Book Review: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy
Why one of the greatest sci-fi series ever written is also a meditation on politics, economics, religion, and planetary destiny
Estimated read time is 3 minutes — enjoy!
I enjoy rereading favorite books—and sometimes entire series. I do this periodically, especially toward the end of an academic year, when my brain is fried from grading what feels like an endless stack of papers. There’s something deeply comforting about returning to stories you’ve loved before. For me, I can almost physically feel the relief—it’s as if the books are soothing my brain.
With that in mind, I recently began rereading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. These books had a big impact on my life. I first read them back in the mid-1990s. They were so inspirational that I decided to change my entire career plan. After finishing law school, rather than practicing, I pursued a doctorate in public policy with a focus on science and technology policy—anchored by field studies on the U.S. space program. I then wrote a book on a failed effort to send humans to Mars in the early 21st century, called Mars Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative. That led me into the think tank world, where I advised the White House on space policy. Even after I left that work to pursue a teaching career—driven in part by frustration with the dramatic slowdown in human spaceflight—I stayed involved in the field for several more years. That included co-authoring The View from Space with my friend Rich Leshner, this time focused on NASA’s evolving Earth science mission.
But as I reread the trilogy now, decades later, I’m realizing that it shaped my thinking in ways that go well beyond space policy. These are books that challenge you to think deeply about political philosophy, economic theory, social constructs, and even religious thought. Robinson doesn’t just ask how we might terraform Mars—he asks what kind of society we would choose to build there, what values we would carry with us, and whether those values would evolve alongside the planet itself.
One of the most impressive things about the trilogy is how big Robinson thinks. This is world-building at its most ambitious. His vision spans generations, political and scientific revolutions, and entire planetary transformations. And yet it never loses sight of the human element—particularly the psychological and ethical struggles that persist across centuries.
In the world of these books, breakthroughs in biotechnology allow characters to live for more than two hundred years, granting them the unique vantage point to witness Mars’s slow evolution from red to green to blue. Sax Russell, who begins as a purely technocratic scientist convinced that politics are irrelevant to science, gradually becomes a more empathetic figure—and ultimately comes to see that political engagement is essential to achieving scientific goals. Maya Toitovna, haunted by emotional instability, becomes a kind of tragic symbol of Mars’s social volatility. Characters like Nadia Chernyshevski and Arkady Bogdanov embody competing visions of order versus revolution, central planning versus anarchism. And Nirgal—born on Mars and raised in the planet’s most important utopian settlement—ultimately becomes the trilogy’s emotional and political center, symbolizing the emergence of a truly Martian identity.
Robinson also considers the future relationship between Mars and a climate-battered Earth. One of the trilogy’s clever inversions is that global warming, which is disastrous for Earth, is a prerequisite for Mars’s habitability. The tension between atmospheric progress on Mars and environmental collapse on Earth underlies much of the drama in the later books—raising questions about sustainability, stewardship, and the interdependence of planetary destinies.
In the end, these books are essential reading—not just for those fascinated by the idea of humanity expanding into the solar system, but for anyone who wants to think seriously about the future our descendants might inherit—and the values that will shape it.
COMING NEXT MONDAY: How Democrats might benefit from conservative radicalism on reproductive rights—while more closely aligning with popular opinion on abortion access.
Robinson’s Mars Trilogy goes far beyond sci-fi. It’s a bold philosophical meditation on politics, identity, and the future of civilization