When I saw that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars was available as a free Kindle download, I snapped it up (it’s still available, btw). I’d read this book several years back, and it amazed me. Reading it again now, in the context of what we’re trying to do on this website, is an even richer experience. Much of what the Mars pioneers face parallels what we Earthlings are facing right now: how do we handle ecological, political, and economic complexity? What stars do we navigate by?

Set in the near future, Red Mars tells the story of the first hundred colonists’ arrival on Mars, and the first half century or so of history to happen there. As the colonists spend time on the planet, their ideas on where it should go diverge. Some—the Reds, led by Ann—want to treat Mars as a park, studying it with minimal alteration to the landscape. But most others want to terraform the planet to make it more hospitable to life—partially for the scientific challenge of transforming the planet, and partially so that at least some of humanity can escape an increasingly tapped-out Earth. Over the first few years of Martian settlement, the argument grows in ferocity, and it finally comes to a head in an epic showdown between Ann and Sax after dinner one night.

Ann speaks of reverence towards Mars as it is: “Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either ... You want to try it out and see—as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”

Twitchy, super-geeky Sax stands up to respond. “The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning ... The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can ... If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? ... It adds life, the most beautiful system of all ... There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So we might as well start.” At this point, Ann knows she has lost the argument. And with every shuttle bringing more people to Mars, she loses it more completely.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of the difference between Dark Green environmentalism—Ann’s take, which is largely about doing fewer bad things to the environment—and Bright Green environmentalism, analogous to Sax’s view, which holds that human activity and creation can be incredibly beautiful and supportive of natural systems, and that it’s up to us to make it so.

At the same time, there’s a disingenuousness about Sax’s point of view. This statement of larger values and morals is the only one he makes in the entire book—I got the sense that, although he may feel deeply everything he expressed, he also just wants to see if he can do it, to have the experience of solving the greatest puzzle of all time. This is fine, this is great, actually, but transformation of this scale requires conscience and morality at an equal scale, and Sax doesn’t seem to have it.

No, the conscience and the big-picture view come courtesy of genial, idealistic John Boone, the first man ever to set foot on Mars. Throughout his years on Mars, he struggles to create a framework of new values, a new Martian way to live. Through him, we learn about various projects with the potential to lay the tracks for this new creation. The most thrilling to me was the idea of eco-economics, which assigns economic value to activities and products based not on what the market will bear, but on a scientific and values-based analysis of what each contributes to the biosphere. Even as Boone laments the increased political distress on Mars—he witnesses several acts of sabotage and is even framed for murder by security forces—he works to put discover and create this new vision, and to lead Mars into it.

The culmination of Boone’s achievement comes on the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, where hundreds of Martians have come together to watch an asteroid burn up in the atmosphere. He gives a speech weaving together all the threads he’s taken up—eco-economics, a new genetic self-repair treatment which greatly extends human life capacity, the idea of engineering a new culture by splicing together all the old ones brought down from Earth. His ideas come very close to those of Integral Theory, which sees all of evolution up to this point as a trove of treasures and pathologies that it is our task to sort through.

Boone’s speech thrills and unites the group on the mountain, and they are all excited to go forth and live it into reality. But several months later, Boone is dead, murdered through the maneuvering of his old frenemy, Frank Chalmers, whose disgust for humanity runs perhaps even more deeply than did Boone’s idealism.

The story continues to unfold from this point with increasing complexity—as more people and more funds flow into Mars, one person’s vision no longer holds sway. Mars breaks into a multiverse every bit as corrupted and full of possibility as Earth before it.

What I love about this book is its combination of idealism and realism. Yes, someday—maybe someday soon—we will be able to go to Mars. But no, going to Mars in and of itself isn’t going to fundamentally change us. The question raised in my mind is how do we create that fundamental change—in ourselves—that will illuminate everything we choose to do, on any planet?