Red Mars
Red Mars is the first novel of the Mars trilogy, published in 1992. It follows the beginnings of the colonization of Mars, from the arrival of the First Hundred to the First Martian Revolution.
Stats for nerds
56recommend
140mentions
121people
2008–2026years
44% recommend49% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > it's a dead rock. There is no environment to pollute
I used to share this view until I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. There is aesthetic value to preserving Mars in its pristine form, within reason, if only so future generations can enjoy it.
That doesn't mean full space NIMBY, as this article suggets. But it does argue against being cavalier about an alien landscape simply because it's lifeless.
- I recommend the novel Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Mars makes Antarctica look like a jungle.
"The Red Mars series initiated a shift in science fiction away from the stars and back to our real future in the solar system. Unless a technological miracle occurs, we are not building an interstellar civilization anytime soon..."
"Writing On The Terrifying Beauty Of The Human Future", Adam Frank, NPR 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/11/02/561577403/writi...
- Oh man, this one hits close to home! I for one am deadset on setting foot on Luna one day, so I need this to work. Ever since reading the incredible treatment of this issue in the Red Mars trilogy, I’ve been on board! And with intuitive algorithms we now have an even better shot than before; not only will they help speed up research, they will also necessitate reduced inequality, which in itself is a huge boon to paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. After all, how many Einsteins never get to attend secondary education in todays world?
Substantively;
This paper is fantastic science, but the title/conclusion is just lazy rhetoric. “If we don’t get a breakthrough, we won’t have a breakthrough” is just tautological, and high-resolution recent trend analysis is not a meaningful tool for answering that question, anyway.unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century. - Ah, I couldn't figure out why it sounded vaguely familiar until I saw the "Works of Kim Stanley Robinson" section at the bottom of the page:
> The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is also portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement [52] and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation[53] two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars.
Red Mars was one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read, but Green Mars starts pretty slow so I didn't get very far into it. I think I'll start the trilogy over.
- _highly_ recommend the "Red Mars" series - deals with questions I never thought of before, namely "to what extent should we preserve the surface of other planets?
- A martian space elevator is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, definitely worth a read.
