This novel is an object lesson in the difficulties of writing serious science fiction about Mars in the late 1960's and early 1970's. During this period the space program was at its height and writers had to absorb new discoveries on an almost yearly basis. In the afterword to Welcome to Mars (dated 30 July 1965) Blish commented that "the manuscript of this book left [his] hands before Mariner IV reached Mars." Indeed the book was not published until 1967, and this lag meant that the author could not ensure that his work was not grotesquely out-of-date by the time that it was released.

Mariner IV went into orbit around the southern hemisphere of Mars on July 14 1965. The data it transmitted back to Earth contained many surprises. First came close-up photographs which showed the surface of Mars to be a barren and crater-pitted waste; more like the moon than any imagined Martian landscape. Moreover, there were no signs of any serious erosion on Mars, indicating that it had never had any surface water. And while it had been known for years that Mars' atmosphere was thin, it was still a shock to find out exactly how thin the atmosphere of Mars really was. The best scientific estimates had put the atmospheric pressure of Mars at around 85 millibars, or approximately 10% the surface pressure of Earth. Instead, the atmospheric pressure of Mars was found to be approximately 9 millibars, or 1% of Earth's. That fact, coupled with the fact that Mars apparently had no magnetic field, meant that the planet would also be exposed to intolerably high amounts of ultra-violet radiation. Anyone attempting to stand unprotected on the surface of Mars would be killed within seconds.

As Blish remarked, the "hit rate" in Welcome to Mars was not too bad - although there were some interesting anomalies. The teenage hero, having traveled to Mars using a home-made anti-gravity device (one of Blish's favorite contrivances) manages to survive within the shelter of a packing crate! Blish also populates his planet with a variety of interesting flora and fauna, a possibility rendered less likely by the discoveries of Mariner IV.

Other works appearing around this time contained similar mistakes for similar reasons. D.G. Compton, for example, depicted a Martian penal colony in his 1966 novel Farewell Earth's Bliss. The colonists are portrayed as surviving by cultivating the mosses and lichens growing on the surface of Mars. The planet, while dry, is not depicted as being totally desiccated; and one character, executed by the will of the majority, is thrust out into the wilderness without protective clothing - but manages to survive the better part of a day! Perhaps this novel is best enjoyed today as an historical piece, interesting as much for its sixties preoccupations with social and sexual repression as for its outdated scientific background.

It is possible to avoid answering questions about the true nature of Mars by setting stories in the very far past or the far future. Algis Budrys did this in his novel The Iron Thorn, first published as "The Amsir and the Iron Thorn" in 1967. The "iron thorn" is the metal tower which dominates the warrior society of which the hero, Honor Jackson, is a member. Jackson and his compatriots dedicate their lives to hunting down the Amsir, bird-like creatures who also inhabit Mars. When Jackson discovers that the Amsir are sentient he sets out to learn more about them - and discovers that they, too, have an "iron thorn". Eventually he learns that both he and the Amsir are part of a long forgotten genetic experiment launched from Earth and the "iron thorns" are in fact the vessels which brought his ancestors to Mars. Utilizing the latent capabilities of the iron thorns, Jackson returns to Earth to discover his roots.

Meanwhile, in July 1969, two more American spacecraft - Mariners VI and VII - went into orbit about Mars. Like the earlier Mariner IV probe, these surveyed the Southern hemisphere of Mars, concentrating on an area known as Hellas on telescopic maps. The results were disappointing for those who had hoped to find life on Mars. Temperatures as low as -123 degrees Celsius were recorded at the South Pole, indicating that the polar caps were not made of ice but frozen carbon dioxide - dry ice. Ironically, the most hopeful discovery of 1969 was made from an observatory in Texas rather than by the two Mariner probes. An analysis of Mars' spectral lines showed that there were minuscule amounts of water vapor in the planet's atmosphere.

