Blue Mars (Hugo, Locus; 1997)

By Kim Stanley Robinson

Early edition cover art: Don Dixon

Rating: ★★★½

SF Hardness Rating: 8

Themes: Future colonization, human potential, terraforming highs and lows, interplanetaru political intrigue, advancement of science

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy is brought to a close with "Blue Mars." I think it is a fine novel, though I have had many conversations with others who felt differently. The refrain that comes up again and again is that Blue Mars just doesn't measure up to Red and Green. I suppose there is some truth to that. Certainly, the tone of Blue Mars is very different from the other two. But a large part of that is the legacy of how "Green Mars" ends. At the end of that novel  an independent self-determining Mars is right on the cusp of achievability. Even the former waring factions of the underground spanning the ideologies of Reds through Greens and stranger things look like they may be able to put their differences behind them.

That leaves little room for a traditional trilogy grand-finale ending. And Robinson does not contrive artificial roadblocks to ensure that summation waits for the end of Blue Mars. Instead he gives us something different, yet no less worthy. Once the hanging threads left over from Green are dealt with, his story becomes free of the necessity of feeding the plot. What happens is that we are treated to a series of vignettes, spread over long stretches of time, each of which is meant to evoke some interesting aspect of the Martian future. Despite these occurring in a temporally linear sequence and with interactions between characters we have come to know and love, the format more resembles an anthology. In that sense Blue Mars is perhaps closer in tone to Robinson's companion collection of short stories "The Martians."

Slow River (Nebula, 1996)

By Nicola Griffith

Early edition cover art: (unknown)

Rating: ★★★

SF Hardness Rating: 9

Themes: Light and Dark Sides of Biotechnology

Much like the previous novel, The Diamond Age, and the classic Neuromancer before it, "Slow River" presents us with the gritty underbelly of a futuristic city in which advances in technology have failed to end suffering. Instead, such tools just provide more terrible weapons to both sides of the equation. In this case, however, those tools and the society in which they are used feel much more (if you'll excuse the pun) organic. Perhaps this is partly a matter of personal comfort. Being a northerner, I can bring to mind the look and feel of the tableau of steel greys to be found in damp cold river city during the short days of winter. By contrast, Diamond Age's (and Neuromancer's) fetid tropical setting is more difficult and less visceral an experience for me.

But beyond the subject matter and setting, I also found the narrative style effective. When we first meet Lore, she is litterally naked and bleeding on the dock of the unnamed city, having emerged from the water reborn, in a way, from the life she led before. Over the next few years, as she tries to sort out how she came to this, the reader is brought along on her journey of self discovery in three parallel story lines. 

The Diamond Age (Hugo, Locus; 1996)

By Neal Stephenson

Early edition cover art: (Bruce Jenson)

Later edition cover art: (unknown)

Rating: ★½

SF Hardness Rating: 6

Themes: Nanotechnology, Class Distinctions in a post-technological society

I'll admit that cyberpunk is not really my cup of tea. Part of the reason for that is that cyberpunk, like steampunk before it, seems to value complexity above all else and tends to produce settings and novels that feel overly complicated to my sensibilities. The Diamond Age is a novel that celebrates such complexity and really brings us full circle back to the origins of the genre. In the novel, a world is described in which nanotechnology has made almost anything possible to those willing and able to pay for it and has provided the basics of life free to all. The air is literally saturated with tiny machines, each carrying out the bidding of its masters. And so, the technology is simply a part of life, taken for granted. For the poor it allows a meagre existence while for the rich it creates complex ostentation to flaunt their distinction, like the most ornate and expensive of pocket watches.

The Terminal Experiment (Nebula, 1995)

By Robert J. Sawyer

Early edition cover art: (unknown)

Later edition cover art: (unknown)

Rating: ★★½

SF Hardness Rating: 8

Themes: Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Life after Death, Spirituality, Morality of Life

Everyone says that somewhere is a novel that will get inside your head and speak to you on a personal level. Well, this is not that novel for me. But when you move outside of the head and gaze down at some of the facts objectively, this one's uncannily familiar. In fact, the parallels between the main character and my own history is pretty frightening. It's the first of the awarded Science Fiction novels set in Toronto, my home city. Heck, the main character lives in the same neighborhood as me, went to the same university and would have graduated from the same program (had the novel been set just a few years later) and is married to a woman with a similar history to my own wife. I wonder if this is what it feels like to live in New York or Los Angeles or London where one's daily routine involves locations the rest of us experience vicariously through fiction.

