Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars

Praise for Kim Stanley Robinson and
Red Mars

The novels and short stories of Kim Stanley Robinson constitute one of the most impressive bodies of work in modern science fiction he virtually invented a new kind of science fiction in which characters as richly drawn as any in conventional fiction inhibit near future worlds evoked with as much versimilitude as the contemporary settings of any conventional novel.

The New York Times Book Review

Robinson provides enough sense of wonder for any dozen SF novels, introduces and juggles a mammoth cast of characters and provides intrigue, mystery, murder and political maneuvering, as well as a nuts-and-bolts account of how human technology would tame a wild planet.

The Orlando Sentinel

The best pure science fiction novel I have read in years, a book so full of credible human drama, technological savvy, breathtaking planetary scope, stunning historical sweep, and hard-nosed spiritual uplift that I regard it as the prologue of a brand-new Martian Chronicles.

Michael Bishop, Science Fiction Age

If Red Mars were a movie, it would feature a cast of charismatic stars big special effects and set-pieces, and a literate script full of intrigue, romance, and high adventure Fortunately, it is a novel, and as fully-imagined a science fiction novel as any I can think of.

Locus

This epic tale of colonization, settlement, and revolution on Mars is a people story despite lots of technical detail: it is impossible to stop reading.

The Philadelphia Press

Splendid characters in a brilliantly realized and utterly convincing setting For power, scope, depth, and detail, no other Martian epic comes close. An intricate and fascinating mosaic of science and politics, love and betrayal, survival and discovery, murder and revolution.

Kirkus Reviews

Robinsons prose is as good as usual, his scientific home work impeccable, and his handling of a large cast a model to many avowed saga mongers.

Booklist

A lyrical, beautiful, accurate legend of the future by one of the best writers of our time.

David Brin

Red Mars is a huge, engaging novel that provides a provocative and compelling vision of a very plausible scenario for Martian colonization. A fascinating story of the early days of human existence on an alien world.

Gentry Lee, director of mission planning for Viking mission to Mars and co-author of The Garden of Rama

If youre looking for a scientifically sophisticated story, deftly told with enormity and grace, here it is.

Gregory Benford

An expansive widescreen epic of the settlement of Mars, the kind of sweeping narrative that could be called old fashioned save that few science-fiction writers, old or new, have ever done a job so well. Beautifully detailed and vividly realized, Robinsons novel dramatizes the transformation of Mars. Not only the best SF novel about Mars ever written, but one of the best novels of political science fiction yet published in English. Readers across a broad spectrum of literary tastes should enjoy it.

New York Newsday

An enthralling work, as vast and colorful as its namesake subject Red Mars is a real science fiction novel that is beautifully written, and an epic in the classical sensea narrative of heroic scope peopled with heroic characters. Robinson is a literary landscape artist, creating breath taking vistas. Red Mars is so full of fascinating and elegantly written speculation on the future a wonderful book Its last chapters fly past, until we reach those final stunning pages.

The Detroit Metro Times

A splendid book. The scientific background and techno logical details are utterly convincing, the people come alive, and as the story comes to its catastrophic climax it gives a sense of time passing and history happening such as is rare in world literature.

Poul Anderson

Amazingly and refreshingly, here is a book about Mars that has no native Martians, green, bug-eyed or otherwise; no Schwarzenegger slashing at villains. For sci-fi fans who crave hard science, Robinson has crammed all they could want into an adventure that opens in 2026.

The Indianapolis Star

This is a strongly realized work, transmuting todays concerns for ecology and international cooperation into an exciting story. Mr. Robinson makes the future seem not only plausible, but already here, and his novel is a model of thoughtful extrapolation, admirably controlled plotting and good writing.

Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Red Mars will be the Dispossessed of the nineties; as with LeGuins novel, a host of new political thoughts will be awakened by it, to match the unforeseeable possibilities of the new century. Red Mars is one of those rare moments in which science fiction and the mainstream novel meet and coincide, without either one losing its gratifications: you can read it either way. It is Robinsons most ambitious work by far, in which all his varied literary and descriptive gifts finally come together: collective delirium and personal lyric experience, the epic of sport and physical exertion, the language of exotic landscapes, farce, a vivid characterization of memorable individualsall this now struck and illuminated by History as by a lightning bolt.

Fredric Jameson

Bantam Books by Kim Stanley Robinson

FICTION

The Mars Trilogy
Red Mars
Green Mars

Blue Mars

A Short, Sharp Shock
Antarctica
The Martians

Look for
The Years of Rice and Salt

Available now
in hardcover

for L isa

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Mars was empty before we came. Thats not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnessesexcept for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongueNirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhisthey sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart