A review by wanderinglynn
Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
adventurous
slow-paced
2.0
This is not a book for everyone. It's definitely not my cup of tea. It captures everything I dislike about the sci-fi genre. And so, I doubt I'll ever read book 2 or book 3 of this trilogy.
Red Mars goes into exhaustive detail describing the landscape features of Mars and inane details on some sciency stuff. Some of the sciency stuff was just exhausting. Likely because I am not a sciency person and so most of it sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher to me. But my issue is a lot of the sciency stuff that KSR goes into great detail about was not necessarily essential to the story. Whereas other parts, parts that at least have some bearing on the story, are never discussed at all. The reader just has to figure it out from context. So I found that really frustrating.
And despite all the science, one of the biggest holes I think the story has is that the first 100 don't really seem to have any problems conquering this red planet with its thin poisonous atmosphere. Everything just seems to work, resources just seem to be there, and we have a settlement on Mars.
As for the characters, Nadia was one of the few that I could nearly fully picture and had any kind of development. The rest were flat. I could never really picture them except in stereotypical terms or as a caricature. And the changing POV would have worked better had there been better context instead of just jumping from one POV and time to another time and another POV.
The last half of the book, I really just skimmed. The exploration of the political implications of a newly habitable planet filled with resources for an overpopulated civilization just got boring. Basically, KSR tells us in the first section what will happen. The last 50%, I found occasional flashes of conversation surrounded by long descriptions of people driving endless distances around Mars and writing about the landscape in flat prose. Too much on the science and landscape, not enough on character development.
Red Mars goes into exhaustive detail describing the landscape features of Mars and inane details on some sciency stuff. Some of the sciency stuff was just exhausting. Likely because I am not a sciency person and so most of it sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher to me. But my issue is a lot of the sciency stuff that KSR goes into great detail about was not necessarily essential to the story. Whereas other parts, parts that at least have some bearing on the story, are never discussed at all. The reader just has to figure it out from context. So I found that really frustrating.
And despite all the science, one of the biggest holes I think the story has is that the first 100 don't really seem to have any problems conquering this red planet with its thin poisonous atmosphere. Everything just seems to work, resources just seem to be there, and we have a settlement on Mars.
As for the characters, Nadia was one of the few that I could nearly fully picture and had any kind of development. The rest were flat. I could never really picture them except in stereotypical terms or as a caricature. And the changing POV would have worked better had there been better context instead of just jumping from one POV and time to another time and another POV.
The last half of the book, I really just skimmed. The exploration of the political implications of a newly habitable planet filled with resources for an overpopulated civilization just got boring. Basically, KSR tells us in the first section what will happen. The last 50%, I found occasional flashes of conversation surrounded by long descriptions of people driving endless distances around Mars and writing about the landscape in flat prose. Too much on the science and landscape, not enough on character development.