Science fiction has always been one of my most reliable thinking tools for education. Not because it predicts the future of schools or offers a blueprint for better classrooms, but because it creates space to ask questions that our day-to-day practice rarely gives us room to sit with. Questions like: What would learning look like if we built it from scratch? What happens when the assumptions we inherited stop working? And who gets to decide what counts as good enough when the stakes are real?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is the science fiction that has pushed those questions furthest for me. Published across the 1990s (Red Mars in 1992, Green Mars in 1993, Blue Mars in 1996), the trilogy follows the colonization and transformation of Mars across roughly two hundred years. It begins with the First Hundred, a group of scientists and engineers sent from Earth in 2026 to establish the first permanent settlement, and it ends with a functioning Martian civilization that has gone through three revolutions, a constitutional founding, and a fundamental reimagining of how humans organize work, governance, and their relationship to the land they live on.

These books are long. They are full of meetings, geological descriptions, political arguments, and extended passages about atmospheric chemistry. They are not the kind of science fiction where a hero saves the world in the third act. They are the kind where a hundred flawed people try to build a decent society and mostly get it wrong before they get it partially right. Robinson himself has said in interviews that when he describes the colonization of Mars, he is not really thinking about a distant planet. He is using Mars as a metaphor for a different Earth.

That metaphor is what makes the trilogy so useful for thinking about our work. If you have not read Robinson, that is fine. I will give you enough context to follow. But I would encourage you to pick up at least the first book when you are done here, because the experience of sitting inside Robinson’s world for hundreds of pages does something that a summary cannot replicate. He writes at the pace of actual change, which is to say slowly, and that patience is part of the point.

Building a Society as a Design Problem

From the moment the First Hundred leave Earth orbit, they start arguing about what kind of society they are building. This is not a subplot. It is the central drama of all three books. The colonists are not just constructing habitats and terraforming a planet. They are figuring out, through constant negotiation and failure, how to organize human life in a context where none of the old assumptions automatically apply.

Robinson treats this as a design problem in the truest sense. The colonists arrive on Mars with technical expertise, disciplinary training, and the cultural baggage of their respective nations. What they do not have is a shared vision of what they are building or an established process for deciding. So they argue. They form factions. They propose competing models for governance, economics, and land use. They try things that do not work. They try other things.

One passage captures this process more precisely than anything I have found in the instructional design literature. Robinson writes that the Martians “hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then changed the system and tried again.” He continues: “Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over centuries, as they ran through their experience and paradigms, trying closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all.”

Read that again and notice how naturally it maps onto iterative design. Hypothesize. Implement. Evaluate. Revise. It is the same cycle that sits at the center of every design framework I have worked with, from ADDIE to design thinking to the spiral model of instructional development. But Robinson embeds it in the messiest possible context: actual human governance, where the stakes are existential, the feedback loops take years to play out, and the participants disagree about fundamental values.

What makes this more than a convenient metaphor is that Robinson shows the process failing repeatedly before it produces anything functional. The first Martian revolution in 2061 is a catastrophe. Arkady Bogdanov, the charismatic Russian engineer who had been the most vocal advocate for a new kind of society, is killed in the fighting. Cities are destroyed. The space elevator is severed. Most of the First Hundred die or go into hiding. The political structures that emerge afterward are imposed by Earth-based transnational corporations, not designed by the people living on Mars.

It takes another sixty-seven years, a second revolution, and a grueling constitutional congress at Pavonis Mons before the Martians produce a governing framework that actually reflects their collective learning. And even that framework is explicitly designed to be revised. The constitution includes amendment processes, environmental courts with real authority, and a decentralized structure that leaves most governance at the local level. It is not a finished product. It is a prototype that its creators knew would need iteration.

The Characters as Learning Archetypes

One of the things Robinson does exceptionally well is use his characters to embody different relationships to knowledge, expertise, and change. The major figures in the trilogy are not just people with different political views. They represent fundamentally different orientations toward learning and doing, and watching them evolve over the course of two centuries is where much of the educational richness lives.

Sax Russell: The Limits of Technical Thinking

Sax Russell is an American physicist and the trilogy’s most compelling character arc. He begins the story as a pure technocrat: brilliant, socially awkward, and genuinely convinced that science is apolitical. For Sax, the work of understanding and transforming Mars is a problem to be solved through rigorous application of the scientific method. Politics, emotions, relationships, the messy human stuff, these are distractions from real work. He is not callous. He simply does not see how the social dimensions of Mars connect to his scientific project.

