Red Mars

Rating:
Summary: the best SF has to offer
Review: This first book has believable science, intrigueing politics, and fascinating characters. This is a tale of survival and the beginnings of a new civilization.

Rating:
Summary: A lot of detail, an interesting story.
Review: The Mars trilogy is interesting but moves rather slowly. Some people like that; I just don't happen to be one of them. I recommend the AREA 51 series by Robert Doherty for those who enjoy a faster paced story.

Rating:
Summary: Visionary
Review: I read this book when it first came out in 1993 and I still think it is one of the best books out of the hundreds I've read. Robinson is not a perfect author, but the insights displayed in this novel are profound. Robinson has laid a blueprint for the future of humanity. He expertly deals with the long range concerns of the present dilemmas of Earth and the human race. His diversity in characters displays his objectivity towards an undecided future. But those characters' astonishing accomplishments will offer hope to any one who has a commitment to themself and creating the best future possible. If you are making plans for the long run, read this book immediatly.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting story but has problems
Review: Overall I give this book 3 stars. Although I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to others, it is not what I would classify as one of my favorites. I don't anticipate rereading this book in the future. I found the story compelling and the technological discussions quite interesting, but the book suffered from several shortcomings.

The first one is that the author spent far too much time with descriptions of the martian landscape. I found that I could skip over many paragraphs without losing any details that would effect the story. This longwinded approach caused the story to drag in several points.

The second issue that I had with the book is that all of the main characters seems to have rather radical views of government, economics and sociatial order. Everyone seemed to be advocating communistic views on how things should work and there were entire passages discussing how our current capitalistic society is to blame for all of the problems that we have in the world today. After reading the book, I'm convinced that Mr. Robinson believes that a communist (Little "c" not big "C") society would be much better than what we have.

Despite these shortcomings, I found that I enjoyed reading this book. I just conisdered the characters to be a bunch of radicals....

Rating:
Summary: i liked it.
Review: I thought the book rich in detail and yet more had more interesting detail than say a Tom Clancy "oh ahh" sequence. I learned a few things and thought about some of the envisioned technological advances. One that stands in mind is the treatment for aging (aging, he advances, is just dna sequence errors, like copies of copies.) I thought a longing for home could have been better developed. The political angle is a little naive. Overall, a good read. On book two of the trilogy.

Rating:
Summary: The Future can be read now
Review: Red Mars pays attention to detail so well, that this book could actually be a history book from the future.

Rating:
Summary: loooooooong
Review: A very long book. It's followed by two others, "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars", which are longer and even longer, respectively. I congratulate myself for having read the entire trilogy. If you don't get strange pleasures out of reading (seemingly) hundreds of pages about rock formations or similarly unexciting stuff, you're in for a hard time.

I have to say that there were lots of interesting, moving, even unforgettable stuff about politics and the love of science hidden somewhere in this book, but do we have to work so hard to extract them?

Not recommended if you have a short time to live.

Rating:
Summary: For citizens of the Information Age
Review: True, this novel's backstage conflict is between technical information and character development. There is so much of the former that the latter sometimes suffers. And some characters, like Maya, are never very well developed. But Robinson successfully rises to the occasion a number of times, especially in his depiction of the taciturn Nadia and her relationship with Arkady. I haven't read many novels that are so educational and have such good science. It's almost a mini-seminar in Martian geology. Some of the technological achievements, like the airships and the cable attached to Phobos, are fascinating in their plausibility. If you like learning combined with entertainment, and are not an impatient reader, you'll enjoy Red Mars.

Rating:
Summary: slow narrative with systematic development towards climax
Review: The central character of this book is Mars. Humans come into the picture the more they interact with Mars but a lot of the book is descriptions of Martian traits: the atmosphere, the rocks, geography etc. As one can imagine not much happens. The action takes time to build up. Gradually this book opens up into a plot line taken up in the superior Green Mars. Mars and it's alien untouched nature is a counterpoint to mankind's messing about. The point of view taken by Robinson of a planet wide perspective is ambitious but he contains it within his writing, though there is alot of this and as I've said it can be tedious. Still he's factual, genuinely interested in his subject, scientific and plausible. Oddly there is a visionary streak in the book, with some of the developments the author foresees for mankind's future but I'll let each reader be the judge of this reality. All in all a reasonably good read with a slow overlong easily read opening section (about half the boo! k). Did he have a trilogy in mind when writing ? I'd be interested to know the truth of this. Good reading !

Rating:
Summary: Award winner?
Review: I found the book extremely slow. I skimmed whole chapters where characters seemed to wander aimlessly describing the landscape. This slowed down the pace of the book and made it unnecessarily long. Robinson is certainly no Muir, I had difficulty picturing the landscapes described. Some of the characters and their interactions are interesting, but just as you get into it, Robinson cuts to describing still more landscapes. Just as you begin to like some of the characters, they get killed off left and right. I'm reading the next book because I already bought it, but if I had read Red Mars first, I wouldn't have bothered.