The drive to colonize, terraform, and industrialize Mars yielded scientific and technological advances (system wide colonization, expeditions beyond Sol, longer lifespans, etc.) as well as a new socioeconomic system, but as Robinson himself has pointed out, what we know about Mars now suggests that much of what underpinned the series' optimism is unrealistic.Īt a 2015 talk, one example Robinson offered centered on the discovery of the widespread abundance in Martian dust of perchlorate-a chlorine in the form of a salt that is poisonous to humans in the parts per billion range. The Mars trilogy isn’t a triumphant saga imploring us to colonize Mars, it’s a story that tumbles largely out of the consequences of the so-called First Hundred colonists who fight over what to do with Mars and turn this fight into a struggle that ensnares all of humanity. On its face, this might seem contradictory to say after writing a hopeful trilogy about the colonization of Mars, but it’s consistent if you look closer. But until we have solved our problems here, Mars is just a distraction for a few escapists, and so worse than useless.”

“It would be a kind of reward for our success-we could think of it in the way my novel thinks of it, as an interesting place worth exploring more. If we were to create a sustainable civilisation here on Earth, with all Earth’s creatures prospering, then and only then would Mars become even the slightest bit interesting to us,” Robinson says in an interview with Farsight. My Mars trilogy is a good novel but not a plan for this moment. We should of course concentrate on maintaining the habitability of the Earth. It may come as a surprise to some, then, that Robinson recently seemed to rebuke all this and declare Mars irrelevant in the year 2022. Through it all, and despite the decline of Earth thanks to various environmental and political disasters, military conflicts with Terran forces, and political tensions sparked by waves of migration from Earth, the series is truly hopeful and optimistic not just about humanity’s future but the role Mars might play in it.

Kim stanley robinson mars