Over the course of three books and more than a century of fictional time, Sax is proven thoroughly wrong. In the aftermath of the first revolution, he is captured and tortured by Earth security forces, suffering brain damage that literally alters his capacity for language and empathy. The injury forces him to relearn how to communicate, and in that process of relearning, he begins to understand things about human connection that his previous cognitive framework could not accommodate. He falls in love. He develops friendships that matter to him. And he gradually comes to understand that every scientific decision on Mars, from the pace of terraforming to the distribution of longevity treatments, is fundamentally a political decision wrapped in technical language.

This matters for learning design because we face a version of the same temptation Sax does. It is easy to treat our work as primarily technical: choose the right platform, structure the right assessment sequence, build the right course architecture, optimize the analytics dashboard. And those things matter. But every design decision we make carries social and political weight. Who has access? Whose experience counts as the default? What does the system measure, and therefore what does it value? What does it leave unmeasured, and therefore invisible?

Robinson uses Sax’s century-long transformation to show that technical expertise is necessary but insufficient. Understanding the human context of your work is not a soft skill that you bolt on after the engineering is done. It is part of the engineering. Sax does not become a worse scientist when he becomes more empathetic. He becomes a better one, because he can finally see the full picture of what his work affects.

Nadia Chernyshevski: The Practitioner Who Builds

If Sax represents the limits of technical thinking, Nadia Chernyshevski represents its grounded best. Nadia is a Russian engineer who arrived on Mars having built nuclear reactors in Siberia. While the rest of the First Hundred argue about ideology and politics, Nadia builds things. She constructs Underhill, the first permanent settlement, using automated robots and whatever materials are available. She is practical, steady, and largely uninterested in the factional squabbles that consume her colleagues.

What makes Nadia’s arc interesting from an educational perspective is what happens when her competence makes her a leader. She does not seek political power. She is, in Robinson’s telling, pushed into it because she is the most moderate and trustworthy figure available. During the constitutional congress at Pavonis Mons, Nadia falls into the role of facilitator not through charisma or ideological conviction, but because she immediately concerns herself with productive activities rather than posturing. Others begin to imitate her approach. She leads by doing, and that doing creates a gravitational pull that organizes the process around practical outcomes rather than theoretical arguments.

There is a real tension in Nadia’s story, though, and it is one that resonates with anyone who has been pulled from practitioner work into administrative or leadership roles. As president of the first Martian council, she finds herself unable to participate in the construction projects that she loves because it would create conflicts of interest, and she barely has time anyway because of the demands on her position. The thing she builds best (physical infrastructure, tangible solutions to concrete problems) is exactly the thing her new role prevents her from doing. Robinson does not resolve this tension neatly, and I appreciate that, because it is not a tension that resolves neatly in real life either.

Arkady Bogdanov: The Visionary Who Does Not Survive His Own Ideas

Arkady Bogdanov is the trilogy’s most passionate advocate for building something genuinely new. A Russian engineer with anarchist leanings, Arkady argues from the very beginning that Mars should not replicate Earth’s social, economic, or political structures. He wants to use the blank slate of a new planet to experiment with fundamentally different ways of organizing work and community. Robinson named the character after (and later revealed him to be a descendant of) Alexander Bogdanov, a real-world Russian polymath who was one of the first rigorous systems thinkers and who wrote his own utopian science fiction novel, Red Star, about a socialist society on Mars.

The connection to systems thinking is not incidental. Alexander Bogdanov developed what he called “tektology,” a universal science of organization that anticipated many ideas later associated with cybernetics and general systems theory. Robinson’s fictional Arkady carries that intellectual inheritance into his vision for Mars. He does not just want a different government. He wants different organizational structures at every level, from how work is distributed to how architecture is designed (Bogdanovist buildings are characteristically circular) to how decisions get made.

What makes Arkady’s story instructive rather than simply inspirational is that he dies in the first revolution, before any of his ideas are fully implemented. The movement he started, later called Bogdanovism, outlives him and shapes Martian politics for generations. But the version of those ideas that gets implemented is messy, compromised, and mixed with elements from competing visions. Arkady’s pure vision runs into reality, as pure visions always do, and what survives is not the plan but the principles that proved durable under pressure.

For anyone who has tried to introduce systemic change in an educational setting, this arc is painfully familiar. The initial vision is always cleaner than the implementation. The people who articulate the need for change most powerfully are not always the ones who get to see it through. And the version that eventually takes root rarely looks like what anyone originally proposed. Robinson treats this not as failure but as the normal cost of doing the work. Arkady’s ideas matter precisely because they were big enough to survive being compromised.

