Customer Reviews

Red Mars

5 star:		(179)
4 star:		(71)
3 star:		(59)
2 star:		(55)
1 star:		(57)

 

 

I really enjoyed this trilogy, but readers considering it should probably at least consider the following up front:

* You're gonna be subjected to miles of dialog-free prose, more than I've ever seen in any book that proports to be a novel. If you're into the science, and into visualizing what you read, you'll have no problem. But if you're used to Crichton, forget it. The pace will kill you.

* If you don't already know geology, keep a dictionary handy. He uses 150 geological terms I'd never heard of.

* The book has two main topics: Mars and Politics. Don't expect a thriller.

* There are gaps in the science that you'll have to overlook. He's weak on the biological, but strong on the astrophysical.

* The characters are pretty archetypal, so you'll probably relate to at least one of them. But also, some are, well, pretty darn annoying. But they add to the story anyway if you can stand them.

So given that, if you're not scared off, read it. Read all three. You'll like them, and in the end you'll feel like you know a lot about Mars. It's an epic, and a great one despite its occasional shortcomings.

Nominally a future-history of Martian colonization, Red Mars covers the initial 100 Martian colonists, the influx of workers as corporations attempt to exploit the planet's resources, and the consequences as conditions worsen. The book is divided into eight parts, each telling the story from the point of view of one of six characters. Each character is interesting and three dimensional. The first, Frank Chalmers, is a stunning example - a machiavellian sociopath who arranges the murder of his best friend. The book suggests early on that the characters are dysfunctional, but most are not, and Robinson describes each personality in a way that's easy to relate to. Most readers will see some of themselves in every character, and will be moved when many disappear from the story as events unfurl.

Robinson's prose is easy to read and descriptive. He lovingly describes the Martian landscape, and the events that change the planet. He explains the processes and technologies being used to make the planet more habitable. Mars and its future is viewed through different cultures and ideologies. And Robinson describes political and social systems evolving, growing, and collapsing - the only challenges the colonists seem unable to solve are those that cannot be fixed technologically. The ending is dramatic and, cheesy last line notwithstanding, overwhelming.

A word about the politics: Several reviewers have trouble understanding the concept of sympathetic characters not representing the author. Nobody argues that, through Chalmers, Robinson is advocating murder, so why assume that characters portrayed as idealistic hot-heads advocating an enlightened Utopia (not communism) are attempts to convert readers to Marxism? Robinson's prediction of a near future where a handful of democratically unaccountable transnational corporations wield more power than governments is neither unreasonable nor extremist propaganda nor unique; nor is it that people sick of these conditions might reject them for something Utopian, and might make up a sizable proportion of those wanting to leave Earth. Robinson is describing what might happen and why, rather than pushing a particular ideology. It is notable that the consequences of the actions of most of the first 100 are hardly positive: why would an author promote a vision of an enlightened Utopia by having for it such divided, belligerent, builders?

If Red Mars has faults, they are that it is fairly humourless, and some of the science (nothing, fortunately, important to the principle of convincing the reader that colonization is possible) is somewhat stretched.

There are no ray-guns or bug-eyed aliens: there is much to think about. If you're looking for an airport novel, go read L. Ron Hubbard. If you can watch CNN talking 23 hours a day about scandals effecting minor Democrats, and still grumble "Darned liberal bias", you may be too right-wing to cope with fictional characters disagreeing with you; go read some "Doc" Smith or something instead. Otherwise the reader needs patience and a willingness to get inside a whole range of radically different characters. Most of the book is interesting, but the climax is especially so.

Posing more problems than answers, Red Mars leaves the reader uneasy about humanity's progress, with a mix of optimism about what we can do, and pessimism for what we are likely to do; it portrays characters the reader can feel for, and a planet to fall in love with. What a wonderful book.

The author's breadth of knowledge in science and political theory is impressive, to be sure. Years of research evidently went into this book. But often it seemed he was straining to showcase just how much he knows. The psychiatrist's long esoterica on human temperaments is a case in point -- dry as the Martian soil and entirely gratuitous. (Where was the editor with scissors?)

