Red Mars (Mars Trilogy)
Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel - Discover the novel that launched one of science fiction's most beloved, acclaimed, and awarded trilogies: Kim Stanley Robinson's masterly near-future chronicle of interplanetary colonization. "A staggering book . . . the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written."--Arthur C. Clarke For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light onto its surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
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I love how Kim Stanley Robinson writes. Ever since I read Green Earth and 2140 in high school I’ve been hooked on his work, but I never picked up the Mars trilogy until now because I could never find any copies. Now that I’ve read this first book I think this series will definitely become one of my favorites.
Since reviews are for readers: if you don’t like long, dense descriptions of environments, skip this one. Personally I really enjoyed it, it helped me feel connected to the characters and better imagine the new world they’re navigating (and made me start vividly daydreaming about driving a rover across Mars myself), but I can imagine it might not appeal to some people.
The last 80-100% of the book goes wild, and while I think a few characters had endings that felt a little unsatisfactory, for the most part the very last part of the book was phenomenal. Part 7 had me on the edge of my seat. Everything before it was obviously also great, but the action scenes and big events of those parts happened in-between long stretches of traveling or some events happening off-screen being described, while the ending was just one thing after another. I loved the shock of the change in pace, it really made the main characters’ escape feel more dangerous and urgent.
I gotta say, Arkady is such a fun character, his glaring flaws aside. I adored him from the beginning. All of these characters felt vibrant though, and really stood out from each other- for example you can probably pick out a random line of dialogue from the book and guess whether or not Frank said it without any context. Also John was so interesting, his parts of the book are without a doubt my favorites.
This is a great piece of speculative fic and hard sci-fi, and I look forward to reading the next book in the series.
Since reviews are for readers: if you don’t like long, dense descriptions of environments, skip this one. Personally I really enjoyed it, it helped me feel connected to the characters and better imagine the new world they’re navigating (and made me start vividly daydreaming about driving a rover across Mars myself), but I can imagine it might not appeal to some people.
The last 80-100% of the book goes wild, and while I think a few characters had endings that felt a little unsatisfactory, for the most part the very last part of the book was phenomenal. Part 7 had me on the edge of my seat. Everything before it was obviously also great, but the action scenes and big events of those parts happened in-between long stretches of traveling or some events happening off-screen being described, while the ending was just one thing after another. I loved the shock of the change in pace, it really made the main characters’ escape feel more dangerous and urgent.
I gotta say, Arkady is such a fun character, his glaring flaws aside. I adored him from the beginning. All of these characters felt vibrant though, and really stood out from each other- for example you can probably pick out a random line of dialogue from the book and guess whether or not Frank said it without any context. Also John was so interesting, his parts of the book are without a doubt my favorites.
This is a great piece of speculative fic and hard sci-fi, and I look forward to reading the next book in the series.
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