- Robinson, Kim Stanley. Blue Mars. New York: Bantam
Books, 1996. ISBN 0-553-57335-7.
- This is the third volume in Robinson's Mars
Trilogy: the first two volumes are Red Mars and Green Mars (April 2001). The three volumes in the trilogy
tell one continuous story and should be read in order; if you start
with Green or Blue, you'll be totally lost
as to the identities of characters introduced in Red
or events which occurred in prior volumes. When I read Red
Mars in the mid 1990s, I considered it to be one of the very
best science fiction novels I'd ever read, and I've read all of the
works of the grand masters. Green Mars didn't quite
meet this standard, but was still a superb and thought-provoking
read. By contrast, I found Blue Mars a tremendous
disappointment—tedious and difficult to finish. It almost seems
like Robinson ran out of ideas before filling the contracted number
of pages. There are hundreds of pages of essentially plot-free
pastoral descriptions of landscapes on terraformed Mars; if you like
that kind of stuff, you may enjoy this book, but I prefer stories in
which things happen and characters develop and interact in
interesting ways, and there's precious little of that here. In part,
I think the novel suffers from the inherent difficulty of writing
about an epoch in which human technological capability permits doing
essentially anything whatsoever—it's difficult to pose challenges
which characters have to surmount once they can simply tell their AIs
to set the robots to work, then sit around drinking kavajava until
the job is done. The politics and economics in these books has never
seemed particularly plausible to me, and in Blue Mars
it struck me as even more naïve, but perhaps that's just because
there's so little else going on. I can't make any sense at all of
the immigration and population figures Robinson gives. On page 338
(mass-market paperback edition) the population of Mars is given
as 15 million and Earth's population more than 15 billion in 2129,
when Mars agrees to accept “at least ten percent of its population in
immigrants every year”. Since Earth pressed for far more immigration
while Mars wished to restrict it, presumably this compromise rate is
within the capability of the interplanetary transportation system. Now
there's two ways to interpret the “ten percent”. If every year Mars
accepts 10% of its current population, including immigrants
from previous years, the Mars population runs away geometrically,
exploding to more than two billion by 2181. But on page 479, set in
that year, the population of Mars is given as just 18 million, still
a thousandth of Earth's, which has grown to 18 billion. Okay, let's
assume the agreement between Earth and Mars meant that Mars was only
to accept 10% of its present population as of the date of the
agreement, 2129. Well, if that's the case, then you have immigration
of 1.5 million per year, which leaves us with a Mars population of 93
million by 2181 (see the spreadsheet I used to perform
these calculations for details). And these figures assume that
neither the Mars natives nor the immigrants have any children at all,
which is contradicted many times in the story. In fact, to get from a
population of 15 million in 2129 to only 18 million in 2181 requires a
compounded growth rate of less than 0.4%, an unprecedentedly low rate
for frontier civilisations without any immigration at all.
January 2004 