Whether there was water vapor or not on Mars, it remained a disappointingly inhospitable planet. Appropriately enough, Arthur C. Clarke was the first writer to respond to the "new" Mars, in a poignant short story published in 1970. "Transit of Earth" took the form of the monologue of a doomed astronaut, last surviving member of an expedition sent to observe the alignment of the planets from the vantage point of Mars. Unlike his literary predecessors, Clarke's protagonist is trapped on a world without any resources for a clever man to exploit. Lacking even the basics of air and water he can only wait for death. The story ends with the narrator heading off to explore the mountains of Mars before he dies.

The existence of mountains on Mars was one of the more interesting discoveries of Mariner VII: as Clarke put it "there weren't supposed to be any mountains on Mars" There weren't supposed to be any volcanoes on Mars either, but Mariner IX - the last of the Mariner probes - discovered the largest volcano in the solar system on Mars in January 1972. It rose over 13 miles above the plain on which it was situated and measured over 300 miles across its base. This volcano had long been visible from earth as a bright, white area on the surface of Mars. Astronomers, misinterpreting what they saw, had christened it "Nix Olympica" or the Snows of Olympus, but the discoveries of Mariner IX necessitated a change of name and so it became "Olympus Mons" or Mount Olympus.

Equally spectacular was the discovery of an extensive canyon system slightly north of the equator. Dubbed "Vallis Marineris" by astronomers it ran some 2500 miles, or about the distance between New York and Los Angeles, and descended, at some points, as deep as Mt Everest was high.

Before Mariner IX ceased transmitting in 1973 it relayed some information more surprising yet - the existence of dried up water channels on Mars. Not the lost canals of an ancient, imaginary Martian civilization, but natural channels resembling dried-up river beds. This indicated that Mars had once had liquid surface water - albeit billions of years ago.

Three fictional voyages to Mars were launched in 1973. The first of these, The Earth is Near by Ludek Pesek, was originally published in Germany in 1970. It was award a prestigious children's literature award in 1971, and is, in translation at any rate, an interesting read for adults as well. It is the story of a disastrous nineteen-man expedition to Mars as narrated by the ship's doctor. The crew, unable to adjust to the stresses of living in isolation millions of miles from Earth, develop strange psychological symptoms and conflicts. Worst of these is the clash between the captain and his second in command. The former is a military martinet unable to relax discipline or admit a mistake: the latter longs to discover life on Mars and is prepared to go to any lengths, including the sacrifice of men under his command, to achieve his ambition. Between the psychological problems of the crew, and the physical hardships of the mission, the expedition falls apart.

Similarly, The Far Call, by Gordon R. Dickson, is concerned with an international expedition to Mars which is sabotaged by the cynical political maneuverings of the participating nations. Caught in the middle of this are the astronauts themselves and Jens Wylie, the idealistic US secretary of space. When one of the crew is fatally injured, most of the expedition is forced to turn back, and Wylie, in an attempt to vindicate the astronauts, destroys his own career. The sordid political realities of Earth are contrasted against the heroism of Wylie and the astronauts, particularly Tad Hansard, who dies in a solar flare, and Fedya, who sacrifices himself to take a crippled ship alone to Mars.

By contrast The Man Who Loved Mars by Lin Carter is pure fantasy: a Leigh Brackett pastiche with no grounding in the realities of 1973. Carter's Mars contains mysterious desert tribes, lost cities, ancient gods and strange rituals; and the characters of The Man Who Loved Mars include an eccentric professor and his beautiful granddaughter! Ironically, while this old fashioned and derivative tale makes no use of the astronomical discoveries of the 1960s it does mention Mariner IV - if only in passing!

The last real-life voyagers to make it to Mars - the Viking probes - were launched in 1974. To celebrate, Analog put out a special "Mars" issue in December that year. In it were three stories: "Encounter Below Tharsis" by Bob Buckley, in which a nebulous alien destroys an obnoxious settler; "The Weather on Mars" by Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein, in which determined Martian settlers overcome a penny-pinching Terran government; and "Nix Olympica" by William Walling, in which adventurous Martian colonists climb the slopes of Olympus Mons. The same issue also contained an editorial and several scientific and speculative articles on Mars.

