Books like Red Mars
What should you read after Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Kim Stanley Robinson
- 1992
- Hard science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Red Mars
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall match2312
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson again, two centuries further on, with Mars settled and the argument moved outward to Mercury, Venus and the terrariums. The same mind, on a looser leash.
- Terraforming, step by step
- Science you can check
- Landscape as a character
- Structurally digressive and loose
Best for the hard scienceAurora
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson's most sceptical book: a generation ship that behaves exactly as physics and biology say it would, which is to say badly. The anti-romance of colonisation.
- Science you can check
- Arguments about what a planet is for
- Decades passing inside one book
- Bleak conclusion by design
Worth a look — with a warningMarsbound
Joe Haldeman
A young-adult trip to Mars with a real first-contact turn in it. Diverting, but with none of Robinson's patience for rock, politics or time.
- Landscape as a character
- Science you can check
- YA register throughout
Great matchMartian Time-Slip
Philip K. Dick
Dick's Mars is a failing suburb with water rationing and bad marriages — the settlement novel written as social realism, with the psychosis turned up.
- The first hundred and their factions
- Landscape as a character
- Mars is backdrop, not subject
Best for the revolutionMoving Mars
Greg Bear
Bear takes the independence question head on: a Martian student becomes a politician and finds out exactly what Earth is willing to do about secession.
- A revolution against Earth
- The first hundred and their factions
- Science you can check
- Ending swerves into handwaving
Great matchPlanetfall
Emma Newman
A small colony built on a lie, unpicked from the inside. Where Robinson gives you factions, Newman gives you one woman's psychology at very close range.
- The first hundred and their factions
- Arguments about what a planet is for
- Intimate scale, single narrator
Worth a look — with a warningRed Planet
Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein's boys' adventure on a colonised Mars, with a properly imagined Martian ecology and a colonial rebellion buried in it. Historically interesting more than satisfying.
- A revolution against Earth
- Landscape as a character
- 1949 attitudes on show
Great matchThe Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
For readers who came for the argument about what humanity should do with a planet, conducted at civilisational scale and with equally uncompromising physics.
- Science you can check
- Arguments about what a planet is for
- Characters are argument-shaped
Great matchTau Zero
Poul Anderson
The purest example of the mode Robinson works in: take one physical principle, follow it honestly, and let the crew's politics fall out of the consequences.
- Science you can check
- Decades passing inside one book
- Characterisation is functional
Best for the politicsThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Robert A. Heinlein
The founding text for colonial revolt in science fiction: a penal colony works out the orbital mechanics of dropping rocks on Earth and declares itself a country.
- A revolution against Earth
- Science you can check
- The first hundred and their factions
- Long libertarian lectures
What should you read after Red Mars?
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson — robinson again, two centuries further on, with Mars settled and the argument moved outward to Mercury, Venus and the terrariums. The same mind, on a looser leash.
If what stayed with you was science you can check, read Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson instead: robinson's most sceptical book: a generation ship that behaves exactly as physics and biology say it would, which is to say badly. The anti-romance of colonisation. Marsbound by Joe Haldeman is the other strong option — a young-adult trip to Mars with a real first-contact turn in it. Diverting, but with none of Robinson's patience for rock, politics or time.
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