ABSTRACT

In a scene toward the end of the final book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy on the settling and terraforming of Mars, Blue Mars, two surviving members of the first one hundred settlers, now ageing despite their longevity treatments, have got into the habit of sitting looking at the sky. Using color charts, Sax and Maya put names to the new colors that they see slowly emerging in the Martian sky, as the planet is altered in order to make it more hospitable to life. With their senses tuned by months of observation, they share wordlessly the moment when the color of an Earth sky finally appears.