First published in 1975, The Space Machine by Christopher Priest is, like The Man Who Loved Mars, a pastiche of an earlier author. In this case, however, the pastiche takes the form of a light-hearted tribute to H.G. Wells. The narrator, one Mr Edward Turnball, is unwittingly transported to Mars in the company of the lady-like Miss Amelia Fitzgibbon after interfering with one of the inventions of her eccentric employer. There they discover a race of humanoid slaves who tend vast canals full of red weed and provide nourishment for their blood-drinking, be-tentacled masters. In the end, our hapless hero and heroine find themselves leading a revolution in an attempt to foil the monsters' plans to invade Earth...

As can be gathered from this plot summary, The Space Machine owes a great deal to The War of the Worlds. Christopher Priest manages to meld Mars as imagined by H.G. Wells with the Mars revealed by later discoveries.

On July 20 1976 Viking I, the first terrestrial voyager to actually land on Mars, touched down at Chryse Planitia, a site in the Northeastern quadrant of the planet. It was followed on September 3rd by Viking II, which landed at Utopia Planitia to the Northwest of Chryse.

The first photographs from the surface of Mars contained one surprising, albeit trivial, piece of information - the real color of the Martian sky. No one had expected it to be salmon pink. In "Transit of Earth" Arthur C. .Clarke describes the sky as being dark blue; in The Far Call Gordon R. Dickson describes it as being pale blue; and though no color is explicitly mentioned in Frederik Pohl's Man Plus it is clear that he envisages the sky as being black.

Man Plus, first released around the time of the Viking landings, is the story of the preparation of a cyborg designed to withstand the surface conditions of Mars. The novel focuses on the physical and emotional ordeals of Roger Torraway, the luckless astronaut chosen for this experiment, as he is surgically transformed from a human being into a monster. Every organ - heart, lungs, brain, skin, limbs and testicles - is either replaced, augmented or removed. The payoff comes towards the end of the novel when Roger finally lands on Mars and finds it a "fairyland" "the planet he was meant to live on". No longer at home on Earth, Roger's story ends as he decides to remain on Mars.

Man Plus is hard science fiction at its best: the details are carefully extrapolated from contemporary science and technology. At the same time hard science fiction has seldom been so moving. Frederik Pohl won a deserved Nebula Award for Man Plus in 1977.

Scientists had not yet given up hope of finding life on Mars. Carl Sagan's remark about finding footprints around the Viking landers aside, however, it was generally held that any life found on Mars would be microscopic in nature. Vikings I and II were equipped to probe for life, but, probably due to budgetary constraints in establishing the experiment, the results were inconclusive.

Microbes provide less imaginative fodder than canals, but some writers were prepared to tackle the subject. In The Martian Inca by Ian Watson, a contaminated soil sample from Mars is lost in the Andes, infecting a native village with a virus that induces an altered state of consciousness. One man, convinced that he has become the Messianic incarnation of the ancient Inca, leads his people in a local uprising. The plot alternates between the events of the rebellion and Mars, where three American astronauts are also experiencing strange effects from the same virus. Needless to say the rebellion fails - as does the expedition to Mars.

As the title suggests, Jesus on Mars (Phillip José Farmer, 1979) also includes a Messiah. A representative expedition (consisting of a Christian, a Moslem, an atheist and a Jew) discovers a secure, but somewhat repressive orthodox Jewish community living in caverns under the surface of Mars. The population consists of equal parts an alien race called the Krsh and descendants of humans abducted by the Krsh 2000 years before. A supernatural being calling himself "Jesus" rules over this community - and the question arises: is this really Jesus or simply another form of alien? In the end the answer is seen not to matter as "Jesus" returns to Earth to conquer and convert the rest of the human race.

