New Scientist Book Club: Read an extract from Kim Stanley Robinson’s sci-fi classic Red Mars

Mars was empty before we arrived. This is not to say that nothing ever happened. The planet had accumulated, melted, agitated and cooled, leaving a surface marked by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all this happened in mineral unconsciousness and without being observed. There were no witnesses – except us, watching from the neighboring planet, and then only at the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness Mars ever had.

Now everyone knows the story of Mars in the human mind: how, for all generations of prehistory, it was one of the principal lights of the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and how it stopped in its course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed its direction. That seemed to say something with all that. So perhaps it’s not surprising that all of Mars’ oldest names have a particular weight on the language – Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis – they sound as if they are even older than the ancient languages ​​we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thousands of years Mars has been a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

Then the first telescopes allowed us to look closer, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark spots that expanded and shrank over the long seasons. No improvement in telescope technology has ever brought us much more than this; but the best land images gave Lowell enough blur to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to repel the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a beautiful story. But then Mariner and Viking sent their photos back and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars has expanded dramatically, we literally know millions of times more about this planet than before. And there, before us, flew over a new world, an unsuspected world.

Yet it seemed to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, from microbes to doomed canal builders to extraterrestrial visitors. As you know, no evidence of any of this has ever been found. And so stories naturally flourished to fill this void, just as in Lowell’s time, or Homer’s, or in the caves or in the savannah – stories of microfossils destroyed by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always seen out of the corner of our eyes. And all of these stories are told in an effort to bring Mars to life, or to bring it to life. Because we are still those animals who survived the ice age, who looked up at the night sky in wonder, and who told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it has been for us since our beginnings: a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

And that’s how we came here. It had been a power; now it has become a place.

This is an excerpt from the book by Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars, the latest pick from the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read with us here.