Green Mars

Green Mars, the second book of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, picks up about fifty years after the failed revolution of Red Mars. The surviving members of the First Hundred and the first generation born on the planet, the Nisei, live in the hidden refuges of the Martian underground and plan a second uprising against the transnational corporations and the Earth authorities that control Mars.

The story moves between several viewpoint characters. Sax Russell, the physicist who champions terraforming, goes undercover inside the project and pays for it; Ann Clayborne, the geologist, fights to keep the planet red; Nadia, Maya and the young Nirgal and Jackie each pull the movement in a different direction. Arthur Randolph, a diplomat from the corporation Praxis, helps bring the underground factions together.

Beneath the politics is the book's central argument about what humans owe a world they are changing, and whether a planet can be remade without losing what made it worth reaching. It won the Hugo and Locus Awards for best novel in 1994 and is best read after Red Mars.