Customer Reviews

First Landing

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Every once in a while, I pick up a book thatŐs tough to put down. I read this one in several sittings and as I read, I kept thinking of what a great film it would make. I make this statement because the novel is very visual, has a great cast of characters, and a story line with a interesting perspective on the first manned Mars mission. I like my Science Fiction with a heavy emphasis on science and technology, and this book delivered. I found myself deeply involved with the characters, and their situations as well. The last few chapters, especially the epilog, brought a tear or two to my eyes. I highly recommend this novel.

I have read most of the modern Mars novels, including Ben Bova's MARS, Jack Williamson's BEACHHEAD, Stephen Baxter's VOYAGE, and Kim Stanley Robinson's RED MARS. Until now, I have always felt Williamson's book was the worst -- the equivalent of CBS' soap opera 'Dallas' set in space. But Robert Zubrin's FIRST LANDING actually sets a new low.

The characters are drawn in absurdly basic types, showing no shades of subtlety whatsoever. Luke the Texan is almost literally a cowboy, right down to his "Yee-haw!" exclamation. Gwen is a head-to-toe Atlanta Braves fan, a God-fearing country hick with a rebel yell (I'm not making this up!). Rebecca is the intellectually and morally superior type, accustomed to winning every battle, and her awestruck fan is McGee the historian (a WHAT?), a nerdy bookworm and token outcast. Finally, the commander and Right Stuff guy, Townsend, feels the need to wear a leather pilot's jacket and peaked hat while putting in the stick time! How could these people possibly get chosen for history's first flight to the red planet? It is simply some of the most cartoonish characterization I've ever read in any supposedly serious novel. And I thought Bova was bad.

The plot is even worse. It has so many holes and it's so driven by cliches that I simply had to give up looking for any substance. Every obligatory plot device in the handbook is thrown at us in the interest of furthering the story -- and moving the story along is all it's there for -- intrigue, personal conflict, conspiracy, politics, despair, love interests, murderous rage, hairy scrapes, life-and-death cliffhangers, good guys and bad guys, you name it. I found myself shaking my head at almost every page. All the novel has to offer are extremes. It's an old-fashioned pot-boiler, setting the scenes, throwing in conflict and resolving them, over and over again. All we need now is for a villain to be unmasked in a Scooby Doo ending.

Incredibly, the novel's third major failure is that Zubrin, a trained engineer, doesn't even include much hard science here (and whenever he does, they're usually the best parts of the book). We never find out why the crew marks days by the terrestrial calendar rather than with sols (martian days), and we never get a genuine feeling of the crew's physical distance from earth. We don't find out many details of how the mission actually got to Mars. We get nothing more than a thumbnail sketch of mission control, and we don't see any of the program's background. There simply isn't much for the reader to chew on besides the soap opera.

This should have been the guts of his earlier book, THE CASE FOR MARS, set in motion in novel form. Instead, the adventure of going to Mars takes a back seat to the melodrama, so we have the equivalent of 'Survivor: Mars Outpost.' Now I know why Zubrin never addressed the human factors issue in his earlier book -- it's because it just doesn't matter enough to him.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is "hard sci-fi." It isn't. It is strictly old school -- and I mean very old. Zubrin must have watered down the writing to try to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, but instead, he came up with a "young adults" Mars novel that manages to insult everyone's intelligence. Considering its source, FIRST LANDING is a major disappointment, and I think it's so bad that it actually undermines his non-fiction.

Read FIRST LANDING only if you're interested in finding out how not to write a good science fiction novel. It may be appropriate reading for the beach, but not for the armchair adventurer.

Author Robert Zubrin obviously has great scientific credentials. He must be brilliant. His non-fiction book, A Case for Mars, added valuable insight and understanding to the body of thought on this subject and generated kudos from the likes of Buzz Aldrin, Carl Sagan, and the revered Arthur C. Clarke.

Unfortunately, however, this novel about man's first voyage to the red planet is idiotic. It supposes that five incompatible personalities travel to Mars for a years-long mission, about which they have no clear sense of what they're supposed to accomplish. Laughably, having arrived, they can't agree on why they're there, as if NASA sent them with simply"take a look around and let us know." Even the earthbound scientists directing the mission are yet arguing about what they should be about on the martian surface.

