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A review by nwhyte
Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
5.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1541312.html
I think the Mars books are among the best examples of sfnal world-building, combined with politics, that I know; without needing a detailed knowledge of Martian geography in advance (the maps supplied are adequate for me) I got a tremendous sense of the scale and size of the planet, of the vast enterprise of making it livable, not a new Earth, but a new Mars. And Robinson raises questions about the political management of the environment and the wider economy on the new planet which certainly have resonances for our own time and place.
Blue Mars is a series of explorations of what happened next, what happened elsewhere, to the characters of the first two volumes. We get excursions to Earth and to the rest of the Solar System, with a mention of interstellar colonisation; we get constitution-building, explorations of the new planet and the new society that Mars has become. But it is also about death. The two killer moments in the book are, first, after Nirgal has set up and started cultivating his own little garden crate, filling it with plants and wildlife, showing it off to his friends, the whole lovingly described enterprise is wiped out in a sandstorm. No human character is even injured in the incident, but it is still tremendously sad. Second, as part of his scientific hand-waving to allow the same cast to witness all the stages of Martian terraforming, Robinson has gifted his characters with longevity. But this starts to run out after a while, and the suriving members of the First Hundred begin to die, one by one; the crucial moment comes when Maya fails to recognise a photograph of her long-ago lover, Frank Chalmers - a scene told from her point of view and then again from the viewpoints of those around her. The book, which has had a lot of death in it, ends with a summoning of lost memories, a reunion of survivors, and a celebration of where they have got to; with mysteries still remaining - for instance, whatever happened to Hiroko?
I think the Mars books are among the best examples of sfnal world-building, combined with politics, that I know; without needing a detailed knowledge of Martian geography in advance (the maps supplied are adequate for me) I got a tremendous sense of the scale and size of the planet, of the vast enterprise of making it livable, not a new Earth, but a new Mars. And Robinson raises questions about the political management of the environment and the wider economy on the new planet which certainly have resonances for our own time and place.
Blue Mars is a series of explorations of what happened next, what happened elsewhere, to the characters of the first two volumes. We get excursions to Earth and to the rest of the Solar System, with a mention of interstellar colonisation; we get constitution-building, explorations of the new planet and the new society that Mars has become. But it is also about death. The two killer moments in the book are, first, after Nirgal has set up and started cultivating his own little garden crate, filling it with plants and wildlife, showing it off to his friends, the whole lovingly described enterprise is wiped out in a sandstorm. No human character is even injured in the incident, but it is still tremendously sad. Second, as part of his scientific hand-waving to allow the same cast to witness all the stages of Martian terraforming, Robinson has gifted his characters with longevity. But this starts to run out after a while, and the suriving members of the First Hundred begin to die, one by one; the crucial moment comes when Maya fails to recognise a photograph of her long-ago lover, Frank Chalmers - a scene told from her point of view and then again from the viewpoints of those around her. The book, which has had a lot of death in it, ends with a summoning of lost memories, a reunion of survivors, and a celebration of where they have got to; with mysteries still remaining - for instance, whatever happened to Hiroko?