GoKawiilKim Stanley Robinson opens his classic science fiction novel Red Mars in 2026. As the New Scientist Book Club embarks on reading it in April, he looks back on its origins – and how the idea of moving to Mars holds up today
A view from NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
I’m happy to think of people reading Red Mars in 2026. Its story begins around this year, but I wrote the book between 1989 and 1991, so naturally one aspect of reading it now is to note all the discrepancies between what the book thought this decade would be like and what it’s really like.
That always happens to science fiction novels: as time passes, the story shifts from being about the future to being about a past set of ideas about the future. This is a valuable window onto what that past felt like to those alive in that time, something not easy to recapture.
When we read old science fiction, we catch glimpses of what people back then thought might come to pass, which was an important part of their reality. The old text then becomes not so much a matter of inaccurate prediction as it is quite accurate portrayals of that moment’s sense of potentiality, expressing its hopes and fears about what seems to be coming.
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Just as with all other fiction, science fiction is therefore always mostly about the present, even though it’s set in the future, and, as it ages, becomes a window onto the past. In its form and its content, it serves as kind of time travel, both forwards into the future and backwards into the past.
That said, if you were to look at Red Mars as 1990 trying to imagine the 2020s, even though that isn’t what it was trying to do, I still think it holds up pretty well. The US and Russia as failing empires, teaming up in a desperate attempt to hold off new emerging powers? Check. China and India on the rise? Double check.
And there’s more that feels right, like the danger Earth is in ecologically and economically, hammered by climate change and geopolitical conflict even to the point of war. Or an emerging social order manifesting as a gigantic ongoing argument over what it should become. None of this took any special vision to call out; our situation has been a mess for a long time and something new is going to emerge, because things can’t go on as they are, just in the physical sense. What can’t happen won’t happen, and what will happen is something that can happen. Reality bites, it won’t go away.
I like noting the technological details in the book that I foretold pretty well, also the details that I missed entirely. Sometimes these two are mixed together, for instance when they are still using video tapes, but making something like YouTube out of them. Or when John Boone’s Dick Tracy-style wristwatch includes a talking AI, Pauline – a modest precursor to the many Paulines scattered through my subsequent work (see my novel 2312 in particular). That’s what happens when you speak about the future: you are always wrong but sometimes right, in an interesting mix.
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