Then there's a rediculous scenario about a phony "expert" riling up the entire country with the idea that the crew, having been contaminated, shouldn't be allowed to return to earth, as if NASA hadn't considered beforehand what exposure to the martian envoirnment might entail.

I gave it a good try, but halfway through the book I could suspend my disbelief no longer; NASA just couldn't be that inept. This story appears to be the result of someone saying, "You know so much about this stuff; you ought to write a novel," and our scientific and technological genius rising to his level of incompetence.

So, in my opinion, this book is a waste of time.

A successful science fiction novel must, I believe, not only have good, or at least feasible, science, but also believable characters and a story line that makes sense. Zubrin's characters are believable as people, I suppose, but not in this nonsensical scenario. Were Arther C. Clarke or Orson Scott Card to write a similar tale, there would surely be no suspension of disbelief problems nor confusion about who the reader would be pulling for.. Come to think of it, they already have!

This first novel by Mars enthusiast, Robert Zubrin, follows hard on several much more successfully realized works by Ben Bova, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, and others. It is ironic and disappointing that one of the leading voices on behalf of Mars exploration should turn in such a half-hearted effort. What's missing here are the very minutiae that writers such as Bova and Stephen Baxter excell at detailing. Zubrin fails to make his story as much about the expedition and the planet on which it is set as it is about the people, all of whom remain mere thumbnail sketches, caricatures. That any space agency would group these five disparate souls together for the first expedition to Mars is not only unlikely, but completely improbable. Among them number Rebecca the empiricist, Gwen the religious zealot, Luke the good ole Texas boy, and so on. Didn't NASA conduct any psyche profiles before selecting this crew? And how unlikely is it that NASA would ever select historian/chronicler McGee for such a mission? Wishful thinking on Zubrin's part. NASA, furthermore, is reknowned for exercising control over virtually every detail of an expedition such as that depicted in the novel. It borders on the ludicrous then that upon arrival, the crew and Mission Control suddenly debate the priorities of the expedition: geology or biology. Like other recent novels, Mars Crossing and The Martian Race, First Landing is as much about suspense and thrills as it is about science and planetary exploration. It succeeds slightly better on this score, I think, through a series of improbable but exciting mishaps. What's missing, however, is the wonder of walking on the Martian surface, of walking on a new, unexplored world. The author hurries through the science unneccessarily, as if his audience would somehow be bored by the very things that made them, certainly me, pick up the book in the first place. I don't doubt that Zubrin has a better Mars novel in him; he needs, however, to trust his reader's enthusiasm as much as his own.

I felt like I was reading two books in one. When it focused on the Mars mission, the book was thought-provoking and seemed quite plausible (though I'm literally no rocket scientist). However, the characters seemed straight out of daytime drama; overwrought and not what you'd expect from highly skilled pros selected from the top of their respective fields for a Mars mission. The human aspect lacked dimension and the inevitable conflict in an isolated survival situation that could have been as fascinating as the operations aspect, was jarringly overdone.

Dr Zubrin's book is as hard as hard scifi can get. Set ten years in the future, this story is almost tomorrow's news. A must for read for those following the developments of the Mars Society. This book is absolutely great on technical merit while engaging and fun to read.

Dr. Zubrin is unarguably best known for writing Mars non-fiction (think The Case for Mars), but what about his first novel?

It is not difficult to agree that even his fiction includes the most realistic situations and solutions to problems. It is hard to explain without spoiling the details, and especially the end. However, knowing how the Mars missions should work, and all the related factors that go into them, Dr. Zubrin is able to portray all the conceivable obstacles that the crew may encounter. Sabotage from someone on Earth, Earth political battles over the mission, religious and moral standings, and personal differences are only a part of what the crew is faced with. It might not be very realistic that NASA would pick a crew who are completely different from each other to the point that they do not get along, but the personal opinions will always be a factor, and perhaps the greatest factor, of a human mission to Mars.

A lot can be learned from this novel, even if it is fiction.

It's a real page-turner, with conflicts that you cannot wait for to be resolved.

I was really influenced by this book too. My favorite character was Major Gwen Llewellyn, and after I read this book, my nickname became Gwen. This is trully one of the two of my favorite books of all time, sitting right next to Nightfall by Isaac Asimov.