The novel is a pretty good read too. But unfortunately, it suffers from one fatal flaw. Instead of focusing on the initial plot thread and following that thread's implications to the end, we switch gears about two-thirds of the way through. The rest of the novel is played out as a crime thriller that is a little derivative of works like "Neuromancer" and "Hyperion." Furthermore, this novel is one of the first amongst a trend - stories set in the very near future (in this case 2011) that read more like the novels of other genres with a Sci-Fi twist added in as a minor component. In that sense, the setting is the world essentially as it is today with negligible changes. In that way it's reminiscent of novels like "Flowers for Algernon."

Moving Mars (Nebula, 1994)

by Greg Bear

Early edition cover art: (unknown)

Later edition cover art: (unknown)

Rating: ★★★

SF Hardness Rating: 9

Themes: Building a Society, The Frontier, Revolution, Future Politics, Human Potential

I expect this to be the last post before this space goes dark for a little bit. After reviewing the first two novels in the "Mars Boom" (Red and Green Mars, respectively) we follow up with a tale that shares many similarities, but is strikingly different in tone. Like Kim Stanley Robinson's novels, "Moving Mars" describes a martian independence movement and that necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention implications of the frontier. However, unlike Red and Green and Cyteen where ancient emigrants feature prominently, in "Moving Mars" the politics and the science are both driven by the native and the young. 

In fact, Casseia Majumdar's tale could have been ripped from the diary of any zealous presidential campaign worker. I use that reference because there is a distinct American flavour to the political side of the novel. But the heart of this story is really about Majumdar and her coming of age from a quiet but interested outsider to a power in her own right at the centre of martian self-determination. And like all politics, here self-organization and revolution is something which the martian people are dragged into kicking and screaming, not something after which they lust. Somehow that seems more appropriate and, in some ways, more realistic.

Green Mars (Hugo, Locus 1994)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Early edition cover art: Don Dixon

Later edition cover art: (unknown)

Rating: ★★★½

SF Hardness Rating: 10

Themes: Building a Society, The Frontier, Teraforming, Revolution, Evolution of Societies, Landscape Ethic, Corporate Rule as Dystopia

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for the "middle" story of a trilogy.  The first book is often filled with exposition, the third recounts the showdown between the protagonists and antagonists (although the upcoming awarded "Blue Mars" is structured a bit differently). So we already know what to expect with the bookends. It's the middle that really gets to play in the universe of the story arc and it is in the middle novel that we often get a taste of the author's vision in its fullest, relatively unencumbered by the requirements of the arc.


"Green Mars" does a good job of following up on "Red Mars" but the impact is lessened, hence my deduction. Because of Robinson's sped up terraforming timeline, the story feels a bit more remote than did "Red Mars" and we were already introduced to many of the themes that are expanded upon here. As well, while the novel does a good job of providing a believable and organic evolution of the situation on the red planet, several of the elements deployed feel a little less fresh. I'm not saying that Robinson made the wrong choice to include them, or that they are uninteresting, simply that after the events of the first novel they seem a little more predictable.


However, don't mistake this quibble for a strike against an extremely well-written, well-researched and well assembled novel. One of the greatest triumphs of "Red Mars" was that by the time we get to "Green," Mars no longer feels like an alien place.

Red Mars (Nebula, 1993)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Early edition cover art: Don Dixon

Later edition cover art: (unknown)

Rating: ★★★★

SF Hardness Rating: 11

Themes: Planetary Exploration and Colonization, Building a Society, The Frontier, Teraforming, Revolution, Landscape Ethic

Once again, the Nebula awards reveal their uncanny ability to find diamonds in the rough and introduce new authors to awarded SF. In "Red Mars" Kim Stanley Robinson presents a grounded, impeccably researched vision of future exploration and colonization of our nearest neighbor in incredible detail. That future is so close and so real you can almost touch it, and sometimes you need to remind yourself that Robinson's opening to his Mars Trillogy is not a work of non-fiction. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Most science fiction relies on presenting a plausible future, but even as we read, we don't often actually expect that in our lifetimes we could be doing those things that are described in the novel. Here, it feels different. It is as if we could make this novel a reality tomorrow, if we really wanted to, as a society. That hopeful message is infectious and one of the reasons why this novel is one of the most popular of the 1990s.

But what really makes Robinson's novel exceptional is that it is setting-based Sci-Fi with a location that is not made up. Instead the existing landscape of Mars is brought to life, as never before, in vivid fashion. Crater, regional and feature names are dropped with such regularity that the reader begins to know the place almost as well as our own geography. But despite that familiarity, we never forget that this is an alien place. Mars has been marked by forces similar to those that have shaped the earth, but in an unearthly way.