Nirgal and the Next Generation: When Learners Outgrow Their Teachers

One of the trilogy’s most nuanced educational threads involves the children born on Mars. Nirgal, the son of Hiroko Ai (the Japanese ecologist who founded the hidden settlement at Zygote) and Desmond “Coyote” Hawkins, is one of the first generation of Mars-born humans. He grows up in a dome carved out of the south polar ice cap, raised communally by Hiroko’s followers, educated informally through a combination of Hiroko’s ecological philosophy (the “Areophany,” a spiritual respect for Mars as a living system) and practical experience traveling across the planet with Coyote.

What Robinson captures through Nirgal and his generation is the fundamental disconnect that occurs when learners develop a relationship to their environment that their teachers never had. The First Hundred, no matter how long they live on Mars, arrived as immigrants. Their frame of reference is always partly Earth. The children born on Mars have no such reference point. Mars is not a frontier or a project or a substitute for something better. It is home. Their understanding of the planet, their physical adaptation to its gravity, their intuitive sense of its rhythms and limitations, all of these are qualitatively different from what any Earth-born person can achieve.

This generational shift has profound implications for how knowledge transfers (or does not transfer) between cohorts. The First Hundred have the technical knowledge and historical context. The Mars-born generation has the lived experience and the identity. Neither group’s understanding is complete without the other’s, and yet the gap between them produces real conflict. Robinson uses generational terminology borrowed from Japanese (issei for first generation, nisei for second, sansei for third) to track how each cohort’s relationship to Mars, and to each other, evolves.

The educational question Robinson keeps circling is this: How do you design learning experiences for people whose relationship to the material is fundamentally different from your own? The First Hundred cannot teach the Mars-born what it means to be Martian, because they are not Martian. They can share knowledge, frameworks, and cautions, but the experience of applying those things in a context the teachers never fully inhabited belongs to the learners alone.

The Terraforming Debate: When Every Technical Decision Is a Values Decision

The debate over terraforming Mars runs through all three books and never resolves cleanly, which is exactly what makes it useful for thinking about design decisions.

The “Reds,” led by the geologist Ann Clayborne, want to preserve Mars in its original state. For Ann, the planet’s barren beauty has intrinsic value that should not be destroyed for human convenience. The “Greens,” led by Sax, want to make Mars habitable for humans through biological and industrial processes, arguing that a living planet is better than a dead one regardless of its original character. Between these poles exists a spectrum of positions, from those who want minimal terraforming (enough to allow walking outside without a pressure suit) to those who want full Earth-like conditions.

On the surface, this is a scientific and engineering debate. How fast should we change the atmosphere? What techniques are acceptable? What are the ecological risks? But underneath the technical questions are value judgments that no amount of data can resolve. Does a planet have rights? Is human habitability the highest good, or should other considerations constrain what we do? Who gets to decide when the people affected include future generations who cannot participate in the conversation?

Robinson refuses to declare a winner. Ann is not wrong that something irreplaceable is being lost. Sax is not wrong that making Mars habitable saves human lives and opens possibilities that did not exist before. The environmental court established in the Martian constitution does not resolve the debate. It provides a framework for making decisions about it, case by case, with real consequences for getting it wrong in either direction.

The parallel to educational technology decisions is direct. Every platform choice, every data collection policy, every design for “personalized learning,” every decision about what gets measured and what gets left alone carries embedded values. We do not always name those values explicitly, and we are not always aware of them. But they are there, shaping outcomes for learners in ways that outlast any individual course or program. Robinson’s terraforming debate is a reminder that “we can do this” and “we should do this” are different questions, and that the second one never has a purely technical answer.

The Constitutional Process: Collaborative Design at Scale

The constitutional congress at Pavonis Mons, which takes up a significant portion of Blue Mars, is Robinson’s most detailed depiction of collaborative design in action. After the second revolution secures Martian independence, representatives from dozens of factions, Bogdanovists, Reds, Greens, Free Mars advocates, Arab communities, Christian Democrats, Bolognan Neo-Marxists, and many more, gather to write a constitution for the new society.

The process is messy, contentious, and slow. Robinson does not skip over the boring parts. He shows the committee meetings, the back-channel negotiations, the moments when the whole thing nearly falls apart over irreconcilable disagreements. Nadia’s facilitation is crucial, not because she has the best ideas, but because she keeps the process moving toward concrete outcomes when it threatens to dissolve into abstraction.

Several features of the resulting constitution are worth noting from a design perspective. First, it is explicitly designed to be revised. The amendment process is built in from the beginning, reflecting the “hypothesize, live under it, revise” approach that Robinson describes as the Martian political method. Second, it distributes authority rather than concentrating it. Most governance happens at the local level, with the global government handling only issues that genuinely require planetary coordination. Third, it gives the environment legal standing through the Global Environmental Court, which has the authority to veto laws that violate ecological principles.

