Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

      Voyager Classics

      BLUE MARS

      

      KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

      

      

Copyright

      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

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      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

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007121656

      Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007402175 Version: 2018-09-05

       Dedication

      For Lisa, David and Timothy

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

       Calendar

      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

       Keep Reading

       Acknowledegments

       Chronology

       Voyager Classics

       The Voyager Classics Collection

       About the Publisher

Calendar

       PART ONE Peacock Mountain

      

       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.