How does Kim Stanley Robinson use imagery in Red Mars?

Imagery:

"How to say it? How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still somehow better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?"

"Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door...And you're going to wreck it all."

"In reality, they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow."