Have you ever had an epiphany, when pumping gasoline into your car, voting for the least corrupt candidate you can find, or being confronted with homelessness on your own neighborhood streets, that everything -- everything -- is wrong? That somewhere along the line, humanity should have walked down one path, but hid in a tree instead? That we missed our opportunity to be truly great and settled into a history of mediocrity a step above the animals we once were?

What would you do differently if you could start over and build society again, from the beginning?

Red Mars, a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, asks that question. In the 2020s, a group of astronauts, scientists, and miscellaneous geeks is chosen to be the "first hundred" to colonize Mars. They leave behind an Earth with problems predictably familiar: overpopulation, political turmoil, dizzying wealth eclipsed by the basest poverty. It's 2000, plus a couple of decades of exponential worsening.

But this first hundred, they can start fresh. Landing on the bare red rock with its poisonous atmosphere, layers of permafrost, and deadly radiation, they can create the society, the new world that we always knew we could have.

Or, Robinson poses, can they?

Red Mars is about baggage, both the psychological baggage the first hundred carry with them and the societal baggage that none can leave behind. Just by stepping onto the new planet, the colonists bring conflict over terraforming, emigration, and exploitation of the planet's mineral wealth. It's telling that two Japanese phrases used prominently through the book are shikata ga nai ("there is no other choice") and senzeni na ("what have we done"). If as a population we've become so reliant on fossil fuels and corrupt leadership, how could we make better choices on Mars? And even if we as individuals know better, how well can we do in a group? Or in a mob?

Red Mars is the kind of book most people have in mind when they think of science fiction, both for good and bad. It's the kind of book that has the reader turning the page, muttering "Cooool" at some new possibility, nodding and recognizing humanity even in future years, in almost unimaginable situations, but it's also the kind of book that keeps the reader separated from the characters, an outsider watching events unfold rather than participating in them.

One of the best scifi moments comes early on, when we're introduced to the Martian time slip, "the thirty-nine-and-a-half-minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. The was how the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars's slightly longer day with the twenty-four-hour clock, and the situation had proved oddly satisfactory."

I should think so. The time slip figures prominently a few times throughout the book, a time of wrongdoing for some, cleansing for others. Cooool ...

But Robinson's book is not one for deep characterization, for completely relating to an Ender Wiggin or one of Stephen King's characters. The members of the first hundred, Maya and Frank, John and Ann, exist not to transform or reach an epiphany -- they exist to have the spectrum of opinions and debate them, to have sex occasionally, and to bear witness to the results when things go wrong.

How much you care about the characters may depend on how much you agree with their political stances. Ann rails against her contemporaries' desire for terraforming, angrily telling them, "We are not lords of the universe. We're one small part of it. ... You've never even seen Mars." During a later exchange about the problems of excessive emigration, Phyllis reassures another, "This is just a step on the path to full human use of Mars. It's here for us and we're going to use it."

Ann has the right opinions, and we like her, while we wait for Phyllis' downfall. Robinson contributes to the emotional disconnectedness by writing each section of the book from a different character's point of view, so that, before we get a bead on Maya, we're reading about Nadia or Frank.

This lack of character empathy is an element of much pure scifi, and it's fine for some, but for those who want to feel what their characters feel or make the journey with them, it can make 600 pages long indeed. During some particularly wordy descriptions of space engineering or the Martian seasons, it was extremely easy to think, "Get on with it!"

Since this book was originally published in 1993, Robinson has produced two sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, continuing the story of what's left of the first hundred. If you can enjoy a book that poses interesting ideas about our future without connecting to the characters, you'll probably enjoy them. If not, you might want to pass on this particular trip to the Red Planet.

-- Jennifer Rose Hale

Red Mars, published by Bantam Spectra Books, is currently available in paperback.

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