You can speculate a lot about what happened to Hiroko, for example, and you may find clues, but you will never find out the truth. As a reader, you actually know as little as the protagonists. History simply cannot be fit into a schedule. The length of the chapters also varies enormously and the number of chapters per book increases from eight in “Red” to twelve in “Blue”.Īnd actually I think this looseness and arbitrariness is one of the strengths of the trilogy.

There is not really a pattern in the change of perspective the choice through whose eyes we look for the duration of a chapter seems completely arbitrary. And while these ten characters certainly play an important role in the story, there are also some protagonists who do not have their own chapters, such as the red-bearded revolutionary Arkady and the mysterious visionary Hiroko. The result of this setup is that there are many loose ends and unresolved issues. As a reader you are not pushed into one specific direction, but you can form your own opinion. They all have their own views about how things develop and their ideas range from “Red” to “Green” and all the shades in between. The structure of the books is fascinating: the story is seen through the eyes of ten different characters, each of whom has the perspective in a number of chapters. Front view of the Ares with on the left the bubble dome Perspective Two completely different projects: a literary analysis of the perspective and the use of time in the three books and a 3d model of the spaceship of the First Hundred, the Ares. In order not to let that milestone in alternative history go unnoticed, I took two projects that I devoted to the trilogy long ago and gave them a little make-over.

Although the story of Red Mars does not begin until 2027 with the journey of the First Hundred, the first manned Mars landing takes place seven years earlier, so more or less as we speak. You would almost forget it in the current covid-19 crisis, but 2020 is an important year in Robinson’s chronology. Often read copies of Red, Green and Blue 2020 Not all main characters are happy with those changes: the battle between the Reds, who prefer to keep Mars as it is and the Greens, for whom terraforming cannot go fast enough, is the main theme of the trilogy. In those two centuries, Mars is fully terraformed: transformed from a cold, dry, lifeless desert into a living world with seas, forests and cities. Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars were published between 19 and tell the future history of our neighboring planet over a period of almost two hundred years. The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the highlights of American science fiction, as far as I’m concerned.

Stanley robinson mars