Kim Stanley Robinson's Favorite Martian

In reading various interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the award-winning trilogy Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), Blue Mars (1996), we came across a short but interesting interview on NewMars.com, the online magazine of the Mars Society. Conducted at the Second Mars Society convention in Boulder, Colorado in August 1999, the interview ended with this neat exchange:

New Mars: Excepting your own characters, who's your favorite Martian?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, if inaminate things -- or call them robots -- are included, than the Viking orbiter that took all those satellite photos in the late 1970s would have to be my favorite. As for real historical personages: Alexander Bogdanov, who wrote so passionately about Mars as the site for a better society. For fictional characters, I think Philip K. Dick's Bleekmen, his indigenous aboriginals who wander the desert margins of his novel Martian Time-Slip.

Note that Robinson earned a Ph. D. in English from the University of California, San Diego in 1982. His doctoral thesis, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, was published in 1984.

Pictured above: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Martians (1999), a collection of short fiction.