Red Mars

Red Mars is the first novel of the Mars trilogy by the American writer Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 1992. It follows the beginning of the colonisation of Mars, from the arrival of the First Hundred to the First Martian Revolution.

The scale of the story is generational rather than episodic. The first hundred settlers arrive and begin the work of making the planet habitable, and the novel's interest is in the debate about what terraforming means and who is entitled to decide, so the science is inseparable from the politics. The story covers several decades rather than a single expedition, so the settlement grows and divides while the argument about the planet continues. The First Hundred are the founding settlers, and the revolution that closes the book grows out of the disagreements they have among themselves.

Robinson's subjects include nation building and the Long Now Manual for Civilization, which are the terms in which the book is usually discussed: a long-term engineering project and the forms of government that grow up around it. The novel is the first of three.