Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Red Mars | 1993 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 2 | Green Mars | 1994 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 3 | Blue Mars | 1996 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 4 | The Martians | 1999 | Kim Stanley Robinson | N/A |
| 5 | A Martian Romance | 2001 | Kim Stanley Robinson | N/A |
Red Mars (1993) opens with the first hundred colonists arriving on Mars, a group of scientists and engineers whose different visions for the planet’s future immediately put them in conflict. Robinson structures the novel around these competing ideas: should Mars be terraformed into a habitable world, or preserved as pristine wilderness? Should the planet belong to Earth’s corporations and governments, or develop its own political identity? These questions drive the trilogy forward across two centuries of fictional history.
Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars (1996) follow subsequent generations as the terraforming proceeds and Mars’s political situation grows more complex. Robinson tracks dozens of characters across very long timescales, and the novels have an unusual quality for science fiction: they treat governance, economics, and environmental management as seriously as they treat technology and adventure. The science is detailed and largely plausible for its time, but Robinson is equally interested in the social and philosophical dimensions of what it would mean to make a new world.
The trilogy won the Nebula Award for Red Mars and Hugo Awards for both Green Mars and Blue Mars, a combination that remains rare. It established Robinson as one of the leading voices in hard science fiction and influenced a generation of writers thinking about Mars, climate, and the politics of large-scale environmental change. The Martians, published in 1999, collects short fiction set in the same universe, including some stories that imagine Mars left unaltered.