Kim Stanley Robinson - The Complete Mars Trilogy - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper Voyager

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London SE1 9GF

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Red Mars

Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy 1993

Published in paperback by Harper Voyager 1996

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1992

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2009

Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1992

Green Mars

Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy 1994

Published in paperback by Harper Voyager 1996

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1992

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2009

Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1994

Blue Mars

Previously published in paperback by Voyager 1996

First published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 1996

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2009

Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1996

Cover Photographs © Kees Veenenbos/Science Photo Library

Kim Stanley Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBNs: 9780007401703, 9780007402090, 9780007402175

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780008121778

Version: 2017-11-20

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Red Mars

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Festival Night

Part Two: The Voyage Out

Part Three: The Crucible

Part Four: Homesick

Part Five: Falling Into History

Part Six: Guns Under the Table

Part Seven: Senzeni Na

Part Eight: Shikata Ga Nai

Green Mars

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Areoformation

Part Two: The Ambassador

Part Three: Long Runout

Part Four: The Scientist As Hero

Part Five: Homeless

Part Six: Tariqat

Part Seven: What Is To Be Done?

Part Eight: Social Engineering

Part Nine: The Spur of the Moment

Part Ten: Phase Change

Blue Mars

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Peacock Mountain

Part Two: Areophany

Part Three: A New Constitution

Part Four: Green Earth

Part Five: Home at Last

Part Six: Ann in the Outback

Part Seven: Making Things Work

Part Eight: The Green and the White

Part Nine: Natural History

Part Ten: Werteswandel

Part Eleven: Viriditas

Part Twelve: It Goes So Fast

Part Thirteen: Experimental Procedures

Part Fourteen: Phoenix Lake

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also By Kim Stanley Robinson

About the Publisher

For Lisa

Mars was empty before we came. That’s 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 witnesses – except 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 tongue – Nirgal, Mangala, Auqàkuh, Harmakhis – they 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.

Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah – stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning – a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.

“… And sowe came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West – it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings. ”