The orbiters of Vikings I and II stopped functioning in July 1980 and July 1978 respectively: the landers ceased operations in November 1982 and March 1980. Altogether, the Viking probes produced a total of 55,620 photographs: 4,620 from the landers and 51,500 in orbit. With the final transmissions from Viking, all exploration of Mars ceased for nearly a decade. Not surprisingly, much of the Mars fiction written during the 1980s took the form of action-adventure escapism.

As Lowell's "discoveries" at the turn of the century inspired many a writer to write of green-skinned girls living beside ancient canals, so did more recent discoveries inspire the fantasies of the eighties. Three plot elements became so overused that they turned into cliches: the terraforming of Mars; the discovery of alien artefacts on Mars; and the rebellion of brave and freedom-loving colonists against a repressive government on Earth.

An outstanding example of this trend is Menace Under Marswood by Sterling F. Lanier. First published in 1983 it contains all the story ingredients mentioned above. It is set on a Mars terraformed some centuries in the past and harboring a wilderness area known as Marswood or the Ruck. Communities of barbarian clans have sprung up in the Ruck and are resisting all attempts to civilize the planet. The hero, Mohammed Slater, is a part of the UN garrison fighting the clans - until a "new" clan appears in the Ruck armed with super weapons of unknown origin. Aided by tribesmen who feel that the newcomers are a threat to their independence, Slater goes undercover in Marswood to find the source of these weapons - which, naturally enough, prove to be of alien manufacture. Menace Under Marswood is a undemanding action-adventure story, with rather thin characterization and a background which is only tenuously Martian.

Much grimmer in tone is Frontera by Lewis Shiner (1984). It is the story of a barely surviving colony on Mars, abandoned by Earth in the wake of the mother planet's own troubles, but sheltering a group of mutated child geniuses on its fringes. When one of the corporations that rule Earth discovers that these children have developed a matter transporter it decides to stage a "rescue" mission to Mars - the aim being to "rescue" the technology by any means possible. A resurgent communist Russia sends out a similar expedition: and the colony finds itself trapped between the two. Shiner minutely evokes the atmosphere of the decaying colony, the despair of the colonists and the alienation of the children, and the desperate, sometimes sordid, motives which drive the men who seek their technology.

Equally atmospheric is Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge, published in the same year as Frontera. Icehenge makes use of couple of common plot devices - a rebellion and the discovery of artefacts of possible alien origin - but the novel is essentially a discussion about the nature of history. It is narrated in three parts by three different characters: Emma Weil, who is caught up in a rebellion against the Mars Development Committee; Hjalmer Nederland, an historian who discovers and publishes her narrative many years later; and Edmond Doya, his great-grandson, who discovers new evidence which throws doubt on narrative of Emma Weil. Linked to all this is the Icehenge itself: a magnificent monument found carved in ice on Pluto. Was it put there by fleeing rebels? Or was it built by someone - or something - else?

Robinson also wrote "Green Mars", first published in the September 1985 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Ostensibly about a party of mountaineers climbing the face of Olympus Mons, at a deeper level it is a thoughtful exploration of the ethics of terraforming Mars. In an interview with Interzone in 1992, Robinson indicated that the idea for the title had come first and that the story had been written to secure his right to it.

If Kim Stanley Robinson brought intelligence and a high standard of writing to his works, Michael Lindsay Williams seems to have written Martian Spring with the express aim of demonstrating just how poor a book on the colonization of Mars could be. A nuclear explosion in orbit alters the axial tilt of Mars and induces a sudden and surprising change of climate - including the appearance of vegetation and a breathable atmosphere! This is the "Martian Spring" of the title. Add to this a race of telepathic, saint-like aliens hibernating beneath the surface of Mars and a villain named Von Bok, and the novel stretches the credulity of even the most uncritical reader.

