Red Mars

Notes

Kim Stanley Robinson corrected a scientific error in the text of Red Mars after it was pointed out by a scientist at JPL. He describes the change in an interview in the October 8th-15th, 2005 issue of New Scientist magazine:
In one of my Mars books, I had some characters powering up batteries by sticking fans over the side of the blimp they were in, but the blimp, of course, would be moving at the same speed as the wind. This was pointed out to me by Donna Shirley, head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Sojourner program, the little rover back in 1997. It was lovely because she's such an engineer. And yet in the same breath she showed me a way I could fix it that would be particularly cool in fictional terms - she told me that my characters should put out solar panels to re-power their batteries and could point them both up and down, because in the dust storm they were in, there would be so much reflected light coming off below that you could gather extra light from underneath.
This change occurs in the Bantam mass market paperback edition on pages 196 and 197, somewhere between the 17th and the 20th printings (hence in the range 1997-1999).

• "Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992" on copyright page
• Month from Locus1
• First printing by number line: 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
• An uncredited 2 page map appears on the pages preceding the text
• An uncredited diagram of the Martian Calendar appears on page 108
• Several uncredited semantic rectangle diagrams appear on pages 190, 191 and 192
• Acknowledgements on unnumbered page 502
• Brief Chronology (timeline of events) on unnumbered page 504
• "Jacket illustration by Mel Grant" on rear dust jacket flap