Novels about building a life on Mars rather than just visiting it: first landings, colonies, generations born there and the politics that follow. Grouped by era so you can see how the idea has changed.
Mars has been fiction's favourite next home for over a century, but 'Mars novel' covers very different books. Some are about the first landing. Some are survival stories. The rarest kind, and the subject of this guide, follow a settlement over time: who builds it, what it costs, and what the people born there become.
As real Mars science has improved (water ice, buried brines, radiation data, lava tubes), the novels have moved from canals and Martians to engineering and ethics. Each entry below notes the era it was written in, because a 1950 Mars and a 1992 Mars are different planets.
| Book | Author · year | Focus | Timescale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Planet | Robert A. Heinlein · 1949 | Young colonists, frontier politics | Months |
| The Martian Chronicles | Ray Bradbury · 1950 | Waves of settlers, loss, memory | Decades |
| The Sands of Mars | Arthur C. Clarke · 1951 | A small colony, early terraforming | Months |
| Mars | Ben Bova · 1992 | First international expedition | Months |
| Red Mars / Green Mars / Blue Mars | Kim Stanley Robinson · 1992-96 | Colonisation, terraforming, independence | ~200 years |
| Moving Mars | Greg Bear · 1993 | Mature colony, independence | Years |
| Voyage | Stephen Baxter · 1996 | Alternate-history first landing | Decades of build-up |
| Mars Crossing | Geoffrey A. Landis · 2000 | Stranded crew, overland survival | Weeks |
| The Martian | Andy Weir · 2011 | Solo survival | Months |
| The Fated Sky | Mary Robinette Kowal · 2018 | First crewed voyage to Mars | Years |
| SOLEN: The Eden Archive | Warren Pulley · 2026 | One-way founding, native life, generations | 100 years |
A Heinlein juvenile about colonist teenagers on a Mars of canals and native Martians. Dated science, but an early, influential picture of colonists resisting the company that runs their settlement.
How it differs: Pre-space-age Mars; read it as history.
Linked stories of rocket after rocket of settlers arriving, displacing the Martians and carrying Earth's habits with them. Not hard SF at all, but still the most quoted meditation on what colonising another world does to the colonisers.
How it differs: Poetic and allegorical; no realistic science.
An early Clarke novel: a writer visits the small Port Lowell colony and discovers a plan to warm the planet. One of the first serious attempts at Mars terraforming in fiction.
How it differs: Short, and built on 1950s data.
The first international crewed expedition explores Valles Marineris. Detailed mission realism and team politics; the start of Bova's Grand Tour sequence.
How it differs: An exploration story rather than a settlement.
The benchmark. The First Hundred land and begin a two-century transformation of Mars, arguing all the way about whether to terraform at all (the 'Reds' versus the 'Greens'). Geology, economics, longevity medicine and revolution, all treated seriously. Red Mars won the Nebula Award; Green Mars and Blue Mars won the Hugo.
How it differs: Long, slow in places, and heavy on politics.
A settled Mars of family-based 'binding multiples' pushes for independence from Earth, and its scientists find something that changes the balance of power. Won the Nebula Award.
How it differs: The second half moves into speculative physics.
An alternate history in which the US commits to Mars after Apollo, and a 1986 landing is built step by bureaucratic step. If you like the engineering and politics of getting there, it is unmatched.
How it differs: Mostly about the programme, not the settlement.
Survivors of a failed mission must cross Mars to reach a return vehicle. A NASA scientist's careful take on terrain, suits and supplies.
How it differs: Survival rather than colonisation.
Still the defining modern Mars novel for many readers: one astronaut, one habitat, and a problem-solving voice that made realistic science mainstream.
How it differs: One person surviving, not a colony. See our books like The Martian guide.
In the Lady Astronaut alternate history, an early international crew makes the long voyage to Mars, with computers, prejudice and rationing all part of the mission.
How it differs: Book two of a series; mostly the voyage.
A one-way founding mission to Hellas Planitia that turns into a hundred-year colony saga. NovaSeed: Eden Rising begins with Carter and Alina finding native microbial-scale life in subsurface brine, which forces the question most colonisation novels skip: what do settlers owe a planet that is already alive? Later books follow the first child born on Mars (Children of Dust), the colony becoming a civilisation (The Red Dominion, set partly in lava-tube corridors) and the century mark (Final Ascent). The mission AI SOLEN keeps the record throughout.
How it differs: Shorter later volumes, and more intimate in focus than Robinson's ensemble epic.
Disclosure: this site is the official home of the SOLEN series, so treat this as the publisher's own book, not an independent pick. Reading order · Read chapter one free
The strongest books tend to get four things right: radiation (settlers live under regolith, in buried modules or in lava tubes), water (mined from ice or brine, never just found lying around), gravity (0.38 g changes bodies and children) and delay (a 3 to 22 minute signal lag one way means Earth cannot run the colony). Our Mars science hub collects the real research behind each of these.
Only a few series follow a Mars settlement across generations. Robinson's trilogy spans roughly two centuries; Bear's Moving Mars shows a mature colony; the SOLEN series covers its colony's first hundred years, from two founders to a civilisation. If you want the full arc rather than a single crisis, start with those.
A hard science fiction Mars colony saga across a hundred years, narrated in part by a mission AI. Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.