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Voyager Classics
GREEN MARS
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Voyager Classics An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992
Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1992
Kim Stanley Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007119592
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9780007402090
Version: 2019-06-07
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For Lisa and David
CONTENTS
PART FOUR The Scientist As Hero
PART SEVEN What Is To Be Done?
PART NINE The Spur of the Moment
The Voyager Classics Collection
The point is not to make another Earth. Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.
In a sense our intentions don’t even matter. Even if we try to make another Siberia or Sahara, it won’t work. Evolution won’t allow it, and at its heart this is an evolutionary process, an endeavour driven at a level below intention, as when life made its first miracle leap out of matter, or when it crawled out of sea onto land.
Again we struggle in the matrix of a new world. Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of new species. And as the generations pass, all the members of a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else, have been forever changed.
This is the process of areoformation.