The Martians is a book of 31 short stories set in the same universe as the Mars Trilogy.
List of Chapters[]
Chapter 1: Michel in Antarctica
Chapter 2: Exploring Fossil Canyon
Chapter 3: Archaea Plot
Chapter 4: The Way the Land Spoke to Us
Chapter 5: Maya and Desmond
Chapter 6: Four Teleological Trails
Chapter 7: Discovering Life
Chapter 8: Coyote Makes Trouble
Chapter 9: Michel in Provence
Chapter 10: Green Mars
Chapter 11: Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curve ball to Mars
Chapter 12: Salt and Fresh
Chapter 13: The Constitution of Mars
Chapter 14: Some Work notes and Commentary on the Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia
Chapter 15: Jackie on Zo
Chapter 16: Keeping the Flame
Chapter 17: Saving Noctis Dam
Chapter 18: Big Man in Love
Chapter 19: An Argument for the Deployment of all safe Terraforming Technologies
Chapter 20: Select Abstracts from the Journal of Areological Studies
Chapter 21: Odessa
Chapter 22: Sexual Dimorphism
Chapter 23: Enough Is As Good As a Feast
Chapter 24: What Matters
Chapter 25: Coyote Remembers
Chapter 26: Sax Moments
Chapter 27: The Names of the Canals
Chapter 28: The Soundtrack
Chapter 29: A Martian Romance
Chapter 30: If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and Other Poems
Chapter 31: Purple Mars
About[]
Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy is one of science fiction's most honored series, with Red Mars winning the distinguished Nebula Award, and both Green Mars and Blue Mars honored with the Hugo. A modern-day classic of the genre, this epic saga deftly portrays the human stories behind Earth's most ambitious project yet: the terraforming of Mars.
Now, following the publication of his acclaimed adventure novel, Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson returns to the realm he has made his own, in a work that brilliantly weaves together a futuristic setting with a poetic vision of the human spirit engaged in a drama as ancient as mankind itself.
Backcover[]
From a training mission in Antarctica to blistering sandstorms sweeping through labyrinths of barren canyons, the interwoven stories of The Martians set in motion a sprawling cast of characters upon the surface of Mars. As the planet is transformed from an unexplored and forbidding terrain to a troubled image of a re-created Earth, we meet men and women who are bound together by their experiences on Mars and with each other.
Among them are Michel, a French psychologist dazzled by the beauty around him; Maya, a woman whose ill-fated love affairs lead to her first voyage to Mars; and Roger, a tall Martian-born guide who lacks social skills but has the courage to survive on the planet's dangerous yet strangely compelling surface.
Beginning with the First Hundred explorers, generations of friends, enemies, and lovers are swept up in the drama that is Earth's tenuous toehold on Mars. International exploration turns into world building; world building degenerates into political conflict, revolution, and war.
Following the strands of these lives and events, in an age when human life has been extended for decades, The Martians becomes the story of generations lived on the edge of the ultimate frontier, in a landscape of constant man-made and natural transformation.
This new masterpiece by Kim Stanley Robinson is a story of hope and disappointment, of fierce physical and psychological struggles. Both deeply human and scientifically cutting edge, The Martians is the epic chronicle of a planet that represents one of humanity's most glorious possibilities.
A Letter from Kim Stanley Robinson[]
"When I finished Blue Mars, I realized I wasn't done with Mars yet. There were things I still wanted to say about the place, and about my characters from the trilogy, and there were a number of sidebar stories and characters that had found no place in the trilogy's structure. I also had a couple of precursor Mars stories that did not fit the trilogy's history--'Exploring Fossil Canyon' and 'Green Mars'--and I had held these out of my earlier story collections thinking they belonged with the Mars group."
So all this material was there, and as I wrote Antarctica, I found myself drawn back into the matter of Mars repeatedly, by the discovery of possible life in meteorite AHL8004 and by the Pathfinder landing. I decided to make a collection of Martian tales, and as I put them in roughly chronological order, I saw that they seemed to be adding up to their own larger story, functioning as the trilogy's 'unconscious' or 'secret history'. Using all kinds of modes, from folk tales to scientific articles, from personal accounts to the full text of a constitution, I arranged things so that the book altogether tells the story of an underground and hard-to-see resistance to the terraforming described in the trilogy proper. I had a great time doing these stories, and hope they add up to my own version of a Martian Chronicles."