Red Mars

Red Mars not only depicts a hostile, alien world but also explores the fundamental elements of humanity that follow the 100 to Mars from Earth. This is evident early in the Ares mission, when Arkady gleefully announces that he lied on the psychological tests that were designed to determine whether he would be a suitable candidate. Arkady is certain that everyone cheated on the tests. He’s largely correct: Even Duval the psychologist lied on the tests and misrepresented himself. Only Sax, the archetypal dispassionate scientist, was completely honest. Rather than forging a newer, better society on a distant planet, the 100 bring with them their psychological hang-ups and contradictions from Earth. As much as Mission Control tried to screen out the unwelcome aspects of humanity, almost everyone aboard deceived them. Thus, the tendency to lie and bend the truth is one of the most common traits of those abroad the Ares, and this fundamental human need to perform a role that conceals the quest for power carries over to Mars.

Similarly, the time aboard the Ares reveals that the 100 are fundamentally human in their desires. Those aboard are experts in their chosen fields, people who are respected worldwide for their contribution to science and culture. After just a few weeks in close quarters, however, these intellectuals resort to the most basic of human desires: sex. The sex aboard the Ares is an expression of quintessential human desire. Like Arkady admitting that he misrepresented himself on the psychological tests, sex aboard the Ares shows that the scientists of the 100 are no different than most people. Maya, one of the mission leaders, accepts this expression of fundamentally human behavior as a natural part of the mission, even becoming embroiled in a love triangle with Boone and Chalmers, a situation that occasionally threatens the mission’s viability. Though they’re in space, hurtling toward a distant planet, the 100 can’t escape the human desire for sex and intimacy.

This fundamental humanity is built into the foundations of the early settlements. Underhill, the first human colony on Mars, is a mishmash of competing ideas and interests. Nadia tries her best to accommodate everyone, but engineering problems and ambitious desires for change influence her decisions on the ground. Each time she makes an engineering decision, she moves away from the original plan and alters the former view of human society on Mars. Each tweak represents a decision, straying further from the planned blueprints for practical, ideological, or personal reasons. Despite the mission’s meticulously planning, humanity overrides the plans, and people like Nadia—who view themselves as apolitical—are compelled to make changes. Nadia’s subconscious biases help shape Underhill in her vision; this is extrapolated across the 100 as the new society becomes the product of hundreds and thousands of small human decisions that often conflict and contrast. Consequently, a power struggle becomes inevitable. Boone and Chalmers may be on the same mission, but their fundamental human rivalry reveals how the human colony moves constantly further away from objective scientific interests toward something more human and more subjective.

Against this backdrop of competition, religion emerges as an important cultural tool. The traveling Arab caravans, the miners who adapt Shintoism for Mars, and Hiroko’s forming a nature cult and escaping into the wilderness demonstrate how even the supposedly enlightened Martian colonists cling to old ideas of spirituality and religion. Against the alien backdrop of Mars, the human mind clings to the familiar. Early colonists, exploited miners, and even those born on Mars are drawn to the artifice of religion and spirituality, even as science attempts to explain the world around them.

Thus, the novel suggests a fundamental human disposition toward deception, domination, competition, bestiality, and spirituality. These human traits follow the colonists from Earth and complicate the quest to build a better society based on science and reason.