Initially, I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of the topography and the explanations of how people built the first colony. Beyond the book's halfway point, I was saturated with it -- too much of a good thing. Getting through the last third of the book was a struggle (a coherent plot might have helped here). That disappointed me, because the beginning was engaging.

The characters turned out to be caricatures, not people. How many times could the ultra-grouchy Frank say "shut up" or "you idiot"? And Maya, the Russian beauty with the angst of a note-passing high school sophomore -- what space program let her in?? Then there was the flaky cult leader, and the rigid environmentalist ever flashing righteous scowls. It's an annoying, exaggerated cast of characters with only a few exceptions.

Also irritating was the insertion of the author's political dogmas, which revealed corporations and free-market types as predictably evil, bent on destroying the planet (just as they do on Earth, curse them all). The collectivists, of course, were the ones we were all supposed to cheer.

But OK, lots of it was interesting. The space elevator, terraforming ideas, survival on a hostile world. The author managed to stoke my imagination several times. He proved an able wordsmith, displaying flashes of brilliance at times. But the editors really let him down, I'm afraid. Several hundred pages needed to go and didn't.

Still, for those who like science and believable ideas about interplanetary travel, the book may be worth plodding through in your Martian rover.

I am just aghast at the number of non-five-star ratings this book has received. The answer probably likes in the sophistication of the particular reviewers who are underrating this masterpiece. I don't want to make this sound arrogant or patronizing, but the great thing about the Internet (and Amazon reviewing) is that anyone can review, while the awful thing about the Internet is that anyone can review. I'm not sure what else one could want out of a Sci-fi novel than what you find here. My guess is that those who dislike it tend to prefer space opera or pure adventure books. But if you have any capacity to read good literature this novel will almost undoubtedly knock your socks off.

RED MARS has been almost universally praised by Sci-fi writers and academics as one of the finest hard science Sci-fi novels in recent decades. Partly as a result of the influence of Philip K. Dick (my favorite Sci-fi writer, but someone who was almost completely uninterested in the "science" in Sci-fi but instead focused on metaphysical dilemmas), STAR TREK, and STAR WARS, Sci-fi has been less and less focused on science in the past few decades and instead has been more concerned with exploring questions like "what is real?" or adventure stories. Time was when the most denigrated form of Sci-fi was the space opera. Robinson's Mars Trilogy is the triumphant return of hard science in novelistic form. But RED MARS is far more than that. It is as political as it is scientific. I can imagine that a few of the people giving the novel low marks are troubled by Robinson's politics, which are further to the left than any prominent politician in America today. It isn't an accident that many Marxist writers, including Fredric Jameson, who Robinson thanks in the Acknowledgments, love Robinson's dystopian take on role of capitalism in forming the world we live in, either on earth (as in his Pacific trilogy) or on new worlds (as here in the Mars books). If you are a big fan of an unbridled free market capitalism (which by its very nature is utopian, in that it continually describes a world that doesn't exist, but insists could if only we would free the market from all political and social restraint) then this isn't a novel that will warm the laissez-faire cockles of your heart. This is capitalism as rapacious, inhuman, and imperialistic.

I find the epic sweep of Robinson's vision to be almost overwhelming. He balances almost perfectly scientific, political, social, and narrative concerns. His characters are both many and richly drawn. His Mars exists in a way that only rarely do Sci-fi writers make possible. I can't point to many writers who have made their imaginary world so tangible and believable. I don't have the scientific expertise to address the plausibility of the many terraforming and climate altering techniques and tactics addressed in the novels, but I never found anything in the book to be absurd or silly.

I loved the various components making up this book. And the characters are more developed and vivid than in most Sci-fi novels. While John Boone never really emerged for me as a believable character, many of the others like Frank, Maya, Nadia, the irrepressible Arkady, Ann, Sax, and many others did. Thanks to gene therapy that helps extend life by renewing the genetic structure of the body, many, though not all, of these characters make it into GREEN MARS or even into BLUE MARS. The trilogy itself extends over several decades. I can recommend few works of fiction as highly as I recommend this. But if you are looking for a great yarn rather than a great novel, look elsewhere. This probably isn't for you. But if you are instead looking for a truly great novel, for a trilogy that might represent the apex of Sci-fi writing of the past twenty years, do yourself a favor and read not just RED MARS, but the two other novels in the trilogy as well.

