Rating: 
Summary: I want to go to Mars too!
Review: I love the way this book integrates a great story, loveable characters, and a lesson in planet terraforming. I'm a scientist at heart and this book explains so many futuristic things, like the space elevator which is not futuristic anymore since NASA plans to make one. Not as big as the one in the book but the idea of a strand of carbon reaching from space to earth is really nifty! Anyway the books storyline is easy to follow the conflics the characters face are so unreal that you cant put the book down for one second.
Rating: 
Summary: Awards are deserved for this series
Review: While I find some of Stan's books to be difficult reading, this series met the test, "am I sad when the last book is finished." I found the series to cover an amazing range of science and to integrate in a great story some serious scientific and social questions. I find current science is moving much too rapidly into some areas that Stan covered as "science fiction" when he wrote these books. I've read them several times, and I do not have the time to do that with many books.
Rating: 
Summary: GEOGRAPHIC
Review: This was the first and last Robinson book I read. Too many geographical details- the characters were unsympathetic and the story line lacked creativity. I guess I should have read one of the other colored Mars first. However, I thank Robinson from sparing me from the desire to read any more of them- my time on Earth is limited. If I were you, your time on Mars should be limited, too. This was also the last science fiction genre that I read- it made me realize that it's not for me, and for that, I also thank the author.
Rating: 
Summary: Mostly set-up, little plot
Review: Red Mars is a very long fictional history, with some characters thrown in to try to bring the story to life. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough plot to make the story interesting. Don't get me wrong, the descriptions of the colonization of Mars was fascinating, with some really interesting ideas about terraforming, construction, space-elevator, etc. And the overall story of Mars and the political forces shaping its development was pretty good. But beyond the big picture of what was happening on Mars, there was little in terms of character plot to make me want to keep reading. It seemed a lot of set-up for the rest of the series. There were a few interesting episodes for the characters, but mostly a large history told through the eyes of a variety of people. Some characters I grew to sort of like, but none did I really get attached to.I wanted to quit after about halfway through, but forced myself to continue. I will say that the last hundred pages or so were pretty exciting, but I don't think I'll read the remaining series.
Rating:
Summary: A much-loved and much-hated book
Review: Robinson is an author that most people either love or hate. He writes incredibly long, dense, epics works of fiction with dozens of protagonists and uses his stories as vehicles for musings on politics, science, psychology, and a host of other academic disciplines. This can be incredibly boring or absolutely riveting depending on the type of person you are. Further, Robinson is pretty clearly a socialist, which has a tendency to polarize people. Note, however, that despite what other reviewers here say, this is not the same as being a communist or even a Marxist. Primarily, Robinson just seems to believe that everyone should have basic food, clothing, shelter, and access to education, and that people should be able to own their own businesses collectively. This is not an endorsement of Stalinism or totalitarian government. Nor, I think, does one have to agree with Robinson to find his ideas intelligent and interesting. I've constantly been surprised, however, at the hatefulness of the negative reviews of _Red Mars._ It's not enough for many of these reviewers to dislike the book and give reasons; instead, they resort to inarticulate name-calling and (most recently) suggest that the Robinson's supporters are in some sort of conspiracy with the publisher to make the book look more popular than it is. I've never seen so many people wasting so much time and energy attacking an author and his fans - even going so far as to make bizarre accusations of anti-Arab racism, when anyone who's read Robinson's works will know that he's very interested in Islam and especially in Sufism. Both the Mars books and _The Years of Rice and Salt_ are full of admirable Arab characters. In conclusion, I take the viciousness of the critics of Robinson as an endorsement. Any author who elicits such hatred from such inarticulate, paranoid, and hateful people *must* be doing something good.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly written, overlong, implausible, unlifelike.
Review: This novel fails to impart "that sense of wonder" that I look for in a science fiction novel. Additionally, the writing is poor. The author always manages to tell in three pages what three sentences might do as well. The book is tedious. The characters are not lifelike. They do not behave like real people. To be honest, I found the book to be a bore. To ensure that I was being fair, I read this novel twice just to make certain that I wasn't missing something. No change. This novel, the first of an overlong "Mars Trilogy" deals with the initial colonization of Mars by an international group. Unfortunately, the characters simply do not ring true. There is little if any plot. In addition to being poorly-written with bloated prose, "Red Mars" also features a massive dose of Political Correctness. All forceful, dominant characters are women. Men do as they are told. Must have been something in the Martion air? I am all for equality, but people just don't act like the characters in this book. You can have equality without the characters seeming unreal. I honestly don't know what the fuss was about as regards this novel. I thought it was barely good enough to finish. As I have said elsewhere, someone still needs to write a **good** and realistic novel about man's colonization of Mars. This book is a clean miss.
