13palmeja 's review for:

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

5.0

adventurous dark emotional reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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As far as SciFi goes, this one felt the most human. I loved learning the plot from the different perspectives of each of the first hundred - the focus on their values, beliefs, love, and loss grounded this book more than other SciFi I have read.

All of that against the dramatic background of the Red Planet undergoing colonization - there were many points of the book that left me absolutely stunned.

And it all comes back to the perspectives of the two American leaders given to us in the first chapter - John Boone, First Man on Mars' belief that they became fundamentally different beings who could break the cycles of human history on this new planet, and Frank Chalmers beliefs, 

Not only had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with nothing but the naked raw material of their selves. 

I felt this in each of the characters. I didn't necessarily understand each of their motivations, and I'm still not entirely sure what the purpose was of

Frank murdering John

, but as another review said, some charaters plot threads, "felt somewhat anti-climactic, even frustrating, in their non-resolutions - but then again, that's life. And the book seems to be *very* attuned with what life is." Each character was written with their unique humanity, when often SciFi seems to deal in caricatures.

The central ideological battle of the book, it's beautifully stark and descriptive writing, and groundedness in humanity earn it's place among my favorites.