A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense.
A pity about the overfamiliar colonization- exploitation-revolution plot cycle still, for power, scope, depth, and detail, no other Martian epic comes close.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Despite the imposing density of the narrative, a novel of splendid characters in a brilliantly realized and utterly convincing setting. Yet the constantly intensifying struggle between Mars's idealists and Earth's transnational corporate exploiters makes revolution inevitable and a handful of First Hundred survivors flee into the Martian wilderness, where other idealists have secretly prepared hidden sanctuaries. Among further complications: practical immortality, discovered by Martian scientists the building of a space elevator ice asteroids to pound the Martian crust, bringing water and thickening the atmosphere vast Moholes excavated to tap vital heat from the core and the ingenious creation of life forms genetically engineered to survive the harsh conditions. Each phase of the latter process is told from a different character's point of view, and thus Robinson constructs an intricate and fascinating mosaic of science and politics, love and betrayal, survival and discovery, murder and revolution. Robinson's Mars is realistically cold, arid, and lifeless and even before they reach the planet, his first hundred scientist- colonists are hotly debating how Mars should be terraformed. First of a projected trilogy about the near-future colonization of Mars, from the author of Pacific Edge, Escape from Kathmandu, etc.
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