About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952 and, after travelling and working around the world, has now settled in his beloved California. He is widely regarded as the finest science fiction writer working today, noted as much for the verisimilitude of his characters as the meticulously researched hard science basis of his work. He has won just about every major sf award there is to win.

Reviews

‘One of the finest working novelists in any genre’
GUARDIAN 'If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’
NEW YORK TIMES Praise for The Mars Trilogy: ‘One of the finest works of American SF’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ‘The ultimate in future history’
DAILY MAIL ‘Absorbing, impressive, fascinating… Utterly plausible’
FINANCIAL TIMES ‘A staggering book. The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written’
Arthur C. Clarke ‘Red Mars may simply be the best novel ever written about Mars’
INTERZONE

'One of the finest working novelists in any genre'
GUARDIAN

'If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson'
NEW YORK TIMES

Praise for The Mars Trilogy:

'One of the finest works of American SF'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

'The ultimate in future history'
DAILY MAIL

'Absorbing, impressive, fascinating... Utterly plausible'
FINANCIAL TIMES

'A staggering book. The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written'
Arthur C. Clarke

'Red Mars may simply be the best novel ever written about Mars'
INTERZONE

Red Mars, the kickoff to Robinson's epic Mars trilogy, won the Nebula for best SF novel of 1992; its follow-up, Green Mars, won the parallel Hugo for 1994. The conclusion to the saga is not unlike the terrain of Robinson's Red Planet: fertile and fully developed in some spots, vast and arid in others‘but, ultimately, it's an impressive achievement. Using the last 200 years of American history as his template for Martian history, Robinson projects his tale of Mars's colonization from the 21st century, in which settlers successfully revolt against Earth, into the next century, when various interests on Mars work out their differences on issues ranging from government to the terraforming of the planet and immigration. Sax Russell, Maya Toitovna and others reprise their roles from the first two novels, but the dominant "personality" is the planet itself, which Robinson describes in exhaustive naturalistic detail. Characters look repeatedly for sermons in its stones and are nearly overwhelmed by textbook abstracts on the biological and geological minutiae of their environment. Not until the closing chapters, when they begin confronting their mortality, does the human dimension of the story balance out its awesome ecological extrapolations. Robinson's achievement here is on a par with Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Herbert's Dune, even if his clinical detachment may leave some readers wondering whether there really is life on Mars. Author tour. (June)