For centuries the red planet has been a blank page for human ambition. In 2026 a hundred scientists and engineers — the First Hundred — leave Earth aboard the Ares on a one-way voyage to Mars, charged with turning a frozen, airless desert into a place people can live.
They land, they dig in, and they build the first permanent settlement, eventually called Underhill. What they cannot build is agreement. Terraforming Mars would mean orbital mirrors, blackened polar caps and vents drilled into the planet's mantle, and the colonists split over whether they have any right to do it: Sax Russell argues that a dead world exists to be made living, while Ann Clayborne insists that four billion years of Martian geology is worth more than human convenience. Behind both stands Earth — overcrowded, unstable and represented on Mars by the transnational corporations and the UN authority that paid for the trip.
Kim Stanley Robinson tells the story through the colonists themselves, above all the rivalry between John Boone, the first human to set foot on Mars, and Frank Chalmers, the diplomat who resents him. Around them the settlement grows into a society with its own politics, its own underground and its own reasons to break with the planet that sent it, until the argument stops being an argument and becomes the first Martian revolution.
Red Mars won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the British Science Fiction Association Award, and opens the trilogy that continues in Green Mars and Blue Mars.
