I did enjoy the climactic Martian revolution while at the same time I was wishing for more social conflict and less hard science. The emergence of a new type of person – the Martian – as well as the evolving ramifications of the anti-aging treatments were fascinating, and I look forward to more elaboration on these subjects in the final book in the trilogy.
    • 3/5
      Exhausting. The book opens almost a century after the colonization of Mars (recounted in [Red Mars]), with 39 of the original First Hundred settlers still alive and active as leaders in various political and scientific movements and taking repeated anti-aging treatments. They live side-by-side with several other generations, all born on Mars, physically different and politically Martian to the core. Earth is just not a priority for them. For newer immigrants, however, Earth is still very central, as it is for the huge multinational corporations which run Earth and, increasingly, Mars, with private security forces. As life on Earth deteriorates towards a new world war, with increases in population but limited distribution of the anti-aging treatments and then the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, Martian underground leaders must decide how to foster independence from Earth while they deal with the forced climate changes they've made to Mars and a variety of factions, some quite violent, who can't agree on how Mars should be developed (if at all) and how to end multinational control. Long, with some very tiresome scientific and philosophical debates and few really likable characters. OTOH, if you want to read the Mars trilogy, this is part II and essential to the story line. Many characters are familiar from [Red Mars], and there are a couple of intriguing new ones. Be warned, though: get a map of Mars to use with the book.
    • 4/5
      It took a lot of self-restraint not to read this as soon as I finished Red Mars. I had to restrain myself for two reasons: one, I had too many other books on my to-read pile to justify even buying Green Mars, let alone reading it, and two, I would have burnt out pretty quickly. Much like the first novel, Green Mars is full of complicated politics and complex inter-personal relationships. The plot is glacier in both pace and preventability. I found it harder and harder to put the book down the nearer I got to the end.To quote Wellington: "The history of a battle, is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance..."The events in Green Mars are like the history of multiple balls, a whole complex of ballrooms. Overall it is a political novel; it just happens to be set in the future.
    • 2/5
      A total pain in the ass. More semi-soft science, more noodling philosophizing, more disconnected narrative; large parts are bogged down with tiresome, transparent, pot-boiler-grade plot threads, and the rest reads like an earth science textbook.Honesty dictates that it be disclosed that I haven't actually finished this book. I realize it's bad form to give up on something half-finished, but seriously, do I have time for this?
    • 4/5
      First of all this Green Mars is the 2nd book of the trilogy not as I expected the third. Red, Blue, Green, just seemed more sensible to me, especially with red being the dry mars, and hence Blue wuld be the wet mars, followed by Green the living mars. Not so. Red to Green and Blue last. Not sure why this is called Green mars, very little vegitation is surviving - although some does and the surface is now distinctly not red in many places. Perhaps it is in reference to the two factions within the natives - the Reds are fundamentalist no-terraformists while the Greens are more moderate terraformist supporters of various kinds. Given the ending in Red Mars it is now clear that the Surface of Mars has been altered forever. The story continues in the same style as previously - sections are devoted to a specific character and told in a fairly tight third person - although not quite as tightly as in Red Mars, there are a few disconnects with other characters jumping in. I gave up trying to keep track of exactly when events happened, but Green Mars starts quite a bit after the end of Red - the 'war' in '61. Which didn't turn out quite as well as it seemed, the First 100 are down to 39, and still bitterly divided about the fate or Mars. However the old Transnational companies have now become Metanationals - shortened to Metanats, which I always read as Mentants as in Dune, very annoying - and in a very convenient and not quite belivable plot twist, one sympathises with the Martian 'natives', so that as the conflict over the ownership of Mars escalates and the conditions on Earth deteriorate there is more information around and the natives can be better prepared - if only they can agree in which direction they wish to be prepared! Hiroko is still an enigma, and although we gain a bit more detail about Coyote he too is still much of a mystery figure. However we do get a lot more information about the new youngsters on Mars, 2nd thrid and even fourth generation children, who naturally enough don't quite see eye to eye with the elders.Much less science in this book compared to the last - although there is still some especially early on. The background now is more about rebellion and discussion. How would you go about taking over a planet? How do you as an anarchist copmrimise enough to form a government? How do discussion work and where does agrement come from. Again the tight third person narrative gives a good view on the different sides of the matter. There is also some wonderful commentary on getting old, and the problems a healthy and long lived population have to come to terms with. I wasn't completely convinced that a 120yr old martian would be able to be accepted as a immigrant from earth without any questions being asked! And there is still way too much water being found compared to the infromation that we now know. The Metanats are otherwise remote and not quite convincing either. Overall it's still a cracking good read though, and the many problems of Mars and it's people are captivating - not just as a story but as all good SF should be, also as commentary on the problems we as society may face. Much of the discussion dialog you can see repeated in internet forums every day - iconoclasts who don't/won't or can't see anothers opints of view; or even that there are two or more equally but contradictory right answers to a given problem. Is going it alone the right thing to do?...................................................................................................................
    • 4/5
      The second of the trilogy sees Mars having moved on and th First One Hundred become reverred but not always at the cutting edge of what is happening.The Greens and the Reds are now the largest groups on Mars both wanting to stop it from being taken over by Earth. But there wishes for Mars differ - is terraforming a good idea?Praxis, one of the MetaNats on Earth, want to help with their rise and to form independance. So they send a secret "ambassador" to Mars to contact the First One Hundred. All of which leads to again the break from Earth - though with infighting that shows the growth of any civilisation.The second book is just as good as the first especially as the groundwork on the characters was done earlier. This is now following them in their life.
    • 4/5
      In his trilogy of Red, Green and Blue Mars, Robinson treats the tensions of environmental change with extensive, detailed scientific knowledge and acute political awareness. Reading Green Mars gives concrete meaning to the term "terraforming". He reviews the conflicting arguments and gives them flesh in the personalities and characters of their proponents.To read this trilogy is to become acutely aware of the fact that change brings both distruction of old ways and the evolution of new ways. It underlines the importance of adaptation and flexibility. It also stresses the point that at these maco levels of change,randomness and environmental pressures exert considerable pressure on the process of change. The trilogy is an examination of the complex of scientific, psychological, economic, political,social, and philosophical impact environmental change has on us all
    • 5/5
      This is the second part of a trilogy. Read them in order!1) Red Mars2) Green Mars3) Blue MarsThis you can follow with a collection of short stories, called:4) The MartiansGreat read! Absolutely loved the whole series. Now that is an utterly believable scenario how colonization of Mars could take place, great characterizations, believable political plot, very good visualizations – you can see the place in all its splendour – and one of my favourite things about it – each chapter is told by a different character, you get to see everything from a new viewpoint in each of the chapters. Each of the installments has about 700 pages, so it’s not for the faint hearted.
    • 4/5
      Again, with "Red Mars" and the follow-up "Blue Mars," a very solid trilogy about the social and environmental transformation of Mars (and themselves!) by long-lived human settlers.