Voyager Classics
BLUE MARS
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1996
Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1996
Kim Stanley Robinson asserts to moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007121656
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007402175 Version: 2018-09-05
For Lisa, David and Timothy
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE Peacock Mountain
PART TWO Areophany
PART THREE A New Constitution
PART FOUR Green Earth
PART FIVE Home at Last
PART SIX Ann in the Outback
PART SEVEN Making Things Work
PART EIGHT The Green and the White
PART NINE Natural History
PART TEN Werteswandel
PART ELEVEN Viriditas
PART TWELVE It Goes So Fast
PART THIRTEEN Experimental Procedures
PART FOURTEEN Phoenix Lake
Acknowledegments
Chronology
Voyager Classics
The Voyager Classics Collection
About the Publisher
Mars is free now. We’re on our own. No one tells us what to do.
Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.
But it’s so easy to backslide into old patterns of behaviour. Break one hierarchy and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on guard for that, because there will always be people trying to make another Earth. The areophany will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.
Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out of the windows at the terrain flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by months of furious action; they were tired.
We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we acted. We are making a better way to live.
This was the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Terrans up to Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield, up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out of the window seemed to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.
Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train’s levitation over the land.
Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a Green, she said, the original Green.
Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered.
That’s her first concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.
Except she’s dead, someone else said.