Neither of the planet’s two main kingdoms seems to want to join the Ekumen’s commonweal, and various misfortunes and misunderstandings have left Ai in a perilous situation. Genly Ai, “first mobile” and emissary of the Ekumen, is reporting back to his home planet from the snowbound world Gethen. The Red Planet as we know it today is the real and tragic hero of Robinson’s peerless future history, and by the end of Blue Mars, it has vanished under all that wet and swarming green – a lifeless memory of the pre-settler past. Soon “Moholes” are drilled to release Mars’s subsurface heat, the atmosphere is thickened, nuclear explosions deep in the permafrost release water to the planet’s surface. But the outcome of the debate is never really in doubt. Sax Russell (who believes in humanity’s obligation to spread life across the universe) and Ann Clayborne (who thinks changing entire planets at will is inhuman and immoral) articulate arguments that evolve over time, spawning protest movements, political parties and even governments. It is a narrative that spans centuries, populated with memorable characters, and dominated, at least in this first volume, by an argument over whether or not to change Mars out of all recognition. The first of a tightly plotted trilogy, Red Mars (1992) describes, in painstaking detail, the settlement and terraforming of our neighbour planet.
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