This is great stuff, Zubrin is one cool dude and writes fiction with the best of them. The story entranced me and drew me in and I could not stop myself from reading. If you wonder how it may be like to explore and survive on the planet Mars in the first expedition (circa 2011) read this book, I bet when we finally reach Mars with a human crew it will be very much as depicted by Zubrin here in this novel.

The mission Zubrin describes here is beset with many technical hurdles, some may be from sabotage, and political intrigue exists as well. Mars is a beautiful planet in it's own unique way and Zubrin conveys with success that beauty and wonder to the reader. I thought the resourcefulness of the crew, consisting of five members, was amazing, and the trip to the bottom of the Valley Of The Mariners was very well done. Character development was superb, I loved Rebecca, the biologist. Their ordeal is realistically put forth by Zubrin, again it was a page turner for me. This novel portrays our future exploration of Mars in the grandest sense, a joy to read, expertly written, and should be read by all science fiction fans and others as well.

At the end of this novel resides a short appendix where Zubrin details the Mars Direct plan, interesting indeed. In fact, Zubrin believes spacefaring countries could send humans to Mars within a decade or so, if support developed, and we could become a two planet species. Dr. Zubrin is an astronautical engineer and has written two non-fiction space related books, Entering Space, and The Case For Mars, also well worth reading

After a year in space, the five-person team on board the Beagle are getting ready to land on Mars. The landing, like everything else that follows, does not go smoothly but it does get the astronauts there in one piece. Within the first few weeks there, they have found a gemstone that is harder than a diamond and microorganisms that prove there is life on the red planet.

The astronauts are elated by their discovery of life on Mars but on Earth, hysteria sets in, fanned by a popular writer and a televangelist. They fear that the astronauts will bring back some pandemic disease to earth. A fuel line leakage leaves them stranded on Mars and the president, who is up for reelection, is not pushing a rescue mission. This means that the five stranded Americans will have to find a way to get themselves off planet or die when their air and food runs out.

Robert Zubrin has written a science fiction that measures up to the works of Author C Clarke and Robert Heinlein. The politics that are involved in a space mission are astounding to behold and the interactions of the five stranded people who have been cooped up together for three years ring true (ever share a house with another generation?). FIRST LANDING is a work of hope, written by a visionary who sees the possibilities in the not too distant future.

Harriet Klausner

I would like to say first that I haven't read any previous Mars books, and the only Science Fiction books I read before were Star Wars novels, which I'm not sure that counts. So, for someone who is fairly new to the genre, I have to say that I was quite disappointed with "First Landing".

First of all, I found it hard to imagine. I couldn't picture the story in my head; there was no feeling to it, no atmosphere. The crew was supposed to be on Mars, but as far as I could tell, it might as well have been Arizona (albeit on a grander scale). The technical jargon was not up to par either, which surprised me the most since the author, I believe, used to be with NASA. Just to compare, a few years back I read "Apollo 13" by Jim Lovell, the book on which the movie was based. Granted, that book was non-fiction, yet it was so gripping, I just couldn't put it down. The technical detail and NASA jargon was well handled and easy to understand, even for someone like me who is not a scientific type of a person. In case of this book, it was all 'Martian' to me.

Another problem was with the characters. Okay, maybe two feisty women having a cat fight is every man's dream, but it really has no place in this supposedly 'realistic' novel. All of the crew are stereotypes and laughable ones at that. I would never send these people to space. And that brings me to NASA itself. If the personnel working there was really this inept and, frankly stupid, we would never have gone to the Moon, or even reached the Earth's orbit for that matter. That is my opinion anyway. Maybe the author knows something we don't?

Another problem I had was with the whole protest thing. It beggared the imagination that a country as enlightened as US would all of a sudden turn on their own astronauts because of some flaky novelist's views, which were not even based on facts. That whole story line was ridiculous. I understand paranoia and mob mentality, but come on, that's just going too far. Although, judging by the world's reaction to Dan Brown's opus, I could be wrong. I guess we could be that gullible; enough to believe just about anything if it's fed to us properly.

Basically, I feel that this author should stick to writing non-fiction. As someone here already pointed out, this book reads like "Dallas". I wholeheartedly agree.