Green Mars is still a good book, but it suffers a little but from a sophmore slump, as the conflicts and challenges are nowhere near as interesting as those in Red Mars. It doesn't help that many of the most interesting characters die during the last book. A bigger problem is that KSR seems too be losing touch with the scope and scale of what he's attempting. The best way that I can describe it is that in the book, people are fleeing an overcrowded Earth to move to Mars to live in tiny apartments and rovers where they teleoperate giant ice mining robots to create a world circling sea. The setting can't decide if it's pre-apocalyptic, post-scarcity, totally pulpy, or any other description. Maybe this is a strength, but in a very hard scifi book, I find this floppiness annoying.

(first read December 11, 2012, updated for Hugo reread below)

***********************

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is a masterpiece in science fiction, a dreamy, imaginative, yet rigorously technical account of building a new ecology and new society on Mars. The First Hundred are a compelling cast of geniuses and contradictions, world-class experts stable enough to pass a barrage of tests to go to Mars, yet monomaniacal enough to cast aside all their ties to Earth. Red Mars, the story of landing, division in the new colony, the growth of Mars into a world, and then the spasm of violence that is the abortive revolt of 2061, is one of the best books ever written: lyrical in its depictions of the Martian landscape, smart in its politics and science, and using its multiple narrators to best effect in showing the fragmentation of the unique men and women who first landed on Mars.

Green Mars continues the story, focusing on the native Martians and their nascent political community, but with a heavier touch and less interesting characters than the first book. The story opens with Nirgal, a third generation Martian and member of the underground society, growing up in a small town named Zygote under the South Polar Ice Cap, with the surviving First Hundred under the direct car of the enigmatic Hiroki, the farm ecologist who disappeared in the earliest days of the settlement. It's a profoundly strange upbringing, the smallest of small towns with a dozen or so other kids and the legends of the first days. It's like a town with a one-room school house where the teachers are all Nobel prize winning scientists, the Founding Fathers of your nascent nation, and a literal priestess-goddess. Nirgal grows up, wanders around Mars with the legendary traveler Coyote (who stowed away on the initial journey), and then goes off to coordinate all the diverse groups of the underground and demimonde community in political awareness of the their status as Martians.

The story then follows Sax Russell, another of the First Hundred, as he emerges from hiding to take back up the cause of terraforming. Sax wanders through alpine meadows and glaciers on Mars, forming a liaison with the only one of the First Hundred to stay loyal to Earth, and then getting captured and rescued by his friends, suffering a stroke in the process. The thread then switches between Nadia, Maya, and Art, respectively two of the First Hundred, Russian construction engineer and diplomat, and a spy sent from the profoundly strange super-corporation Praxis, which is trying to form an alliance with Mars as a test for new ecologically sustainable economics needed on Earth. Together, all the characters create a kind of constitutional convention at a settlement, where the diverse groups (space communists, Sufi mystics, Polynesian matriarchies, anarchist geologists) agree to recognize human rights and the diversity of communities in a generalized document. The biggest split is between Reds, who prefer to keep Mars as it is, and Greens, who want to follow a terraforming program leading to humans walking under an open sky. Years pass, tensions mount, and then the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf on Earth, Mars declares independence, use non-violent means to kick the last few cops off planet, and then evacuate a city threatened by flooding in an orderly and triumph walk with nothing but simple carbon dioxide filter masks.

This is not a fast book, or an action packed book, or one with strong characters, but then that's not what KSR is about as an author. The thing is that even on a reread, this feels like a 50 page political pamphlet wrapped in 500 pages about alpine meadows, scientific conferences, and left wing rallies. I really like Robinson, he's a gentleman and a scholar, and I even agree with his politics/economics. The world would be a lot better if more people saw it like he did. But this book is about as didactic as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and way more mellow. The little communities on Mars, scholar-farmers living in cliffside apartments and tented valleys as their gigantic robots go through the centuries long work of making seas and skies and fields, are just so... dull.

The first book really shined in the animosities and visions of three characters: Arkady Bogdanov and his utopian quest to break off entirely from an Earth-bound past, John Boone and his innate charisma and love of newness of Mars, and Frank Chambers and his aggressive pragmatism and anger at anyone who stood before him. All these characters are dead at the start of Green Mars, and and viewpoints that replace them are cloudier, smaller, more hectoring in their insistence that we the reader, as early 21st century humans, are at fault for not living in the world KSR imagines.