Mars trilogy

The Mars trilogy is a series of three science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996). They follow the settlement of Mars and the changing of its climate over about two centuries, from a first landing party of a hundred to a planet with oceans. Each title is the color that Mars has at that stage of the work, which Robinson's reference site calls the color "as it evolves through the process of terraforming". A collection of related stories, The Martians, followed in 1999. Together the novels run to about 2,000 pages.^[1] The trilogy is half of the one-line description that Molecular Reality Corporation gave its planned game Molecules of Mars.

The story opens in 2026. The ship Ares leaves Earth orbit on December 21 of that year with the First Hundred, a group of scientists and engineers chosen and trained in Antarctica, seventy of them from the United States and the Soviet Union, for a nine-month flight.^[a][2] On arrival they split over what Mars is for. The geologist Ann Clayborne wants the planet left as it is, and the physicist Sax Russell wants it made habitable. Their followers become the Reds and the Greens. Biologists release engineered microorganisms, small windmills warm the ground, and within a few years the United Nations office that governs Mars approves terraforming.^[2]

Red Mars covers the first 35 years after the departure, and it ends with the first revolution against Earth's transnational companies, put down by UN police and company forces. Green Mars picks up twenty years later and Blue Mars carries the story to the end of the second century, years in which water falls and then gathers, and in which a longevity treatment developed on Mars greatly lengthens human lives.^[2] The timeline of the reference site puts the pressure of the Martian air at 10 millibars when the first expedition lands and at 130 millibars by the end of the first novel. Mars today has about 6.4 millibars at its mean radius, and the surface of Earth has 1,014.^[3][4]

The verb "terraform" was coined by Jack Williamson in the story "Collision Orbit" (Astounding, July 1942), where an asteroid has been terraformed in a minor subplot.^[5] Robinson's settlers use several methods at once. The sails of the ships that carried them become mirrors, and later an orbital mirror, the soletta, adds sunlight. Waste heat from power plants is released into the air, and deep shafts called moholes bring up heat from below. A mixture of greenhouse gases known as the Russell cocktail thickens the air, aquifers are pumped to the surface, and biomass is "the most important element".^[6]

Research since the novels has been less hopeful. In 2018 Bruce Jakosky and Christopher Edwards examined spacecraft measurements of the carbon dioxide on Mars, in the polar ice, in carbon-bearing minerals and in the atmosphere that is escaping to space. They found "not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming" if it were all released, and that most of it could not be reached anyway. They concluded "that terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology".^[7]

The books use Greek for Mars, Ares, as a prefix where the English uses geo- for Earth. Areology is the study of Mars, or Martian geology, and an areologist such as Ann does it; areosynchronous is the Martian counterpart of geosynchronous. Areoformation is a word John Boone, the first man on Mars, uses for the change that Mars works on its settlers, as against terraformation, the change settlers work on Mars.^[8]

Robinson wrote his doctoral dissertation on the novels of Philip K. Dick at the University of California, San Diego, in 1982.^[9] In 1988 the magazine Thrust published his afterword to Dick's VALIS.

Red Mars won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, presented in 1993.^[10] Green Mars won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1994, and Blue Mars won it in 1997.^[11][12]

The company's memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest of about 2022 describes Molecules of Mars as "Inspired by: Moon Patrol meets Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy", and lists "cyanobacteria, Martian soil simulants" as its samples.^[13] In the novels the settlers' organisms are engineered algae and microorganisms. The company's 2022 paper "Our North Star" lists among the hopes for synthetic biology the chance "to terraform Mars!"^[14] The same paper cites Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which the company's list of influences sets beside the trilogy.

• Molecules of Mars
• Moon Patrol
• The Martian (Weir novel)
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation