The Martians is a companion volume to the three volumes of the Mars trilogy, published in 1999. It is a short story collection, consisting of stories, poems, in-universe article excerpts, essays, and even meta/autobiographical stories ("Purple Mars"). Some of the stories were published before. Some stories do not take place in the same universe as the Mars trilogy; some others, while they share the same characters, are evidently alternate timelines to the trilogy.

It consists of the following stories:

Michel In Antarctica
Exploring Fossil Canyon
The Archaea Plot
The Way The Land Spoke To Us
Maya And Desmond
Four Teleological Trails
Discovering Life
Coyote Makes Trouble
Michel In Provence
Green Mars
Arthur Sternbach Brings The Curveball To Mars
Salt and Fresh
The Constitution Of Mars
Some Worknotes And Commentary On The Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia
Jackie On Zo
Keeping The Flame
Saving Noctis Dam
Big Man In Love
An Argument For The Deployment Of All Safe Terraforming Technologies
Selected Abstracts From The Journal Of Areological Studies
Odessa
Sexual Dimorphism
Enough Is As Good As A Feast
What Matters
Coyote Remembers
Sax Moments
The Names Of The Canals
The Soundtrack
A Martian Romance
If Wang Wei Lived On Mars And Other Poems
Purple Mars