The First Hundred Are Late

The First Hundred were supposed to leave this year.

In Red Mars, published in 1992, the ship Ares departs in 2026 with a hundred colonists aboard. As I write, the real Mars transfer window is open, and nobody is on a ship. The company that had spoken most loudly about going said in February that it would put the Moon first. In a post on X, Elon Musk said SpaceX had shifted its priority to "a self-growing city on the Moon", and that work on a Mars city would begin in about five to seven years. He gave his reasons plainly. You can only travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months, he wrote, whereas you can launch to the Moon every ten days.

So the book is late. That's the least interesting thing about it. The interesting thing is what Robinson thought the delay would be about, and he was right to think it wouldn't be rockets.

The art: a novel about a committee

Red Mars is hard science fiction in the old sense, with the old pleasures. Robinson builds the Ares from clustered space shuttle fuel tanks that were boosted into orbit rather than burned up. His colonists dig; they drill into the crust to let heat out, they plan to thicken the air, and they argue about whether they should. The geology is not decoration. Ann Clayborne, the geologist, loves Mars as it is. Sax Russell, the physicist, wants to make it green. That disagreement, Red against Green, is the spine of the book, and it's a better spine than any chase.

What makes it a literary achievement and not merely a well-researched one is that nobody is wrong. Ann's position is not sentimental: she is defending a landscape that took billions of years to make from people who would erase it in a few centuries. Sax's position is not arrogant: he sees a dead world and the possibility of life. Robinson lets them both be good arguers and doesn't tell you who wins. It's the rare novel of ideas in which the ideas have faces.

The cast is international, Americans and Russians mostly, which was a pointed choice in 1992, the year after the Soviet Union ended. Maya Toitovna and John Boone and Frank Chalmers are caught in a triangle that the book handles with more patience than tenderness. Nadia, the engineer who builds the first real habitat, is its quiet hero. Hiroko, who runs the farms and founds a faith of her own, is its strangest and most compelling invention.

It is also a slow book. Boone, the first man on Mars, is dead in the first chapter, killed in a plot the rest of the novel gradually explains. After that, Robinson takes his time. Chapters are as long as the planet is wide. Some of the First Hundred, particularly in the middle, talk like position papers in good prose. If you want a thriller, the thriller is there, but it comes at the pace of a geologic survey.

I think that's right. A settlement takes decades and the book is honest about what that costs a reader. It won the Nebula for best novel (it also took the BSFA Award, and the sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, later took Hugos), and the awards are earned. It isn't, quite, a book I'd press into the hand of someone who doesn't already like the genre. But for readers who want to see how a society gets made, nothing else in the field goes so deep.

The prophecy: the dates are wrong and the politics are right

Check the dates and you'll mostly lose. A 2026 departure didn't happen, and neither did Boone's landing in 2020. The book's space elevator, a cable tethered to an asteroid in Martian orbit, has no real counterpart; the nearest serious plan is for Earth, from Japan's Obayashi Corporation, which sets out a 96,000 km carbon nanotube cable by 2050 and rests its feasibility case on an assumed cable strength that nobody has yet shown. Robinson's terraforming, a planet warmed and thickened until it can hold liquid water, now faces a NASA-sponsored study from 2018. It concluded that Mars doesn't retain enough accessible carbon dioxide to warm it that way, and noted that the atmosphere is under one per cent of Earth's pressure to begin with. That's a bad result for Sax Russell. It doesn't make Ann Clayborne right. It does mean the book's central quarrel is arriving long before its central technology.

Now the politics. In the novel, Mars is contested by transnational corporations that have grown past the governments that nominally regulate them, and by a United Nations body trying to keep up. The revolution of 2061 is an uprising against the transnationals' occupation, and it fails. Reread now, that isn't far-fetched. The most visible plan for settling Mars has belonged to one private company whose founder can reorder its priorities in a post. The legal frame is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bars any nation from claiming a celestial body by sovereignty and makes states responsible for the activities of their private companies, and which says nothing about who sets the rules for a town. The Artemis Accords, the US-led principles of 2020, say that extracting space resources does not inherently amount to national appropriation. They bind no one, and lawyers disagree about whether that reading holds. The gap between who goes and who has the authority to say what they may do is exactly where the novel lives.

What Robinson didn't foresee was how the schedule would bend. His First Hundred are sent by national agencies, on a date set in advance. The real plan has swung from Mars to the Moon on the strength of a statement of priorities, with Starship also under contract as NASA's lunar lander. A schedule for settling another world can turn out to depend on one firm's other commitments.

What to do with it

Read it now, in the window it names, while the argument is open. Not for the dates, which are gone, but for the questions: who pays, who votes, who owns what you dig up, what do you owe a landscape that has no one to speak for it. Those are not Mars questions, much as they look like them. They are what happens to any place that is settled before it has laws.

The First Hundred are late. The argument about them isn't.