20 works of upbeat science fiction to brighten your day

Red Mars (Cover image via Bantam Spectra)

19. The Mars trilogy

Some of the most optimistic science fiction hinges on the ultimate survival of the human species. It’s an especially powerful genre in the modern era, contrasted as it is with the threat of nuclear war, pandemics, and the 24-hour news cycle. We sometimes feel blanketed by the evil of the world, so utterly surrounded by rage and sadness that the alternatives seem practically impossible.

Hopefully, you don’t always feel that way (and, if you do, I hope you’re seeing a mental health professional). But we all have days where it feels like that, especially if we have trouble just closing Twitter and walking away from the newsfeed. It’s easy to feel drawn towards sci-fi full of despots and ravaged environments in these times.

But it doesn’t always have to be that way. There are plenty of realistic futures where humanity, being, well, humanity hasn’t quite figured out utopian society. Nonetheless, in these works, our species has survived and learned to live in a far future world.

That’s the case in the Mars trilogy, written by Kim Stanley Robinson. It starts off with Red Mars, in a more or less realistic fashion. Travelers arrive on Mars to set up a long term colony and begin the generations-long process of terraforming the planet. It’s a considerable task, given that the settlers are working with Mars as we know it today. That means a very thin atmosphere, lots of solar radiation, cold temperatures and plenty of that fine, red soil everywhere.

On top of that, the settlers just can’t avoid personal and political drama (it would be a pretty dry book otherwise, admittedly).