It had been almost a decade since I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy when I finally picked up the following book The Martians. It contains a quote from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles: "The Martians were here ... Timothy and Robert and Michael and Mom and Dad" (46). And in fact, The Martians feels more like Bradbury's Chronicles than the prior novels ever did, because it is mostly short fiction, including some vignettes and very short pieces. It is even more heterogeneous though, with some essays, fictional abstracts of scientific papers, the Martian governmental Constitution, and a selection of poetry.

Some of the pieces in the book follow the affairs of the First Hundred settlers and other key characters from the trilogy, providing new perspectives and plotlines. Maya, Michel, and Coyote feature in several of these, Michel being the focus of the long novella that leads off the collection. There are also a suite of stories concerning the Martian romance between Eileen Monday and Roger Clayborne. A few tales are concerned with the Little Men and the Big Man of Mars who had been introduced in Green Mars.

But none of these threads is segregated from the others. They are all woven together, with no obvious organizing principle to govern the thirty pieces in the volume. There is a recurring theme of sport, including mountain climbing, baseball, and surfing. As the book progresses, some of the shorter pieces and especially the poetry collapse into Robinson's own voice and his situation as a writer in Davis, California at the turn of the millennium.

The Martians is not rigorously chronological, although it starts with the Antarctic experiment before the first colonizing mission of Red Mars, and later pieces do move into future history beyond what is covered in Green Mars. There are a few points of violated continuity, suggesting that Robinson was exploring alternative possibilities in his future history. Some of the items may have been recovered piecemeal from drafts of the novels, and two were actually published separately in magazines during the 1980s before the trilogy.

I enjoyed the book a great deal, although I am sure I would have gotten more out of it if I had read it more closely on the heels of the larger Robinson Mars work. Although it could stand on its own structurally (or anti-structurally), I would not recommend it as an introduction to the larger series, because quite a few of the stories derive their power from the characters and plots already built in the novels.

Amazing companion to the trilogy. Short stories investigate further many of the core issues of land and world, collectivism and global government, memory and mutual understanding, at various points in the past and future of the trilogy's timeline, and some in alternate timelines. ( )

This is a collection of short stories that fill in some gaps and covers other aspects of the Blue/Red/Green Mars series. While the trilogy was a great read this book is less so. This book is for those who want to more about the world and characters of the trilogy and not recommended as a stand alone read. ( )

The writing of KSR here is just beautiful. You need to have read before the trilogy. ( )

Since I'm already crazy about Robinson and I've read all his Mars novels, I can't imagine whether someone who wasn't & hadn't would love this collection of stories as much as I did. But I think so! I like those novels a lot, but I think that these things-that-happened-in-between stories make even better use of his good and strange qualities-- he gets to use the colonization of Mars as an all-purpose playground for whatever he might want to say about politics, love, hiking, baseball, etc., without having to worry at all about sustaining a single plot or style (or even a character-- some of the stories are just Transcendentalist travelogues told by no one in particular). Although it's interesting to see what he does with some of his existing people, the background isn't necessary to know, and sometimes he just throws it all away to write an alternate history or a memoir or whatever (there's even a dirty Paul Bunyan myth). He's particularly good at writing about small-scale politics, just people dealing with each other, with massive empathy all around. Also, although I'm kind of a sucker, some of the writing in this made me bust out crying on the train. ( )