Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson review

We got a long way to go, folks.

September 20, 2025

Categorization: Science Fiction

Where read: Crusty old paperback with decades-old Pringles sour cream smears

So the other day I decided I was spending too much of my salary on books and decided to sustainably “shop my stash” again (i.e. sneeze half to death digging out old paperbacks) and settled on my crusty copy of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I read Red Mars several times when I was a teenager and afterwards as a yuppie Goblin, so more than 10 years ago, and absolutely loved it. I then picked up Blue Mars and then Green Mars and for some reason, don’t remember enjoying those as much. Thus the whole series was abandoned in a lonely bookshelf up until today, the day that I decided I cannot really call myself a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson if I can’t even remember the plots of Blue and Green Mars. So in the name of fandom? Scholarship? I decided to go through the whole series again.

Because I will call myself an unabashed fan of Kim Stanley Robinson (I stan? Did I say that correctly? Who is stan anyway). He is a freakin’ genius. I am a little more than halfway through Red Mars now and the feelings of awe for this book that I had decades ago have resurfaced unabated. In true intellectual pleb fashion, when I read this book, half the time I am simply marveling and shaking my head in admiration that there was a person smart enough to write a book like this.

Because it is a massive undertaking, this book. It is about going to Mars the same way, I guess, you would say The Fountainhead is about building houses. Or Anna Karenina is about divorce. Red Mars is really about humanity, about the different motivations of its most powerful and influential factions when they try to come together to do something remarkable (like enter another space age), about economics, about culture war, idea war, the environment, I mean, dare I say, human existence??? Reading this book there are just so many interesting ideas coming to you left right and center that you are overwhelmed with the scale of it.

Which is just as it should be! This feeling of awe and being overwhelmed is exactly the theme of the book. Because going to Mars is a vast, colossal undertaking! The hubris of it! It has annoyingly gotten a bad rep because of recent… events… (goddamn it Katy Perry – no one could have predicted that humanity would take this particular turn)…

Anyway, I digress.

Kim Stanley Robinson somehow manages to impress upon you the glory and difficulty of this massive adventure by humanity, together, with all their prejudice and personal agendas, and brilliance and ingenuity and small-mindedness and greed. ALL OF IT!!!

Everything about this book is just so believable. The Russian-US space coalition…

OK, maybe not that.

The beautiful Russian astronaut (played by that lady from Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit in my head). The less-beautiful but genius Russian engineer. The brilliant American political animal. The dashing American pilot (played by Chris Evans in my head, of course).  The terraforming dilemma and the tree-huggers who hate it. The Zen-like cult (led by Mariko in the recent Shogun remake) and their wonderfully spacey philosophy. The mad scientists. The UN Office of Martian Affairs ("UNOMA" - LOL this one gets me every time). Again, a moment of awe for how someone dreamed up humankind’s journey to Mars on a scale this big.

Remember my theory, that the core of Science Fiction is that it should be relatable? Well this is relatable in all these many aspects. Anyone, from any culture, can read this book and find something to relate to. That is the beauty of this epic.

And the science is just so… believable. OK, I will admit that my life path did not lead me to any STEM or STEM-adjacent profession, which makes me unqualified to give this statement categorically. I’m sure people who actually have a background in meteorology and geology and physics probably scoff at some of the scientific explanations and theories propounded in the book. BUT, the science in this book sounds juuust believable enough that a non-science person like me would stop and think, perhaps they did not? I mean, I suspect that some of the science-y words are made up but whatever Kim Stanley Robinson put in that juice I am drinking.

Anyway, the "science" is very fun to read and it is endlessly entertaining to theorize with the scientists in this book, especially when science is the only thing standing between them and death both in space and in the uninhabitable desert that is Mars. Like, can you really smash an asteroid into the Martian atmosphere and pour loads of oxygen into it?? Can you?? Who cares! The very thought of our Toms, Dicks and Harries dreaming that up and humanity banding together to make it happen is thrilling all on its own.

I have to say though, this is one particular book that will not translate well to TV without taking massive liberties. The “adventures” in this book, as they are, are not “exciting” in a way that visual media would need them to be in order to capture and hold an audience’s attention. Red Mars’ adventures are the ideas being shared between the crew, the feelings and motivations that precipitate their actions, their theories about the world and how to live and run it, things that are made up of a lot of speeches and introspective thinking that are fun to read but would visually translate to a whole lot of monologuing, politicking, and walking around an empty red desert wearing a spacesuit and fixing broken Mars rovers that might come across as boring on TV.  Well, there is a love triangle, but it is so boring that Kim Stanley Robinson narrated it partly through the eyes of the beautiful Russian astronaut’s sidekick friend who is too brilliant to be bothered with such inane trivialities when she is trying to fix the nuclear machine to power humanity’s first Mars base camp. LOL.

So, anyway, if you love science fiction, and if you want to amuse yourself with how 30 years ago someone with what is looking to be extreme optimism in the human race (and the United States and Russia, in particular) thought year 2025 would look like, you are in for a treat.

red mars review, red mars by kim stanley robinson