Few authors have shaped our collective imagination of Mars like Kim Stanley Robinson. His Mars Trilogy – Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996) – remains a towering achievement in science fiction, weaving science, politics, and environmental philosophy into an epic vision of what Mars colonisation could look like.
But three decades later, with Mars once again capturing the public imagination – not through literature, but through the ambitions of billionaires – I asked Robinson a simple, pressing question: Do you really believe that humans will eventually go to Mars? Or is this whole conversation a distraction from the far more urgent task of saving Earth?His answer was clear: “Mostly the latter. Given the situation on Earth, Mars is largely a distraction.”
It’s a sobering stance from the author most associated with a detailed and optimistic vision of Mars. While he acknowledges that space exploration has profound value – “Space science is Earth science,” he said, quoting a classic NASA line – the idea of sending humans to Mars is another matter entirely.
He draws a parallel with Antarctica: a barren, inhospitable place populated by rotating teams of scientists, largely ignored by the wider world. “If we had small scientific teams on Mars, it would be similar,” he said. “They’d stay a few years, cycle in and out. But it wouldn’t be glamorous. It would be research. Quiet. Dangerous. Necessary, but not revolutionary.”
The idea of colonising Mars – the Muskian vision of a “multi-planetary species” – is, in Robinson’s words, “bad science fiction”. He explains: “We can’t breathe the air. We can’t touch the soil. The surface is laced with perchlorates – salts deadly to humans. You’d have to live underground, in radiation-shielded bunkers. Like a Motel 6 in a prison.”
We do not know what long-term exposure to Mars, which has just 37% of Earth’s gravity, would do to human biology, fetal development, or mental health.
When I asked Robinson whether he would, in hindsight, have rewritten the Mars Trilogy for our more climate-anxious era, he replied firmly: “I wouldn’t change a thing.” But he did acknowledge that his recent work, The Ministry for the Future, is in some ways a rewriting of the Mars Trilogy – only this time, the project isn’t terraforming Mars, but healing Earth.
“The Mars books were about building a better society on another planet,” he said. “But Ministry is about doing that here, now, under pressure, in crisis.” Even in Blue Mars, the message was never “let’s escape Earth”: it was the opposite. The Martians return to a ravaged Earth and say: “Mars can’t save you. We’re a mirror. If we can build a just society here, so can you.”