Red Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 1)

He wanted to say, “Who are you?” but the silence was so blanketing that he couldn’t bring himself to speak. He mouthed the words and the man turned and looked over his shoulder at him, the whites of his eyes visible and luminous all the way around the irises, the nostrils wide black holes. “I’m the stowaway,” he mouthed, and grinned. His eyeteeth w

And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, no

there is never a case of truly pure research. Because the people who pay for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their investment.

So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking

Chalmers interviewed some of the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at a time. “You see how easy it was to detain you,” he told them. “That’s the way it will be all over. The life-support systems are so fragile that they’re impossible to defend. Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implem

And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the Martian time slip, the thirty-nine-and-a-half-minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. This was how the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars’s slightly longer day with the twenty-four-hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfa

“The renewal is still a few years off,” John said. A million Arkadys rolled their eyes. “It’s happening now. Not just in talk, but in what’s happening day-to-day down there. When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things—some clothes, a lectern, a

Maya was labile and extroverted, clearly choleric, and so was Frank; and both of them were leaders, and both were quite attracted to the other. Both being choleric, however, there was a volatile and essentially repellent aspect to the relationship as well, as if they recognized in each other exactly what they didn’t like in themselves.

He knew that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth, a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once and was living off that for good. That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size. That was okay, especially since in his case they w