I had heard Red Mars was somewhat technical, but since I have a PhD in astrophysics, I was looking forward to reading it. Unfortunately, I have read textbooks that are much more lively and interesting than this book was. Page after page of mind-numbing descriptions of soil, equipment, and the temperature. Scenes that should have been awe-inspiring (flying over Mars in a balloon; caught in a huge dust storm) were written so dryly that the author could have been discussing the tax code.

Making matters worse: the characters are cardboard cut-outs at their best and truly annoying at their worst. There's the astronaut Hero; there's the "leader" with the maturity of a 12-year old girl with a crush; there's the naturalist who gets upset when rovers leave tire tracks in the beautiful Martian dust... None of them have any depth or come across as real people.

On the plus side, after enduring Red Mars, I think that I have a much better understanding of the intense boredom that future solar system explorers will experience.

If Leo Tolstoy was alive and writing science fiction, this is the kind of book he would write. More than just an adventure in space, this novel presents complex, imperfect characters wrestling with questions of philosphy, politics, morality and conflicting personal ambitions against the backdrop of setteling a new world. The scope of the story, the level of detail, the number of characters and the ever shifting focus adds up to a War And Peace in the 21st century.

This is not an easy book or a quick read. It requires attention and a willingness to let the author unfold the story in his own way. But it is a richly rewarding experience. While I liked it more than the following two books in the series, I think the entire trilogy represents a monumental achievement. As a shear feat of imagination based on the known possibilities, it is like no other science fiction that I have read. Those readers that fault Robinson for not writing something like Young Christian Republicans Go to Mars are overlooking the obvious - that a fresh start will necessarily mean a lot of conflict (social, political and economic) until some compromise between conflicting priorities can be established. Robinson does not offer any easy solutions to these problems, and the socialistic elements that are introduced into the Martian system have little to do with old terran forms of central planning and control.

This is a thoughtful book full of action. Much of the action is mundane; people moving from place to place or building things. Yet it is always fascinating, because the trips are through unfamiliar landscapes and the building is constrained by the hostile atmosphere and limited gravity. Reading these books is almost like a physical experience. I even found myself dreaming the landscape.

Like War and Peace, I suspect this is a book I will have to revisit in order to discover what I missed the first time. It's worth it.

This is a complex, thoughtful and thought-provoking book. The science (what I can judge of it) is relatively plausible, and, in multiple fields, well researched and presented. But beyond the science, the human drama that unfolds is absolutely riveting.
Robinson develops a large number of characters without ever losing the narrative thread of his story. The plots and sub-plots all intertwine and interact beautifully. And the story he unfolds, showing the growth of different philosophical groups, the financial and political struggles, and the human level of impact, is absolutely riveting.
Big and complex as the book admittedly is, I could barely put it down. I will necessarily be finishing the entire trilogy, and will definitely look at anything this author has written...

Like many other reviewers, I think this could have been an excellent novel, if only the editor had done a better job. Excess verbiage needs trimming, and gaps need filling. As it stands, the book gets bogged down too much and too often.

Entire parts could be distilled down to a chapter. "Homesick", in particular, reads like the author forgot he was writing a novel, and was just delivering his pet theories on psychology. "Falling Into History" consists largely of a planet-wide tour by John Boone, most of which seems to serve no other purpose than to illustrate that Mars is a planet, and planets are big. Yah, I knew that. "Guns Under The Table" could have been a lot shorter, given that it ends up being that none of the details had any bearing on the plot, the story, or the history.

Descriptions of the magnificent desolation of the martian surface were really moving at the beginning. Unfortunately, the author apparently thinks the reader has a short attention span, for he can't go two pages without reiterating this, at times word for word. It gets to the point where one can recognize these from their lead-in and know to skip a paragraph. Or three.

I found many of the characters shallow and one-dimensional, "caricatures, not people", as another reviewer put it. This was disappointing, as a few seemed to have some depth. Boone charisma's really came through (once the author finished shipping him all over the planet for no real purpose). I could really sympathize with Nadia at times (when the author wasn't hammering us with her tendency to engineer everything). But too many of could be summed in a few words and then omitted from the prose. "I don't care what happens to these people."