Ian MacDonald's Desolation Road (1988) also strains the bounds of credibility, but in this case verisimilitude was not the author's intention. Written in part as an acknowledged tribute to Ray Bradbury, the novel is a fantastic and original mixture containing such ingredients as time travel, little green men, terraforming, cyborgs, and robotic angels. Any attempt to summarize the interweaving plots which make up Desolation Road would do it less than justice. Briefly it is the story of four generations of eccentric characters in a small town. These include Dr Alimantando, the time-traveling scientist who founds the town of Desolation Road; Tasmin Mandella, the prophetess who makes it famous; Inspiration Cadillac and the Children of the Immaculate Contraption who make it their headquarters; and Johnny Stalin, sinister executive of the even more sinister Bethlehem Ares Company.

Desolation Road is poised between science fiction and fantasy and toys with the major themes of each genre. Wynne Whiteford attempts something similar in Lake of the Sun (1989). He inverts one of the standard science fiction ploys - alien invasion - by making us the alien invaders and depicting us from the point of view of those invaded. "They were men unlike any Rah had seen" muses one of the main characters about the strangers:

Their scalps were covered mostly by black hair, and there were hairy brow-ridges above their eyes, which seemed narrow and intense. They looked very broad across the upper body - in fact, their shoulders were the widest part of them, and their limbs looked immensely muscular.

The invaders are not malicious - they simply do not realize that the Martians exist beneath the surface of the planet. Once they discover this fact the strangers attempt to make friendly contact - only to find themselves caught up in a local political conflict.

With a happy ending and a generally optimistic view of the world, Lake of the Sun reads like nothing so much as a Star Trek novel. An altogether more sardonic view of life is taken in Voyage to the Red Planet, Terry Bisson's satire on Mars and Movie-making. In a fully privatized 21st century the rights to explore Mars are sold to Pellucidar Pictures who want to use it as a movie location. A raggle-taggle crew comprised of two superannuated astronauts, a pair of hibernating Move Stars, a corrupt Hollywood doctor, a teenage stowaway and a midget cameraman set out for Mars in a mothballed spaceship named Mary Poppins. Bisson writes in a tradition dating back to Swift and Gulliver's Travels: the wit hits home even as the reader laughs at the jokes.

Voyage to the Red Planet was published in 1990. The decade has since seen a revival of the Mars exploration story in science fiction, most probably as a result of the revival of Mars as a destination for explorers in real life. The Soviet Union headed the venture back to Mars with two probes, Phobos I and II. Phobos I was lost, but Phobos II remained in orbit around Mars for three months before transmissions ceased. Russia was working on the development of surface rovers and orbital balloons for the exploration of Mars in the early nineties, but the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992 has made the future of the Russian space program doubtful. Though the United States was slower in reviving its space program, preparations were underway for launching a Mars probe by 1991.

Two novels were published in 1991: Martian Rainbow by Robert L. Forward and Red Genesis by S.C. Sykes. The former was written by an author with a reputation as a master of hard science fiction. Unfortunately this is not borne out by Martian Rainbow. The science, accurate though it might be, is inserted into the text in the form of wordy dialogue typical of pulp 1930s SF; and the plot and the characterization can only be described as wooden and inept. The hero and the villain are - almost - identical twins named Gus and Alexander Armstrong. Gus is a good, intelligent and rational scientist living on Mars. Alexander is a lecherous, murderous egomaniac general who takes over the Earth by making himself the object of a religious cult. The heroic settlers on Mars decide to resist Alexander's tyranny, and, with the aid of a Mars Underground on Earth, the discovery of alien robots frozen in the snows of the North Pole on Mars, and the cunning substitution of one brother for the other at the crisis of the story, succeed.

