Category Archives: Space

I finally got hold of this first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990s Mars triology. Now I understand what the fuss was about over this series of tales which still sell well on Amazon. As the cover blurb on the 1993 edition, by Arthur C. Clarke, has it: "It should be required reading for the colonists of the next century." Well here we are in that century and polls show and pols say there’s not enough interest in going to Mars to bother.

The novel is still good. It’s light on the tech and the sci but heavy on the human relationships among the First Hundred colonists of Americans and Russians. And their one-way vehicle to Mars in 2026 (still time for that) is nicely practical: a cluster of rotating toruses made of interconnected fuel tanks from shuttle stacks taken into orbit (rather than discarded over the ocean) by both the American shuttle (retiring next year) and the old Soviet one (which only flew a few times).

So that’s impossible, but day-to-day life on Mars nevertheless is compelling. The tale makes me want to put on my "walker" and helmet and go for a lope in the low g, guided by a personal AI on my wrist, even if the Net is still confined to pre-Web bulletin boards. Among my favorite tech description is the building and subsequent use of a space elevator between Pavonis Mons and a captured asteroid. Thirty-story elevator cars make the journey up and down in five days.

Once out of the Mars gravity well, it’s much simpler (and cheaper) to board a rocket for earth, or arrive on one and take an elevator down to the planet. Now I’ll go back and reread the second book and finish the third one, with much more appreciation than I had trying to read them first.