Red Mars

My Kindle says I've read 68%. I can read no more. Interesting ideas but very disappointing writing. I was not aware of him before but, when he spoke at COP26, people said he was a great writer of realistic Science Fiction which sounded good. But it's tedious. Repetitive accounts of repetitive behaviour. Whole chapters of, "look at me, I know all this Psychology/Space Travel/Geology/Climatology/Younameitology and I'll drone on about it until you've entirely lost the plot." I have to compare this with writers like Ursula le Guin and Brian Aldiss, who could tackle huge themes deftly and evocatively. Neither was afraid of difficult theory, LeGuin wrote a whole novel (The Dispossessed) which was famously a practical handbook for Anarcho-Syndicalism but it never read as a political textbook. Aldiss created a complex imaginary planet completely unlike ours, which you understood very well at a scientific level despite almost all the text being an account of interesting human lives. And why so long? One third of a trilogy and it weighs like War and Peace. It needed a less indulgent editor, cut 75% and it might have started to work. And the sex. Several candidates for the bad sex awards here. My benchmark for good writing on sex is Ian Dury's line - "What happens next is private, it's also very rude." There's rarely a need to say more, unless you are serous about writing erotica, which this is not.

If you are looking for a Mars colonization story that covers every aspect of what such an endeavor might look like, down to the level of finest detail, this is the trilogy for you. Everything is described, including but not limited to: the tools used for building and fixing various elements; how the colonists shower; chemical compounds they have to manufacture to create concrete and other materials; and a healthy dose of love interests and "office politics". It doesn't quite fit the mode of a "Space Opera," but it is ambitious in what it attempts to convey, both on the level of world building and human interaction. That said, it's a challenging read because the work-up to the main conflict and action takes time. It's fair to say the story would've benefitted from a more aggressive editor, cutting back on some of the exposition and every day dialog. The author wants us to know what it would literally be like to live and work on Mars with a collection of strong personalities, but the truth is as readers, it's better to be spared some of the more mundane or tiresome details. Making a work of fiction too much like real life, is not necessarily a virtue. What would also benefit the story are a few well-placed illustrations or line drawings, showing us (instead of telling us) what some of the complex habitats, rovers, and other components actually looked like. It can be difficult to actually picture the things the author talks about at points. In fact, at points I felt this work might be better experienced as a trilogy of 2-3 hour movies or an HBO mini-series, marrying the detailed story with some impressive visuals. Overall the quality of story-telling is good but I've rated this three stars for the amount of effort required to get through, and the lack of visuals where warranted.

This book was written thirty-odd years ago, and a lot has happened since then regarding exploration and potential colonization of Mars. But Robinson clearly had access to the best maps of Mars available in the 90's, and the intuition to describe that landscape as if he's been there. The best and brightest eking out a new life on the planet are believable in their ambitions and their flaws, and the ways they explore Mars and spool off from the original colony are fascinating. I'm starting on the third book of this trilogy and am very much enjoying the rover ride.