Red Genesis is vastly superior. While the scientific background is equally well researched it is less obtrusively presented; the social background is lovingly delineated, the plot is gripping, and the novel is filled with vivid and interesting characters. Chief of these is Graham Kuan Sinclair, the part-Chinese hero of Red Genesis. A billionaire corporate executive at the beginning of the story, he is stripped of his wealth and exiled to Mars after being unjustly convicted of a major ecological crime. Once arrived on the planet Graham discovers that the colonists on Mars are being used as the unwitting subjects in an anthropological experiment - and sets out to exert his considerable talents to change the situation. More than this, Red Genesis is the story of Graham's adjustment to a frontier society, his finding a place on a world which never wanted him, and his development as a human being.

Readers who remember "The Martian Way" by Isaac Asimov will be fascinated to learn that the chief industry on Sykes' Mars is the export of water to Earth!

The year 1992 saw the first American Mars probe launched since Viking II in 1974. It also saw an efflorescence of Mars fiction. Short stories published in 1992 included "Danny goes to Mars", a political spoof on Dan Quayle by Pamela Sargent, and "The Martians" by Frederik Pohl. "The Martians" was expanded into a novel and published as Mining the Oort later in the same year.

Mining the Oort is concerned with the financial and technical complexities of terraforming Mars as seen through the eyes of Dekker DeWoe, the somewhat naive Martian hero of the story. The Martians are attempting to terraform their planet by bombarding it with comets from the Oort. To raise the money for this long term venture they are forced to sell bonds to Earth and sacrifice their short term standards of living. Dekker has grown up imbued with Martian ideals and the Martian dream, and longs to be an "Oort miner" - one of those responsible for aiming the comets at Mars - like his once gallant father. But even as his dream comes close to fulfillment it is in danger of being ended, as the backers of the Mars project withdraw support from the scheme seeking investments with a faster return.

Like Red Genesis, Mining the Oort has a carefully constructed social background and a realistic scientific basis. It is an interesting comment on our ignorance of Mars in the late 20th century, however, that two such thorough researchers could describe physical environments so dissimilar and yet still be working from identical data. The same remarks could be applied to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.

Red Mars was the first of a long-projected trilogy dealing with the colonization of Mars. In 2042 one hundred hand-picked scientist and technicians journey to Mars to found a colony. Almost immediately they split into different factions and interests: the first division being between those who wish to terraform Mars and those who wish to preserve it as it is. And as different powers on Earth weigh in to influence decisions taken on Mars, the colonists find their world being taken away from them.

In Red Mars Kim Stanley Robinson has created a sweeping future history of Mars as shown through the eyes of various members of the "first hundred": the first settlement and exploration, the first terraforming projects, the formation of breakaway groups and dissident colonies, population growth as new settlers arrive, the exploitation of the planet by giant transnational corporations, and a revolution culminating in a few surviving members of the first hundred fleeing as refugees to start anew. While the novel is of considerable merit, its great length and the author's method of narrating the story from several points of view has an unfortunate tendency to distance the action from the reader. The story is continued in a sequel, Green Mars, which was released late in 1993.

A minor work on the theme of colonization, William C. Dietz's Mars Prime, was also published in 1992, but it never approached the standards set by Red Mars. In summary it is the story of a colony ship bound for Mars as seen by Rex Corban, a journalist traveling with the expedition. Unlike the elite settlers imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson, Dietz's colonists are the dross of human society, "semi-skilled filler, not unlike the third sons, convicts, misfits and adventurers that have always populated human frontiers." Trouble rears its ugly head when a deranged killer commits a series of murders aboard the ship. Corban solves the mystery with the aid of his wife and some rather cute anthropomorphic computers, but more trouble awaits on Mars when an unscrupulous colonist finds a deserted alien spaceship and uses his discovery to establish a shyster religion.

