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This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, October 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1985. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986) and form half of Tor Double #1: A Meeting With Medusa/Green Mars (1988 , whith Arthur C. Clarke). It is included in the collection The Martians (1999).

Tiptree nominated story in Robinson's Mars trilogy setting. Collected in The Martians (1999).

A glorious companion volume to Robinson's world-wide bestselling trilogy.

All Colours Mars

Red Mars. Green Mars. Blue Mars...

The Mars trilogy has rapidly assumed the status of modern science fiction classic, capturing the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. Now, with The Martians, comes Kim Stanley Robinson essential companion to the Mars series. New novellas and short stories head the collection, featuring many of the trilogy's central characters in events previously only hinted at in the novels. Added to this are works on Martian mythology, poetry, character histories, alternative scenarios to the events that actually took place in the trilogy and finally various pieces which the author omitted in the final edit.

In short, The Martians is a unique collection of previously unpublished fiction, a fascinating addition to Robinson's oeuvre, and a must for all lovers of the red planet.

Contents:

• Michel in Antarctica
• Exploring Fossil Canyon
• The Archaea Plot
• The Way the Land Spoke to Us
  • The Great Escarpment
  • Flatness
• Maya and Desmond
• Four Teleological Trails
  • Wrong way
  • Mistakes can be good
  • You can't lose the trail
  • The natural genius
• Coyote Makes Trouble
• Michel in Provence
• Green Mars
• Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars
• Salt and Fresh
• The Constitution of Mars
• Some Worknotes and Commentary on the Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia
• Jackie on Zo
• Keeping the Flame
• Saving Noctis Dam
• Big Man in Love
• An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies
• Selected Abstracts from The Journal of Areological Studies, vols. 56-64
• Odessa
• Sexual Dimorphism
• Enough Is as Good as a Feast
• What Matters
• Coyote Remembers
• Sax Moments
• A Martian Romance
• If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and other poems
  • Visiting
  • After a Move
  • Canyon Colour
  • Vastitas Borealis
  • Night Song
  • Desolation
  • The Names of the Canals
  • Another Night Song
  • Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art
    • What's in My Pocket
    • In the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth
    • Reading Emerson's Journal
    • The Walkman
    • Dreams Are Real
    • Seen While Running
  • Crossing Mather Pass
  • Night in the Mountains
    • Camp
    • The Ground
    • Writing by Starlight
  • Invisible Owls
  • Tenzing
  • The Soundtrack
  • A Report on the First Reported Case of Areophagy
  • The Reds' Lament
  • Two Years
  • I Say Goodbye to Mars
• Purple Mars

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life... and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel

Kim Stanley Robinson's classic trilogy depicting the colonization of Mars continues in a thrilling and timeless novel that pits the settlers against their greatest foes: themselves.

Nearly a generation has passed since the first pioneers landed on Mars, and its transformation to an Earthlike planet is under way. But not everyone wants to see the process through. The methods are opposed by those who are determined to preserve their home planet's hostile, barren beauty. Led by the first generation of children born on Mars, these rebels are soon joined by a handful of the original settlers. Against this cosmic backdrop, passions, partnerships, and rivalries explode in a story as spectacular as the planet itself.

The red planet is red no longer, as Mars has become a perfectly inhabitable world. But while Mars flourishes, Earth is threatened by overpopulation and ecological disaster. Soon people look to Mars as a refuge, initiating a possible interplanetary conflict, as well as political strife between the Reds, who wish to preserve the planet in its desert state, and the Green "terraformers". The ultimate fate of Earth, as well as the possibility of new explorations into the solar system, stand in the balance.

Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime - they're going to Mars.

Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against. And when she ventures out into the bleak Mars landscape alone one night, a simple accident leads her to the edge of death until she is saved by an angel—an angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad, and a message for the newly arrived human inhabitants of Mars:

We were here first.

Carmen Dula and her husband have spent six years traveling to a distant solar system that is home to the enigmatic, powerful race known as "The Others," in the hopes of finding enough common purpose between their species to forge a delicate truce.

By the time Carmen and her party return, fifty years have been consumed by relativity-and the Earthlings have not been idle, building a massive flotilla of warships to defend Earth against The Others. But The Others have their own plans.

The mysterious alien Others have prohibited humans from space travel-destroying Earth's fleet of starships in a display of unimaginable power. Now Carmen Dula, the first human to encounter Martians and then the mysterious Others, and her colleagues struggle to find a way, using nineteenthcentury technology, to reclaim the future that has been stolen from them.