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cremullins 's review for:
Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
This has been on my "to-read" shelf for years now, and I finally decided 2024 was going to be the year I sat down and read the trilogy. This book took me just over three weeks to read. It's challenging but rewarding.
The main draw of the book is the unbelievable amount of research that shows on every page. Kim Stanley Robinson is a man who knows Mars intimately. I have been fascinated by the idea of terraforming Mars for a long time, and this book is extremely realistic in the way it suggests what a real human terraforming effort on Mars might look like.
I went into this book expecting something fairly dry with flat characters who spent the whole time talking numbers and physical processes. I did not expect the book to start with
What took me by surprise was how political the story is, right from its second section. During a solar storm aboard the spaceship Ares, the malcontent Arkady Bogdanov urges the others of the "first hundred" to think about building a new, egalitarian society from the ground up on Mars, an incident that triggers ripples for the rest of the book. The end result is a book that feels extremely cynical and radically optimistic at the same time.
Frank Chalmers is also one of the most compellingly awful characters ever put to paper. He is extremely dislikeable from the moment we encounter him. He has shades of Gully Foyle from [b:The Stars My Destination|333867|The Stars My Destination|Alfred Bester|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1433671750l/333867._SY75_.jpg|1398442]. And yet he has enough complexities and interiority that he never dips into being an insufferable character to read.
In general, I enjoy the fact that all the characters have personalities. They aren't "Golly, gee-whiz, isn't it great to be on Mars" Golden Age types. They are people, people who are selfish, people who get angry, people who get into petty tiffs over relationships, people who resent each other, people who are emotionally unstable, people who feel joy and love, people who are passionate. None of the characters in the story felt flat to me, at least not the POV characters. Every character feels distinct. KSR has a talent for character writing that is unmatched in a lot of hard science fiction.
There are some negatives: Discussion of the problem of " overpopulation", as was in vogue in much SF of the mid-late twentieth century, which has since been debunked. The book also spends far too long at times describing rocks and boulders and the moving of rocks and boulders. It also "ends" several times before it actually ends. I actually groaned when I got to the end of what I thought was the final chapter of the book, only to see I had another hour of reading to do.
However, these deficiencies are more than excused by the liveliness of the character writing, the solid science and the compelling moral and political questions the book raises.
You will either love or hate this book. Despite my uphill struggle to finish it, I have to say I loved it.
The main draw of the book is the unbelievable amount of research that shows on every page. Kim Stanley Robinson is a man who knows Mars intimately. I have been fascinated by the idea of terraforming Mars for a long time, and this book is extremely realistic in the way it suggests what a real human terraforming effort on Mars might look like.
I went into this book expecting something fairly dry with flat characters who spent the whole time talking numbers and physical processes. I did not expect the book to start with
Spoiler
a description of two murders, and then go back to explain the reasons for those murders, in a sort of [b:One Hundred Years of Solitude|320|One Hundred Years of Solitude|Gabriel García Márquez|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327881361l/320._SX50_.jpg|3295655]-esque fashion.What took me by surprise was how political the story is, right from its second section. During a solar storm aboard the spaceship Ares, the malcontent Arkady Bogdanov urges the others of the "first hundred" to think about building a new, egalitarian society from the ground up on Mars, an incident that triggers ripples for the rest of the book. The end result is a book that feels extremely cynical and radically optimistic at the same time.
Frank Chalmers is also one of the most compellingly awful characters ever put to paper. He is extremely dislikeable from the moment we encounter him. He has shades of Gully Foyle from [b:The Stars My Destination|333867|The Stars My Destination|Alfred Bester|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1433671750l/333867._SY75_.jpg|1398442]. And yet he has enough complexities and interiority that he never dips into being an insufferable character to read.
In general, I enjoy the fact that all the characters have personalities. They aren't "Golly, gee-whiz, isn't it great to be on Mars" Golden Age types. They are people, people who are selfish, people who get angry, people who get into petty tiffs over relationships, people who resent each other, people who are emotionally unstable, people who feel joy and love, people who are passionate. None of the characters in the story felt flat to me, at least not the POV characters. Every character feels distinct. KSR has a talent for character writing that is unmatched in a lot of hard science fiction.
There are some negatives: Discussion of the problem of " overpopulation", as was in vogue in much SF of the mid-late twentieth century, which has since been debunked. The book also spends far too long at times describing rocks and boulders and the moving of rocks and boulders. It also "ends" several times before it actually ends. I actually groaned when I got to the end of what I thought was the final chapter of the book, only to see I had another hour of reading to do.
However, these deficiencies are more than excused by the liveliness of the character writing, the solid science and the compelling moral and political questions the book raises.
You will either love or hate this book. Despite my uphill struggle to finish it, I have to say I loved it.