Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
By Kim Stanley Robinson
 
First UK editions, first impressions of the three books collectively known as The Mars Trilogy: Harpercollins, 1992 - 1996
 
Three volumes. Original red, black and blue cloth, spines lettered in silver. With the original pictorial dust jackets, all unclipped and priced £14.99 net, £14.99 net and £15.99 respectively; jacket illustrations by Mel Grant (Red Mars) and Peter Elson (Green Mars), the Blue Mars jacket uncredited.
 
Red Mars near fine, with a little pushing to the spine head; Green Mars a fine copy; Blue Mars with some toning to the edges, the binding opening a little wide at the half-title, and pages 521-531 with a small crease to the bottom corner, otherwise very good. An excellent set.
 
The dust jacket to Red Mars near fine, with minor wear to the edges in places; the Green Mars jacket fine; the Blue Mars jacket very good, with some creasing to the edges, primarily at the spine head and the bottom edge of the upper panel.
 
The three jackets were designed as a sequence and stand as one across the shelf: a black ground carrying the title in outsized white, green and blue lettering above a band of Martian landscape, the planet shown successively arid, part-terraformed, and finally under open water and sail.
 
Red Mars appeared in London in 1992, preceding the first American edition of the following year, and took the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel for 1992 and the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1993; Green Mars and Blue Mars each took the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, in 1994 and 1997 respectively. The sequence covers more than two hundred years of the settlement and terraforming of the planet, from the first hundred colonists to an independent Martian society. The publisher's note to Green Mars records seventeen years of "meticulous planning and investigation" behind the sequence, the author working in close contact with NASA and the Mars Underground Organisation, and Arthur C. Clarke's verdict is carried on the upper panel of the first volume: "the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written."