Blue Mars

Blue Mars is a science fiction novel by the American writer Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 1996 by HarperCollins. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1997.

The Mars of the book is no longer the planet its first settlers reached: the air, the water and the cities have been remade, and the settlers live in a world of their own making. That success has produced a political argument. The Reds want to keep what is left of the original desert planet, while the Green terraformers regard the transformation as the whole point of going there, and the quarrel runs through families and settlements alike.

Beyond Mars, Earth is threatened by overpopulation and ecological disaster, and its people begin to see the settled planet as somewhere to go. The novel follows its large cast between the settlements of Mars, the crowded cities of Earth and the first moves outwards into the rest of the solar system, as the question of who governs a new world is argued out.