By this stage one would be justified in wondering why so many alien races have abandoned useable technology on Earth's back doorstep. Allen Steele tackles the subject in Labyrinth of Night, a better than average novel if only because it has some basis in fact. In 1976 one of the Voyager orbiters photographed some oddities near the Cydonia region of Mars: a configuration of shadows that looked like a mile long human face and a cluster of what appeared to be pyramids. Fringe elements immediately seized on these as evidence of alien intelligence. Steele chooses to treat these ideas seriously, and builds a novel around the mystery. The human aspects of the story deal with the small scientific mission investigating the face, and the attempts of a paranoiac military officer to destroy what they find there as a "threat" to the human race.

Labyrinth of Night is probably the best of all the novels published of the last decade on the theme of alien technology on Mars. On the whole, however, such novels have been in a minority during the 1990s, less fanciful science fiction predominating. Alien cities are hinted at in Ben Bova's Mars, but they never play a major role in the plot. Instead the novel is a craftsman-like account of the first manned expedition to Mars.

Mars is partly told in flashback, showing the training of the crew, and partly set on Earth, showing the politics underpinning the mission, and there are implications of romance between the half-Navaho main character, Jamie Waterman, and a Brazilian biologist.

Jack Williamson's Beachhead is very similar to Mars in that it portrays a Martian expedition of many nations and both sexes. It also depicts the selection and training of the crew, a romance between the main character and another crew member, and double-dealing back on Earth. But unlike Mars, the plot of Beachhead tends towards the melodramatic, and contains such elements as sinister seductresses, sleazy financiers, a mutiny, a dying crew and a desperate attempt to reach Earth in a landing craft. Characterization is not a strong point in this novel, and Williamson's writing does not appear to be up to his best standards, but the scientific and technical aspects of Beachhead are strong and well thought out.

Given that so many novels were written about Mars in 1992 it is perhaps not necessary to include one in which the Martian elements are merely part of a subplot, but China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh is too good to forbear mentioning. It is set in a future dominated by the People's Republic of China. A settlement project has been begun on Mars - "Patriotic Volunteers Turn Red Desert Into Productive Land" - but the people living there have emigrated for a mixture of personal reasons.

Only two chapters out of the total were devoted to Mars in China Mountain Zhang, but Paul McAuley's Red Dust (1993), also set in a Chinese dominated future, takes place entirely on that planet. Stripped of inessentials, Red Dust is the story of Wei Lee, a young agronomist caught in a struggle to control Mars. The planet is ruled by an "Emperor" - really a computer construct - which has committed Mars to the "Golden Path" by which it will die and its inhabitants pass into a virtual reality universe. Presiding over Mars' demise are the Ten Thousand Years, mandarins nominally serving the Emperor, but only interested in perpetuating their own power and immortality. Wei Lee, however, is in sympathy with the "Sky Roaders", a subversive faction which opposes the Golden Path. And after being infected with a "totipotent fullerene virus" which, in effect, makes him over into a human computer link, Lee gains the power to decide Mars' destiny - if he survives long enough.

With such embellishments as yak herding cowboys, Tibetan lamaseries and a computer simulation calling itself the King of the Cats, Red Dust is the most imaginative future Mars since Desolation Road. Its evocative prose conjures up a fading yet fantastic world. In the real world things were not going so well. Two projects connected with Mars failed in 1993. The first was the Biosphere II project, concerned with the development of a completely self-sufficient environment. The second was the Mars probe launched in 1992 which disappeared in September 1993 shortly before it was due to establish a Mars orbit.

Towards the end of the year HarperCollins released Green Mars, the second in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. As massive as its predecessor, this book picks up where the other leaves off. It has all the flaws and virtues of Red Mars. It also has many of the same characters. The terraformation of Mars progresses, and the revolution begun in the first volume succeeds, but the ending of the novel remains inconclusive. In this it is not unlike the uncertain future of Mars exploration and the space program in the hard reality of the 1990s.

The future if Mars fiction seems much more assured. Though less was published in 1993 than 1992 the genre is still flourishing: and probably will do so as long as Mars remains in the sky.

By Christine Hawkins, 2000