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13 votes
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Is or was there native life on Mars In the Mars Trilogy?

No, they don't find that evidence... but they muck up the search for it pretty early. One of the earliest terraforming ideas and attempts in Red Mars involves dropping wind turbines on a bunch of ...
Radhil's user avatar
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11 votes
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In Red Mars, why did Frank want to kill John?

There were two main reasons, I think. First, Frank and John had political differences in how they viewed the proper evolution of humanity on Mars. Oversimplifying greatly, John wanted to leave Earth ...
Mark Olson's user avatar
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10 votes
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Did Kim Stanley Robinson plan out the entire Mars Trilogy from the start?

Yes and no. It was planned to be a single novel at first, but grew into a trilogy. During writing research went on in parallel continuously. When I started writing it, I'd wanted it to be a big ...
Bookeater's user avatar
  • 2,692
6 votes

Is or was there native life on Mars In the Mars Trilogy?

I don't think there's ever any evidence of contemporary native Martian life. There is a line in Blue Mars that says: Scientists working for the metanats had concentrated on resource exploration ...
Mike Scott's user avatar
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5 votes
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What is the emotional context of this passage in Robinson's Red Mars (1992)?

The clue is at the start of that section of text: And here Nadia came into her own. [...] Almost every job they had benefited from her help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and ...
Michael's user avatar
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5 votes

Whatever happened to Hiroko Ai in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy?

I think it's safe to say Robinson intentionally left it unanswered, though he I believe he had a most likely outcome in mind and tipped it off. It is significant that Hiroko had reached mythic status, ...
PaulC's user avatar
  • 51
5 votes

Whatever happened to Hiroko Ai in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy?

In the very end of the entire series - very end - Ann comes near to death, and then sees an older Asian woman flying a kite at the sea's edge. This is only speculation, but there seemed to me an ...
Mikey's user avatar
  • 1,141
4 votes

Where is the first settlement in Red Mars?

From the ebook map*, Underhill, the first settlement, is located at approximately latitude 8.05 degrees, longitude -43.9 degrees: For comparison, the location proposed by the Red, Green & Blue ...
rtmcg's user avatar
  • 41
3 votes

Why would Sax Russell get into a relationship with Phyllis Boyle?

All the quotes below come from "Part 4, The Scientist as Hero" of Green Mars, but some are out of order. At this point in the trilogy Sax has known Phyllis for decades, the scene takes place ...
Jontia's user avatar
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3 votes

In Red Mars, why did Frank want to kill John?

Getting back together with Toitovna was a nice bonus, but it was explicitly a political assassination that Chalmers thought was going to make him the primary moulder of the emerging Martian society in ...
fiftysausages's user avatar
2 votes
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When did John Boone first land on Mars

My edition (Voyager, paperback, 1996) has a timeline at the end of the book (p671) that says the first landing was in 2020 - six years before the Ares left for Mars. Confoundingly, the blurb text on ...
HorusKol's user avatar
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