Books reading recommendations Five Stories About Surviving and Adapting on Mars Strategies range from paraterraforming to radical cybernetic transformation… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on March 26, 2026 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Slava G. Turyshev’s toe-tapping abstract for Terraforming Mars: Mass, Forcing, and Industrial Throughput Constraints lyrically concludes: We conclude that regional habitability gains via paraterraforming are plausible on near-term industrial scales, whereas global transformation of Mars requires multi-century planetary industry and becomes credible only under conditions of (a) massive exogenous volatile supply or much larger discovered inventories, and (b) sustained high-authority climate control and retention against sinks and loss. More succinctly, terraforming Mars would be hard and requires resources that may not exist. Disappointing, but not really a surprise. However, Turyshev offers this hopeful observation: paraterraforming, contained biospheres, and local pressurization/thermal control can be deployed incrementally and deliver meaningful surface utility without requiring exaton-class gases. There is one upside to Turyshev’s conclusion. Suppose for the moment that Mars could be easily terraformed. What are the odds we’d get it right the first time we tried? …And if would-be terraformers screwed up badly enough, the damage might not be repairable1. Paraterraforming offers the opportunity to run many experiments in parallel. Not only would this greatly speed up the process of figuring out what approaches work best, worst case scenarios—irreparable damage—would only affect one set of tunnels. Of course, SF got there first. Consider these five stories. The Martian Way by Isaac Asimov (1952) At present, the colonies on the Moon, Venus, and Mars are cash-sinks, in no little part because all of them are bleak, resource-poor worlds. In particular, all are water-poor, a situation exploited by Terran popularist Hilder. Terrestrial water provides the reaction-mass for interplanetary flight. Rather than waste precious water supplying colonies that do not pay for themselves, why not focus on Terran needs? Mars’ inhospitable conditions prove an asset in the colonists’ bid to survive Hilder’s anti-colony campaign. What does it matter to a Martian colonist if the constrained circumstances they live in are a tunnel habitat on Mars or a spaceship? The resources Mars needs are in the outer Solar System. All the Martians need do is recover them. The story acknowledges that Mars does in fact have water, just not enough. Asimov prudently avoids providing concrete numbers, as he needs to motivate his characters to undertake their bold journey. In fact, even a lowball estimate for Mars water resources—Clarke’s speculation in 1951’s The Exploration of Space that Martian ice caps might be only few inches thick, for example—would amount to enough to supply Asimov’s 50,000 Martian colonists with much more water than they’d need. Born Under Mars by John Brunner (1967) Martians can take pride in their successful settlement of a nearly airless, hostile world. Too bad the development of faster-than-light travel and the discovery of many habitable worlds outside the Solar System rendered the achievement moot and Mars itself a backwater. Mars-born Ray Mallin is a mundane star-drive engineer, not a spy. No cloak and dagger shenanigans for Ray! No reasonable person would want to kidnap and torture Ray for top-secret information. So why did masked agents kidnap Ray, and why are they torturing him for information? Unlike many coincidence-driven plots, this one is founded in straightforward demographics. Mars is a low-population world. Therefore, the odds that any given Martian knows another Martian—a Martian who is up to their eyeballs in covert ops, say—are pretty good. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1976) Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s unsuitable for humans of all ages, what with the near-vacuum and the radiation. Billions of years of evolution shaped humans for a very specific set of conditions, none of which can be found on Mars. Solution: change humans so that they can survive on Mars. Or at least, change one human as a proof of concept. The Man Plus program transformed Commander Hartnett from a Mark One human into a cyborg almost perfectly adapted for Mars. Too bad about the minor design flaw that killed Hartnett before he could leave Earth. Still, Man Plus learned a lot from Hartnett—insights they will now apply to Roger Torraway. Maybe Roger will be luckier than Hartnett. The results can only be educational. Pohl had a knack for writing novels that reflected the zeitgeist of the era in which they were written. Young people curious about SF steeped in Disco Era entropic malaise could do worse than to sample this Hugo finalist. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh (1992) Financial exuberance destroyed the West’s economies. Fortuitously, China managed to weather the Great Cleansing Wind. Now China provides the other nations of Earth with the benevolent guidance they so obviously needed. Amongst the many threads of the braided plot is an exploration of the Martian communities. These are more outposts than thriving colonies; whether state determination will overcome the many obvious drawbacks to life on Mars is unclear. For the moment, humanity has its foothold on Mars. The titular protagonist offers this rather doleful observation: But I am only free in small places. Government is big, we are small. We are only free when we slip through the cracks. Despite which, this isn’t some sort of Yellow Peril potboiler. Life in this world order may not be significantly better for the masses than under that world order’s predecessors, but it doesn’t seem to be significantly worse, either. Where the Golden Apples Grow by Kage Baker (2006) Bill Townsend is a Hauler’s son. Bill whiles away the long lonely hours in his father’s polar ice hauler with schoolwork and the handful of books Billy can afford (Haulers don’t make much at all). Blatchford “Ford” Thurkettle2 hails from the Martian Agricultural Collective (MAC), which, unlike the Areco company employing Bill’s dad, asks for just as much work and offers twice the austerity. The two teens have one thing in common: both are miserable. An argument drives Ford from MAC. An altercation might have landed him in jail, save for the lucky chance that Bill’s father offered Ford haven in his hauler. Although “lucky” might not be quite the right word, once the hauler gets stuck far, far away from any possible rescue. This novella and Baker’s other Martian stories were collected in 2024’s Maelstrom and Other Martian Tales. I’d recommend tracking it down, despite the collector’s edition price… except both hardcover and ebook seem to be out of print. Mars having long fascinated SF authors—and its environmental intractability being plain to see—science fiction abounds with stories set on hostile Red Planets. The above is a very, very small sample. No doubt I missed your faves. Comments are below.[end-mark] Clarke’s Sands of Mars deserves a mention here, even though the book’s planetary-scale terraforming seems to be going well. Despite Earth’s reluctance to OK the project, the Mars colonists arrange to increase the insolation on Mars by transforming one of the Martian moons into a mini-sun. It’s possible that Earth’s objection wasn’t to terraforming per se, but rather deploying the means by which solid bodies can be turned into mini-suns. The Moon, for example. Or Earth. ︎More exactly, “Ford” is the name Ford chose for himself. His friends, such as they are, call him Blatt… if Ford is lucky. Otherwise, his pals connected the dots between Blatt and Blattidae to arrive at the nickname “Cockroach.” You know what’s a super-great idea? Incessantly needling someone with whom you share a fragile, easily-sabotaged life support system… ︎The post Five Stories About Surviving and Adapting on Mars appeared first on Reactor.