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Summary: What made me pick-up a book and read for years.
Review: There are no ways to describe this book. It's an undescribable book that will bring a tear to your eye at the end. Buy it, I trully recomend this book because, before this book I rarely read but after I read the book it opened a whole new world for me.
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Summary: Technological and Polticial Revolutions Well-Handled
Review: This excellent book places the discovery of revolutionary technology against the backdrop of a Martian independence movement. Bear is a master of hard-core science fiction, but he also succeeds in the challenging task of telling the book from the point of view of a member of the opposite sex. There are hints of Eon here, in people's desire and ability to "enhance" and "transform".
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Summary: Sci-fi is just about all I read and this was one of the best
Review: I just got through reading this book, one of the few that I have time to read each year. I totally enjoy the way Bear puts together a story, interweaivng the destinies of individuals in the ecololgical, political, and demographic tapestry that becomes the plot. I felt myself sympathising with Casseia Majumdar as she followed a group of protesters into taking action against an unwanted government ( I found it a bit irnoic that she would one day become the leader of the very kind of goverment that she was opposed to in her earlier and naive youth). It turns out that this was not the book that I thought it was when I began to read it (the sequel to The Forge of God) However, I am very glad that I got it wrong and had the opportunity of reading this one. I really hadn't expected them to use the "tweak" to move them as far as they did, just far enough to warm Mars up and wake up the atmosphere was all I'd hoped for. WOW! what and ending and a powerful statement to Man's primative nature and how high we aspire to evolve; that in doing so we must leave the very cradle of our existance and strike out on our own.
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Summary: Other Reviewers Must Be Delusional -- This Book is Great
Review: Moving Mars constitutes as one of the top ten reads in my entire life. Bear incorperates many sub-plots BEAUTIFULLY, and develops them well (not repetetive nor over-stressed--Bear assumes the reader is savvy). I have not read a book so COMPELLING (I had a four hour lunch by myself) in years. I could not put it down (<--sorry for the cliche). READ THIS BOOK NOW!
Rating: 
Summary: frustrating
Review: I am only a third through this book. Thus far not much has been developed compared to the characterisation ( attempted ) given to the main protagonist Caessia Majumdar. From the beginning of the book I have found her to be immensively self centred and have since plodded through the book reading about a character I don't really care about. In fact I dislike her. I just want to know the story, not read about her whinings and insecurities. This is the first time I have had so much negative feelings for a book's main character. It got so bad that I had to come to Amazon to see what the others thought of the book. It is so hard to enjoy a book if you don't have a character you can root for. The whizkid sounds a much better character but thus far he has been relegated to just being a tool to advance the story. I'd much prefer to read about him than this egoistical woman. Did Greg Bear set out purposely to paint such a negative picture of a character for his main protagonist??! If he did, he did a good job. I hate her guts. I can't bear to think of having to plod on thru the rest of the book with her narrating but I have to. I have to see where the Nebula award came from.
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Summary: hardly convincing, overused high tech
Review: The book is fairly interesting if you accept to overlook the physics theories and high tech stuff that won't hold as soon as you give them a bit of thought. I found the main character, Casseia, to be increasingly interesting, although I had to suffer my way through the first fifty or so pages, where the characters are confused and the story hardly convincing. Greg Bear's vision of Mars after one hundred years of settlement and development is however interesting, even though I would have liked to see the aspect of Mars life a bit more developed.
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Summary: The title means more than you might think . . .
Review: John Adams Along with Eon and Eternity, this is the best Greg Bear. I couldn't put it down - got through it in 3 days. It starts with a fairly typical rebellion - Mars wants freedom from Earth domination. The main character gets caught up in things and is sent as an embassador to Earth. Meanwhile, she has a friend who, later on, turns out to be very important to the plot's conclusion. The book got better during the trip to Earth - I LOVED New York! Then, toward the end, it became apparrent the title of the book was more than just some symbolic barb. "They're REALLY going to do that?" is what I thought. More than any other hard sci-fi I've read, Bear in this book makes the characters seem real - the main character is not just some cold, analytic scientist-type: She is astounded by the Earthlings and their individuality, yet she herself often seems almost like a teenager among all this - an Alice in Wonderland (at least that's how I felt!) The space age Valley Girl on the way to Earth was probably the best! OF COURSE in the future there will be superficial, immature, air-headed, materialistic young women!
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Summary: A story about the fight for freedom
Review: An excellent read. It took awhile to get into at first, but is worth persevering with. The plot is basically about a revolution to remain free. The view of the future political process is depressingly familiar.
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Summary: Not his best work
Review: I read this book and Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars back-to-back, and this book really suffered in comparison. I was disappointed, because Greg Bear is one of my favorite authors. For Greg Bear at his best, read "Forge of God", "Eternity" or "Eon".
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Summary: Too much, too little developed
Review: This the first book by Greg Bear that I have read, and I was fairly disappointed. What kept me reading was that there were parts that were tantalizingly good, but the overall book didn't really fulfill the promise. I felt that Bear had several good themes that I wanted to see developed more. Given the other reviews here and what I saw in this novel, I will try Greg Bear again, but this story left me feeling that he had just touched on several ideas that I would have liked to read much more about.
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