Terraforming is the process of changing the climate of Mars to a more Earth-like environment. Starting with "A Princess of Mars" in 1917, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote eleven novels in which Mars was made habitable by an "atmosphere factory". The first modern terraforming novel was Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sands of Mars" from 1952, which proposed warming Mars by using a nuclear reaction to ignite the moon Phobos.

Frederik Pohl's 1976 novel "Man Plus" and the 1994 sequel "Mars Plus" suggested cybernetically modifying humans to live on Mars. These cyborgs were powered by solar panels and satellite-beamed microwaves. The latter could be used on future missions to power robotic vehicles on the Martian surface. Pohl revisited terraforming in 1992 with "Mining the Oort", in which Oort Cloud comets were harvested for water. While the Oort clouds are 6 - 15 trillion kilometres away, water is also present on near-Earth asteroids and comets. Robotic missions could be launched to study this potential resource.

One particularly fantastic terraforming scheme appeared in Greg Bear's 1993 novel "Moving Mars". A machine called a "tweaker", which manipulates matter at the quantum level, is used to move Mars to another star system. But the most ambitious work of terraforming fiction was Kim Stanley Robinson's 1993 - 1996 "Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars" trilogy, which chronicled the "synergic terraforming" of the planet. This floated the idea that only many technologies deployed in a massive industrial effort can succeed in changing the planet.

Finally, the 2000 novel "White Mars" by Brian Aldiss was the antithesis of Robinson's trilogy in which the United Nations ban terraforming. The book mentions a "Zubrin Reactor" that uses atmospheric carbon dioxide and stored hydrogen to create methane fuel and oxygen. This was a homage to Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan for low-cost missions to the Red Planet.

 

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