The economic framework is equally instructive. Vlad Taneev, Marina Tokareva, and Ursula Kohl, the scientists who developed the longevity treatments, introduce what the trilogy calls “eco-economics,” a hybrid system that incorporates elements of cooperatives, guided markets, and environmental accounting. It is influenced by real-world examples like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain (a network of worker-owned cooperatives) and the Kerala model of development in India. Robinson does not present it as a perfect system. He presents it as a considered alternative to arrangements that the Martians had already tried and found inadequate.

What strikes me most about the Pavonis Mons process is how Robinson portrays the relationship between vision and pragmatism. The constitution reflects Arkady’s systems-level thinking, but it also reflects Nadia’s practical instinct for what will actually work. It reflects the Reds’ environmental commitments and the Greens’ belief in human transformation of the landscape. No single faction’s vision survived contact with the process intact. But the process itself, the arguing, the compromising, the testing of ideas against competing perspectives, produced something more resilient than any one group could have designed alone.

What Robinson Gets Right About Change

Reading the Mars Trilogy as someone who works in education, several principles keep surfacing that I find myself carrying into my own practice.

The first is that meaningful change is iterative and communal, not heroic and individual. Robinson’s Martians do not transform their society through individual genius or dramatic breakthroughs. They do it through collective experimentation over generations. The people who propose the ideas are not always the ones who implement them. The people who implement them are not always the ones who refine them into something that works. Individual brilliance matters in Robinson’s world, but it is never sufficient. Sax cannot transform Mars alone. Arkady cannot revolutionize society alone. Nadia cannot build a functional government alone. The work requires all of them, plus thousands of others whose names never make it into the history books, working across timescales that exceed any individual career.

The second is that systems shape knowledge. The same expertise, the same good intentions, the same technical competence produce different outcomes depending on the organizational and social context they operate within. Robinson shows this most clearly through the contrast between Earth and Mars. The same scientific capabilities that produce corporate exploitation on Earth produce cooperative innovation on Mars, not because the scientists are different but because the systems they work within reward different things. The implication for design work is that we cannot separate what we teach from the systems within which teaching happens. Platform choices, organizational structures, incentive systems, and access patterns are not background conditions. They are part of the learning environment, and they deserve the same design attention as content.

The third is that the practitioner’s perspective matters as much as the visionary’s. Robinson clearly admires Arkady’s big thinking, but he gives equal weight to Nadia’s hands-on building. The constitutional congress succeeds not because anyone has the perfect theory of governance but because Nadia keeps the room focused on producing something tangible. In a field that sometimes overvalues thought leadership and undervalues the people who actually make things work on the ground, Robinson’s balance feels important.

The fourth, and the one I keep coming back to, is that the pace of real change is slow, cyclical, and often invisible from the inside. Robinson writes at the scale of centuries, which gives him room to show what progress actually looks like when you strip away the narrative conventions that compress it into neat arcs. What it looks like is people trying things, failing, trying again, occasionally getting something right, watching that thing get co-opted or eroded, and starting over with whatever they learned. That is not a story of futility. Robinson is clear that the direction of travel matters, even when the pace is agonizing. But it is a story that asks for a different kind of patience than most strategic plans assume.

Why Robinson, and Why Now

I keep returning to Robinson’s Mars for a reason that has less to do with his specific ideas and more to do with his temperament. He is a writer who takes institutions seriously. He believes that the boring work of building and maintaining organizational systems is as important as the exciting work of imagining new ones. He is critical without being cynical. He shows how things go wrong without suggesting that going wrong is inevitable. And he is honest about the pace at which real change happens, which is slowly, unevenly, and with a lot of meetings.

Robinson has said that he views “science as the model for a utopian politics,” by which he means the inductive method, the collective search for greater knowledge about the world, put to use for the common good. That framing resonates with me because it describes what education is supposed to be at its best: a collective, evidence-informed process of building understanding that serves everyone, not just the people who already have advantages.

In a field that is constantly being told to move fast, adopt the next tool, keep up with the latest disruption, Robinson’s insistence on slow, careful, iterative work feels both countercultural and necessary. We do not need more dramatic visions of education’s future. We need better models for the patient, unglamorous process of getting there. Robinson’s Mars, for all its alien landscapes and two-hundred-year timelines, is the most grounded guide I have found.

If any of this resonates, or if you have your own relationship with Robinson’s work (or other fiction that shapes how you think about learning design), I would genuinely like to hear about it. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and you can find more of my writing on education, technology, and design at bradylicht.com.