BLUE MARS covers ninety years, manages to encompass not only Mars and all the other planets in the solar system but send off a starship as well, and it begins only one hundred and thirty years from now. When you look at the world we have and how it is governed or mis-governed you might wonder whether this is humankind overstretching itself. As the founders of the new Mars have anti-ageing drugs and live for one- or two-hundred years you have the possibility that the representatives we would be sending to the stars could some of the younger politicians of today. So Kim Stanley Robinson is an optimist in more ways than one.
In the third volume of his trilogy, BLUE MARS begins with most forms of earthly life now resident on Mars. The process of areoforming (Ares is the Greek form of Mars) is almost finished and there is a complete atmosphere and a full series of oceans - river systems are much rarer (piping is preferred). Mountains rise at much steeper gradients and the atmosphere thins more noticeably for those who want to get away to the high places. The human inhabitants have built their societies in tents, which are now becoming redundant, like medieval city walls. On the other hand, unlike the declining medieval cities, these tents are politically discrete units, and the first part of the novel is concerned with the bodies politic and their battles. These split into two: between the parties of Red Mars and Green Mars - where Red means leaving the planet without terraforming, so that its climate is much more extreme, and Green, who support a strong terraforming.
The second political battle concerns the struggles of Mars to be independent of Earth. Readers only get a few glimpses of how bad things are back on earth - there is incredible overcrowding as the population rises many times, but when one character goes back to Earth (leaving and arriving at both planets via elevators) the worst he sees is that the polar icecaps have melted and Gillingham in Kent has been flooded. Having asserted their independence, and getting it very easily, the Martians then go into a huddle and argue over their constitution. This gets discussed in long detail, with all the enthusiasm you might expect from a country where bestsellers are still published on the Constitutional Debates of the 1770's.
Then, before you know it, the engineers are out and Venus is being terraformed, as are the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter, and then the moons of Uranus (which is turned into a mini-sun as the real one provides too little illumination).
What is surprising about all this human activity is how little wonder is attributed to the engineers and their effort. For instance, the idea of using one of the distant planets as a small sun is a massive idea in itself, but it gets half a page, or less. Then, for all the space that is given to the discussion of the Martian constitution, it seems as if most of the occupation of the solar bodies and all the changes are made without discussion at all; somehow a group of astronautical engineers or emigrants have managed to arrive and began a major piece of work. There is no Federation, there is no government, Earth is still divided up into states like today, yet somehow planet forming gets done. And how the necessary resources are brought together is never made clear. Robinson gives a number of indirect references to the hard science authors who have predicted how the solar system will change - Clarke and Sheffield are place names, but he does not concentrate on the engineering or the economics, unlike Charles Sheffield, say, who tends to make his protagonists very rich engineers who can afford to build their visions.
At the end of the book Mars is terraformed - all of it is available for human life, and it has the spaces that presumably have disappeared from Earth. It has, though, wilderness that are available for barbarity. In the chapter "Werteswandel", Nirgal, one of the main characters, goes off into the desert and joins a group of hunters: "Nirgal's hands shook as he watched; he could smell the blood; he was salivating. Piles of intestines steamed in the chill air. Magnesium poles were pulled from waistbags and telescoped out, and the decapitated antelope bodies were tied over them by the legs." By the time this happens Mars has a constitution which allows these individuals their dubious pleasures - and whether he is aware of it or not, Robinson's Martians have a brought about something terrible. (If you want to become aware of this difference think of Clive King's STIG OF THE DUMP. That has a hunt scene, too, where Stig's friend Barney discovers that Stig is not interested in the fox - he sees the horses and ponies beneath the red-coated riders as a potential dinner. Somehow, that is much more of a revaluation of all values).
At the same time as I have been reading BLUE MARS, I have been reading CLIMATE, HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD by H.H. Lamb (the second edition was published by Routledge in 1995). It provides a lot of information, some of which is mentioned in BLUE MARS, and it also provokes some bigger questions. The most important question is: when you talk about terraforming or areoforming - which Terra are you talking about? Are you talking about Earth as it was for thousands of years before two thousand years BCE, principally ice-bound, where there was no civilization, possibly because there was no place for civilization? Or the centuries of the Roman Empire, when everything became milder and vines grew in Gaul and Britain for the first time? Or the time of Shakespeare, when the Little Ice-Age had descended again?
Now the climate you have is going to affect the success of your colonisation - Americans know this, because the early settlers had so many problems. However, as H.H. Lamb makes clear, climates have so many variations and so many cycles that the window of civilisation we have enjoyed has perhaps been chance. And in a sense we are lucky that the worst devastation has never been universal. For instance, we all know the political and social consequences of the warm wet weather in Ireland in the 1840's which allowed the potato blight to flourish, but we have mostly forgotten that eight of the harvests failed in Scotland in the 1690s.
Robinson refers to some the freaks, like 1816, the "Year Without a Summer" in many parts of the world. His Mars has some of these problems, but I think he has failed to appreciate, that in creating a world with an atmosphere, he is going to create a world with a climate. For instance, towards the end of the novel, Nirgal and Maya travel on a schooner through a great sea and flooded fjords, but there is no discussion of the micro-climate which must have sprung up about the sea and mountains, suggesting that Robinson can envisage deserts (he is a Californian) and snowstorms, but he cannot envisage temperate ever-changing climes (Britain, Vancouver or Japan, say). And in a similar way other scientific discoveries get a strange treatment - there is a one-off discussion of sub-viral bodies, which are called "viroids", but they appear to be prions, which perhaps we in Britain are more familiar with because of B.S.E. Or, later, there is a long suggestion that there has been no scientific discussion of (loss of) memory, ignoring the work of science popularisers such as Oliver Sacks and Harold Klawans.
So, BLUE MARS, set in the near future is, perhaps rather than an end, a starting point. There may be a MARS COMPANION appearing soon. I hope it will include everything that will allow readers to continue their search.