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For hard sf, there's a solid and relentless focus on politics here, which is cool. The book never quite loses track of the people doing the science.There's a lot of drama, many long descriptions of scientific-sounding things, and some great landscape imaginaries of Mars.
I just finished reading this for the second or third time. I wish I could bump this up to 3.5 stars, which more reflects what I feel about it. To begin with, I should come forward with my biases. This is a book you'll either love or you will hate. For my part, I love the planet Mars. Or at least, I love the idea of the planet Mars, because I've never been there. I'd love to go though. If someone from NASA told me that I could go to Mars, and there was only a 50/50 chance I'd survive, I'd be like...
When primitive man looked up at the heavens wondering what that red light was during the cold nights trying to keep warm in the long dark, they told stories around the camp fires about the mysterious object, the best liars and fables were remembered and from generation to generation these tales were believed, until modern times. Even at the start of the twentieth century, some astronomers saw canals on the red planet. But progress continues to roll relentlessly, and science catches up and dull r...
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Going into this book 20 years later, the feeling I had was one of trepidation. Would the book have stood the test of time?And the answer is: Unfortunately no.One of the things that I've noticed almost from the onset was a huge dissonance (I don't remember spotting it 20 years earlier, but now I did): Why plan the mission without firmly establishing at least some sort of general idea about what sort of terraforming might be done?
I'm not always a lover of what's known as "hard" sf -- sf that's filled with lots of hard science, in this case science regarding ecology, geology, and all sorts of other brain-straining disciplines. But what's remarkable to me about this book is how complex and human Kim Stanley Robinson makes his band of scientists, and how well he demonstrates over and over again how intertwined all of us are, on a truly huge scale. This book asks a very familiar question: what would happen if we were able to...
Update: I found my copies on eBay! Now, let’s hope they get here! Son of a damn it!!! I was surprised I loved the hell outta this book and of course I can’t find my paperback copy! I listened to this on the library’s audio and I swear it better not have ended up in the trade in box!! I want the other two books in the old cover like this one I’m supposed to own. I went to order them and they changed the damn covers. I mean the new covers are pretty. FINE! But I want the the covers like the one I
Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca
Hard SF novel about the colonization of Mars. An initial group of 100 colonists, men and women, is shipped off from Earth to Mars to try to terraform the planet and make it a better fit for human life. Kim Stanley Robinson explores all of the science involved in doing that, as well as the political collusions and maneuvering involved, and the relationships and psyches of several of the colonists. This is a well-known and respected SF novel: thoughtful, scientifically-minded and very detailed, if...
As an avid reader of Science Fiction, this book bored me to tears with its utterly one dimensional characters and utterly predictable plot (once one figured out, in the first 50 pages or so, that the characters were entirely linear and incapable of deviation from their preassigned courses). The "climax" is like a tiny pimple of added dimension, which Robinson apparently thinks is somehow highlighted and made more dramatic by the 500 previous pages that scream "Look, I really am this flat!". For
Re-read! With buddies!I originally read this way back in the mid-90's and was struck by how brilliant and entertaining it was, of how wide a sweep of characters could bring Mars alive, from inception to travel to the first habitats all the way to the first revolution 30 years down the line.What I remembered with the most love, however, wasn't the characters. It was the science and the various aspects of making Mars habitable. That, and I just geeked out. I went on to read all the slew of Mars co...
A long time ago in a city far, far away, the end of a friendship began over a disagreement about Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. D--- was so close to the material, so desperate to relive the nostalgia of the original trilogy, so deeply invested, that when we left the theatre and I expressed not just my frustration but my rage at what I'd seen, he took it as a personal insult. A slag of his taste (or what he thought I must have been declaring was his lack thereof). A debate raged between us for
Red Mars looks at the first waves of emigration to Mars, through the eyes of certain members of the First Hundred, the original settlers. The world Kim Stanley Robinson paints is complex, filtered through the perceptions of different people, the politics intense and contentious, even the debate over terraforming itself is depicted with lively wrangling.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this d...