Another irritation is that after slogging through all 572 pages, the "end" is very unfulfilling. In truth, the book doesn't end -- it just stops. I realize that "real life" often lacks neat endings, but this is fiction, and even history books manage to draw lines between events.

All in all, if I knew it was going to be like this, I wouldn't have bothered.

Red Mars is a very long fictional history, with some characters thrown in to try to bring the story to life. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough plot to make the story interesting. Don't get me wrong, the descriptions of the colonization of Mars was fascinating, with some really interesting ideas about terraforming, construction, space-elevator, etc. And the overall story of Mars and the political forces shaping its development was pretty good. But beyond the big picture of what was happening on Mars, there was little in terms of character plot to make me want to keep reading. It seemed a lot of set-up for the rest of the series. There were a few interesting episodes for the characters, but mostly a large history told through the eyes of a variety of people. Some characters I grew to sort of like, but none did I really get attached to.

I wanted to quit after about halfway through, but forced myself to continue. I will say that the last hundred pages or so were pretty exciting, but I don't think I'll read the remaining series.

Chutzpah! That's the word that comes to mind when I think about Kim Stanley Robinson sitting down one day and saying, "hmmm, I think I'll write a detailed, scientifically rigorous, realistic book (actually trilogy) about the human colonization of another planet -specifically, Mars. And besides the science and technology of it, I'll basically write a 'how to' guide, listing all the potential problems, in terms of politics, philosophy, economics, sociology, ecology, and human psychology. Finally, I'll explore how developments on Earth affect the Martian colonization effort, and vice versa. And, finally, I'll make all this both intelligent enough to be read by a scientist and understandable (and entertaining) enough for the average reader. No problem! "

And somehow, for the most part, Kim Stanley Robinson pulls it off. Sure, the characters can be one-dimensional and even grating and annoying, the plot can get confusing (and melodramatic at times - epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, friendships forming and falling to pieces - yikes, sounds like a bad romance novel!), and the whole book sometimes feels like it's about to come crashing down like the space elevator (Robinson is NOT a great narrative writer, that's for sure!), but still....what a vision, what an ambitious undertaking, what a tremendous amount of research obviously went into this, and what a fascinating subject! This is true SCIENCE fiction, and a credible vision (even a blueprint) for what human colonization of Mars (and the future of Earth) could be like in the not-too-distant future. Personally, after reading (I admit, sometimes it felt like slogging through) this book, I now believe that human colonization of Mars is realistic, not just a dream, and with technology now in existence, under development, or within our g rasp in the coming decades (nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, etc.) Finally, after reading "Red Mars" I came to believe that is not only FEASIBLE to colonize Mars, but probably (I still have my doubts, especially if we just make the same mistakes we have made in screwing up the Earth) WORTH it as well.

My major problems with "Red Mars": the characters can be cardboard/one-dimensional, annoying, stereotypical (i.e. Sax - the brilliant, rational, but passionless, at least on the surface, scientist; Ann - the moody, emotional, also brilliant in her own way, "Red Mars" purist ; Hiroko - the mysterious Japanese "Green Mars" cult figure; John Boone - the politician, etc.; Coyote -- the mysterious revoluationary/anarchist), and even laughable at times; the plot can get very confusing, especially with its cast of thousands and its unfamiliar places and names (more and better maps, plus a top-notch appendix, would have been extremely helpful!); things can get repetitive (how many times can we hear the same basic Red/Green argument, for instance, without getting sick of it?), and the writing style can be dry (LOTS of technobabble), humorless, and verrrry slow, and also so predictable at times you can see things coming 50 pages away.

Is this great fiction? Definitely not -- in fact it's pretty bad at times! Is this a great book? Well, I wouldn't go THAT far! Is this a great accomplishment? Well, yes, most definitely! If you're at all interested in space exploration, and specifically Mars, I strongly recommend that you read this book. After reading "Red Mars," I'm ready to sign up for the first mission to Mars - when do we leave?