Red Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 1)

I'm hard-pressed to figure out why this book got so much attention. Told from the point of view of several of the characters, I never thought that the early settling of Mars, corporate attempts to exploit the planet and the settlers, and a failed rebellion to overthrow the corporate machine and their government cronies COULD BE SO BORING!!!The author spends pages and pages describing features of the planet that no one cares about and has nothing to do with the story. There's a page long list of equipment!!! Who cares!?!?! How does that even advance the story? I suppose if I were going to Mars, I now know what to bring - but I didn't buy this book for a planetary explorer shopping list.The characters are pathetically stereotypical with the golly-gee-wiz good guy John, the machiavellian "bad" guy Frank who wants John's girl, the oh-so-indecisive girl Maya who loves whomever the wind is blowing toward (or whoever manages to stay alive), and on and on. Empty shells - every last one of them. The true enemy, corporate interests, is this amorphously vague construct that isn't well-defined or expressed.The action is sparse - despite the book's lead off - and confusing. The author simply notes it in passing and may describe the architecture of the missile or its trajectory in more studious detail than its impact on humanity. The parts you want to hear more about, such as an entire futuristic battle on the Martian surface, are vaguely described while the dimensions, color, texture, and clarity of a hunk of ice gets two pages of detail.As entertainment, I imagine some engineers may like this or anyone pedantic enough to suffer through multiple pages describing fictional geology. As for me, I can't imagine having to read two more of these books. I'd rather read a geology textbook and learn some "real" science.All in all a good book - IF YOU WANT TO FALL ASLEEP. How in the world did he get a Hugo award for this!?! I gave it two stars - one because the science and setting are interesting - though overly boringly described. The other for using corporate exploitation as a source of conflict to advance the story. But the lack of depth of the characters and too much depth to things no one cares about almost had me giving up on this even after having trudged half way through it.My advice: SKIP THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO PRESCRIPTION SLEEP AIDES.

I really wanted to love this book and I tried very hard. The writing is beautiful, the descriptions about Mars were incredible. The idea was good but it was too scattered. The characters were so so and the story just didn't fit together for me. I felt I was wading through descriptions without caring about the characters or the story very much.

I kept being hopeful that this book was going somewhere. I can't figure out why people think it was so great. It had so many great possibilities but the story organization made no sense, and why did war happen? How is it 30 years later? I kept thinking I missed a chapter. Also, the characters had no depth. There was no relationship development so you just don't care. I did love the realistic nature of the Mars descriptions. I stopped reading with 5% left. I just couldn't be curious about the ending.

This book has such an amazing concept that I was really invested in: colonizing Mars. I wanted to read about how this would realistically be accomplished.To be fair, there was a little of this discussed. Unfortunately, the book derails into political arguments, psychological ramblings and inter-colony backstabbing and holy crap I could not be less interested. I’m too old and have too much other stuff to read to force my way through this.

Red Mars is a long, albeit good hard Science Fiction novel that takes the reader deep into the ruddy landscape of Mars via a massive cast of characters. I must admit that I found the central love triangle a tiresome repetition of soap opera-like dialogue, but the level of realism combined with the scope of the work is truly admirable.The author of Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson, clearly did the necessary homework to displace the reader from our natural environment and deposit us deep into the vast desert-like terrain of Mars. The multicultural facets explored along the way, and their inclusion into the martian mindset, make this a work of SciFi artistry.While a bit drawn out, the perseverant reader will walk away from Red Mars with his head held high, a mouthful of Martian dust, and a deeper understanding of what it is to tackle a completely alien world and redefine it in only a way humans might.A very good read for the dedicated, hardcore Science Fiction enthusiast.Royce Sears[...]

My Kindle says I've read 68%. I can read no more.Interesting ideas but very disappointing writing. I was not aware of him before but, when he spoke at COP26, people said he was a great writer of realistic Science Fiction which sounded good.But it's tedious. Repetitive accounts of repetitive behaviour. Whole chapters of, "look at me, I know all this Psychology/Space Travel/Geology/Climatology/Younameitology and I'll drone on about it until you've entirely lost the plot."I have to compare this with writers like Ursula le Guin and Brian Aldiss, who could tackle huge themes deftly and evocatively. Neither was afraid of difficult theory, LeGuin wrote a whole novel (The Dispossessed) which was famously a practical handbook for Anarcho-Syndicalism but it never read as a political textbook.Aldiss created a complex imaginary planet completely unlike ours, which you understood very well at a scientific level despite almost all the text being an account of interesting human lives.And why so long? One third of a trilogy and it weighs like War and Peace. It needed a less indulgent editor, cut 75% and it might have started to work.And the sex. Several candidates for the bad sex awards here. My benchmark for good writing on sex is Ian Dury's line - "What happens next is private, it's also very rude." There's rarely a need to say more, unless you are serous about writing erotica, which this is not.

I wish I'd liked this more. It's very long, and while some of it is great - especially the political discussions, and the dynamics between the characters - there's huge swathes that I found unreadable, about Mars geology, or descriptions about technical solutions to problems. I'm sure other people have exactly the opposite reaction, loving the detail and bored by the politics. I'm sure that, as in The Martian, the point of the technical detail is to make the whole thing convincing, but as there, it doesn't work for me.I note in passing that KSR (who is great, by the way - I heard him talk a few years ago and he's marvellous on climate change and politics) can imagine people moving to Mars without either nation-states or capitalism coming to an end...lots of the stuff on Mars is supplied by familiar corporations, though the big names that dominate our lives now - Google, Amazon, etc are of course not there. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

This started as a good conceptual SciFi, but for me it soon got bogged down in the fairly dry politics between different factions of colonists. This facet was interesting for a bit, but I felt it was overly long and meandering, and would have preferred a little more focus. Ultimately I felt I got a little bogged down in it, and didn't feel this lived up to the classic status it is often assigned.

I'm sure other reviewers will be more articulate than I on what an achievement this book truly is.All I can say to add to this is that this book, this trilogy, opened my mind to subjects I had not considered, to psychological personas and political considerations not open to me before. Its almost psychic in its ability to discern future trends.It is ahead of its time by a wide margin, only now are the technologies described coming into use, the politics and the environmental disasters into existence, what an insight.The writing has excellent storytelling which makes you want to turn the page. Its a beautiful, uncomfortable and very logical insight into what may happen in the future.Al I can do is recommend it to everyone.

I'd never read SF - then I got the Mars trilogy and became a fan. I think it's accurate - if we wanted to transform Mars to a livable planet, this seems like what would happen. (People who know a lot more about science than I do, to whom I gave the trilogy, tell me it is accurate.) But I loved it, and loved discovering SF. (I'm being asked to review this now because I bought the trilogy as a birthday present for a grandson... I have a bad habit of giving books I love to people I love...)