Is Mars Ours?

Last year, about a month into the pandemic, I reached for something comforting: the 1992 science-fiction novel "Red Mars," by Kim Stanley Robinson. I'd first read it as a teen-ager, and had reread it a handful of times by my early twenties. Along with its two sequels, "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars," the novel follows the first settlers to reach the red planet. They establish cities, break away from Earth's control, and transform the arid surface into a garden oasis, setting up a new society in the course of a couple hundred years. On the cover of my well-worn copy, Arthur C. Clarke declared it "the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written."