This month’s rediscovered treasure comes from Voyager Publishing supremo Jane Johnson.
Publishing Kim Stanley Robinson‘s MARS trilogy remains one of my proudest achievements in 25 years in the industry: it’s a towering, glorious epic, telling 300 years of future history focusing on the terraforming and colonizing of the Red Planet in three chunky volumes: RED MARS, GREEN MARS and BLUE MARS, and it deservedly won praise worldwide, and just about every major award for which it was eligible. The most delightful plaudit received was a note from a group NASA scientists engaged in a Mars-simulation project in Antarctica. We had sent them a proof of RED MARS — they wrote back saying they loved it so much, and found it so accurate and gripping, that competition to read the proof was fierce and that in the end they’d had to tear the proof into two so that they could pass it around quicker!
I have to say I never paid much attention to science at school, having decided early on in that annoyingly black-and-white way that teenagers adopt when carving out their identity that I was an arts student, and so you’d have thought these heavily-researched, science-based epics would have left me cold. Not a bit of it! Kim Stanley Robinson is such a master of characterization that he hooks even the most resistant reader into the story by means of his varied and engaging cast and the soaring thrill of the central concept. Mankind not just travelling to Mars, but going there and seeding it with blue-green algae, creating an atmosphere, making it habitable for settlers, building biospheres and then settlements, discovering and channelling its aquifers; fighting over the rights and wrongs of playing God on another planet. By the time I was halfway through reading RED MARS that was it: I wanted to volunteer to be sent to Mars, even if it meant never coming back again. I burned to climb Olympus Mons, hugest mountain in the solar system and fly dirigibles over its surface.
It’s 20 years old now, this series; but it’s never been more relevant or felt more topical. Climate change, environmental issues, scientific solutions to manmade problems — all are at the heart of this series (a discussion that continues in even more condensed form in Robinson’s ANTARCTICA). It’s a seminal work, the most crucial work of science fiction — I fervently believe — written for our generation.
Tags: Blue Mars, Jane Johnson, Jude Fisher, Kim Stanley, Nebula award Green Mars, Red Mars, The Mars Trilogy
