Subject: Review: _Red Mars_ by Kim Stanley Robinson

From: [email-masked] (Bret Jolly)
Date: 24 May 1994 08:16:03 GMT

Review: Red Mars

   The front matter of this book contains three pages of praise from
various reviewers.  Gregory Benford says:

	  If you're looking for a scientifically sophisticated story,
	  told with enormity[!] and grace, here it is.

   It does indeed have an enormity rivaling Judith Merril's infamous
lunar helicopter.  Some characters set off across the unterraformed
Mars in a dirigible loaded with windmills!  Here is KSR's description:

             Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a
          planetary model [?] built back in Germany by
          Friedrichshafen Noch Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so
          that it had just recently arrived.  It was called the
          _Arrowhead_, and it measured 120 meters across the
          wings, a hundred meters from front to back, and forty
          meters tall.  It had an internal ultralite frame, and
          turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these
          were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries
          were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper
          surface of the bag.  The pencil-shaped gondola extended
          most of the length of the underside, because most of it
          was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills [...]

   Ignoring KSR's peculiar notion of what a turboprop is, where was he
that day in grade school when they explained the law of buoyancy?
Evidently he was troubled by his intuition here, because he added an
`explanation' a few paragraphs later.

             It was remarkable, in fact, that they had not done
          anything like this before.  But flying on Mars was no
          easy thing, because of the thin atmosphere.  They were
          in the best solution: a dirigible as big and light as
          possible, filled with hydrogen, which in Martian air
          was not only not flammable, but also even lighter
          relative to its surroundings than it would have been on
          Earth.  Hydrogen and the latest in superlite materials
          gave them a lift to carry a cargo like their windmills,
          but with such a cargo aboard they were ludicrously
          sluggish.

   We are all abysmally ignorant about some things, but should anyone
this ignorant of science be writing ultrahard saifai?  And what of the
editors who let this slip by?  Did they all skip class on that same
fateful day in grade school?

   Well, you say, what of the rest of the book?  After all, if we
demanded that our ultrahard-saifai writers had a good general knowledge
of science, we wouldn't have much to read.  Unfortunately, and despite
its Nebula award, this book is a thoroughbred turkey.  KSR has written
some admirable stories, but I felt embarrassed for him all through this
book.

   It's a shame too, because he was clearly trying hard.  I could
imagine him at his word processor, surrounded by stacks of NASA SPs.
But he has no idea of what is technologically plausible.  For example,
when the 100 colonists arrive on Mars in 2027 they get their water by
*extracting it from the atmosphere*.

   A ways into the colonization, Mars is flooded with immigrants,
mainly from backward countries who are trying to relieve their
population pressures.  Did KSR think about this for five minutes?

   While the 100 colonists are colonizing Mars, their biologists
discover the secret of immortality in their spare time.

   KSR can create vivid, believable characters when he wants to (as in
_The Gold Coast_) but he didn't do it here.  Throughout the book the
characters give the impression that they are doing things not because
they want to, but because the author told them to.  The most appalling
example of this is a mild spoiler, so I save it to the end after a
spoiler warning and some control-Ls.

   A comparison with Pamela Sargent's Venus books forced itself upon
me.  Sargent wrote a saga of the terraforming of Venus, where KSR is
writing a saga of the terraforming of Mars.  Sargent is not that much
more knowledgeable than KSR, and when she figured out that terraforming
Venus was much harder than she'd thought at first, she fell back on
anti-gravity machines which marred a would-be ultrahard saifai.
Nonetheless, Sargent's saga is much better than KSR's.

   This is partly because her characters are more interesting and
believable, but largely because her future world is better thought out
and much more interesting than KSR's.  The earthbound part of KSR's
future is pretty much boring extrapolation.  Sargent's future is exotic
and strange.  Sargent's future has a sensawunda that KSR's lacks.

   _Red Mars_ does have some interesting ideas in it, but these are all
to be found, to much better effect, in his excellent novelette _Green
Mars_, which has appeared in a Tor double.  This novelette should not
be confused with the *novel* _Green Mars_, which is a sequel to _Red
Mars_ and which is to be followed by _Blue Mars_.  (Librarians
everywhere will curse KSR's name for this!)  KSR has decided to expand
an excellent novelette into a bloated and stupid trilogy.  This was a
good business decision on his part, but a sad decision from the
viewpoint of those who love good saifai.

%A	Robinson, Kim Stanley 
%T	Red Mars
%I	Bantam Spectra
%C	New York
%D	February 1993 (paperback November 1993)
%G	ISBN 0-553-56073-5
%P	572pp
%O	paperback USD5.99, also in hardback and trade ppb.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  MILD SPOILER WARNING

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



  When the original 100 colonists arrived at Mars, a
group of political utopians split off and colonized
Phobos.  Near the end of the book it is revealed that,
in their first year on Phobos, the utopians hollowed it
out and secretly turned it into a giant rocket.
Ignoring the problem of how they did this, *why* they
did this remains a mystery.