OK, so you have all the elements. The first hundred colonists being sent to Mars. A planet dripping with resources for a hungry Earth, and ‘red’ environmentalists hanging on at all costs. A love-triangle between the most powerful three, and a murder thrown in for good measure. You’d think this would be the basis for a good novel right?
Nope.
Boring, beyond, belief.
I gave up and left this slow slow snail of a story well behind me. I mean, they even had something like freakin Ninja’s and this was *still* boring, like a long slow pan of the most gorgeous landscape you can imagine. But again, and again, and again. A visual feast, but nothing much else doing.
Robinson has written two sequels to Red Mars, and you can bet your patooty I will not be rushing out to the library to find them.
14 February, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I loved it. Long slow character development, real women who have stories that are not about the men in their lives, layer on layer of plot, building to a crescendo at the end. What’s not to like?
We bought the books when they came out, then lent them to a friend and they never came back. Just three days ago, I replaced our long lost copies at a second hand store. Fantastic.
14 February, 2009 at 10:24 pm
I loved it too – I’d go so far as to say that it is one of the best, fully-realised and believable SF series ever written.
I’ve read the whole lot, including the extra book of short stories, twice from the library already and at some point I’ll buy them.
It actually made me want to go to Mars, which is a pretty strange thing to wish for.
15 February, 2009 at 6:37 am
:gobsmacked: you’re kidding!
so, so awful.
i can see what you’re both saying, and since i have respect for you both i’ll persevere through the last hundred-odd pages…
but… i get what you’re saying about believable, and character development. but there is a complete lack of tension of any kind. sure there is frank/john/maya, ann and the reds, hiroki and the mysterious coyote, but… they barely intersect. what i thought i was actually reading was a description of the terraforming of mars, with characters chucked in incidentally to provide something like a narrative.
now, had the book been characteristed as a novel about terraforming, and introduced the characters incidentally, then i might have been interesting. but the emphasis is all wrong, and waaaay too long.
if the last few pages changes my mind, i’ll re-write the review.
but thus far i’m thinking that this is a fairly poor borrowing of the moon is a harsh mistress
16 February, 2009 at 7:23 am
If you persist I think you’ll find the continuing evolution of the Martian society quite interesting, and there’s some impressive conflicts thrown in to liven things up. The terraforming aspect becomes far more prominent in the remaining two books of the trilogy. One of the things I found amusing was the gerontological/anagathic anti-aging techniques in this and other Kim Stanley Robinson books means that some of the characters you’re familiar with from the very beginning keep cropping up again throughout the narrative, and when they appear you think to yourself, ‘jeez, it’s been centuries and you’re STILL around?!’
You might like his Orange County trilogy, three unconnected sci-fi novels looking at possible futures for southern California. Or there’s an alternate history tale, The Years of Rice and Salt, in which the plague wipes out Europe in the 14th century and history is dominated by Muslim, Asian and Hindu nations instead of the west. Some good ideas in that one, but I must admit I felt it was a little over-ambitious.
17 February, 2009 at 7:14 am
meh.
what we have is a book that starts with the *murder of the first man on mars* [gasp!]. this is done by Arabs, a nationality who aren’t integrating well into the new martian society, and [gasp!] the man who does it dies mysteriously from poisoning shortly thereafter.
intrigue! mystery! drama!
nope. what should have been a chapter of back-story on maya/john/frank, turns into a prolonged landscape description.
for instance, we *never* discover why the rivalry between frank and john. frank *never* faces the music for having john killed (note: that wasn’t a spoiler). frank does however, “go into the desert to find himself”, but he’s *still* a hollow man.
dull.
although the infighting at the end was well-described. perhaps it should have been moved 300 pages closer to the front…
25 February, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Don’t listen to these maniacs Che. The second two books in the series are even more deadly than the first.
27 February, 2009 at 3:26 pm
we *never* discover why the rivalry between frank and john
We do. It’s in one of the later books.
I’ve just reread all three of them – I was part way through when you put up your post (started in January, when we were staying at a friend’s place, felt I couldn’t really remove her copies to Australia, so bought myself copies when we got back here). Robinson is trying to be realistic – how would a new society on Mars really develop. How is the relationship with the home world going to go? How will people react to the new landscape and the new potential? Will they build a new society, or just replicate the old one? How will people change over time?
Space opera it ain’t. It’s all ideas and relationships and politics – much more fun and much more satisfying.
28 February, 2009 at 7:26 am
still not convinced. the total lack of import john’s death had on the book (other than putting frank in the driving seat when renegotiating the treaty), effectively becomes a red herring.
it’s a great landscape. but a story it is not.
oh, and arkady was my favourite, even if the name is 100% transparent.