Rating:
Summary: In The Beginning There was the first hundred
Review: And They did land on Mars, and make themselves shelter, and food. And they did study and learn and shape this new world to thier will. And it was good. This book is rich in imagery, science, personality, and realism. I was so thoroughly pulled in by this book that I read the entire trillogy straight through on the momentum of this first book. This is the best of the series I belive, but the other two books are still worth it to complete this epic tale. They start in Antartica, during training and final selection of the first hundred to land on mars and build a rich tapestry to start this trillogy from. The Charachters are full of personality and realism, the setting richly described, and you'll find yourself pulled to Mars and dreaming of the day when we really will land there and set up a colony and eventually a new nation.
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Summary: One of the Finest Books on Mars Ever Written.....
Review: The first of installment of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. A grand and epic story of the first hundred human colonists on Mars. This book is packed with hard sci-fi, grand exploration, adventure and fascinating characters. One of the most detailed and well written books on Mars I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Juvenile, racist and filled with one dimensional characters.
Review: I would give this book no stars if possible (even negative stars would be better.) You don't have to read more than 20 pages of this junk to identify Red Moon as "it's-another-politically-correct-piece-of-garbage-agitprop-kind-of-book" that infests the retail bookshelves with what passes for "literature" these days. The author clearly hates whites and arabs, and it would be interesting to know the ethnicity of the author. I think we can guess. Best to spend your hard-earned money on the Classics until the new Dark Age is over.
Rating:
Summary: Mars colonized by Ralph Nader clones
Review: What if Mars were colonized by Ralph Nader's campaign managers? Answering that uncompelling question is Kim Stanley Robinson, in a bid for left-wing bragging rights among his neighbors in infamous Davis, California, his cultural template for a utopian Mars society. The novel's only character development and dialogue involves a dozen or so main characters agonizing and bickering over hair-splitting differences in Green Party dogma. There's no dimension of the characters, of any personal motivation or romantic involvement, that doesn't serve as an addendum to ad nauseum political ramblings. Everyone bands together though to fight the real adversaries: the bloated Earthbound corporations, depicted as a caricature of pure evil in their insatiable quest to consume human dignity and the natural environment, and bent on extending their insidious reach to corrupt the unsullied red planet. A ham-fisted socio-economic polemic dressed up as a novel, which unfortunately doesn't work well as either: the repetitious, clichéd social critique is about at the intellectual level of a college freshman trying to show off to his parents on his first visit back home for Thanksgiving. Which is unfortunate, because interspersed among the leaden characters and left-wing rhetoric is also a fascinating, thoroughly researched look at the colonization and terraforming of Mars, in the finest tradition of "hard sci-fi." From landing, through base-building, prospecting, resource collection, exploration, etc., we are treated to an insider's peak at just how the first permanent crew on Mars would probably settle in and prepare the way for others to follow. Anyone interested in the science and engineering aspects of settling another planet will be spellbound by these passages. Even here, though, after borrowing extensively from what must have been an exhaustive review of the technical literature, the author egregiously leaves only the skimpiest possible reference to the actual developers of these speculative technologies for settling and terraforming. A page of notes listing references, or at least giving credit for specific bright ideas to their particular originators, would have been more fair. I've had to try to trace down individual references since reading the book to link the hastily mentioned names in the scant reference listing with their particular ideas and papers. This may not affect your ability to enjoy the book, but then again, I found it disappointing. Meanwhile, about halfway through the novel, the first ship of settlers are no longer alone on Mars as hordes of new ships start showing up, at which point the only interesting material from the novel gets phased out in favor of more and more squawking about the same issues. (and more, and more... a decent editor would have insisted he trim half the bulk away, it still would have been more than enough to cover the same material.) Anything incidental, like how or why all these people are leaving Earth for Mars in the first place, is ignored. Although characters start getting killed off at a respectable pace, they remain content to spend all their time debating the fine points of surrendering private ownership of property to the collective community, prohibiting profit-motivated economic activity, and whatever else you're likely to overhear at any Davis-area Starbucks. If you think you'd find this an unacceptable substitute to realistic characters with compelling dialogue and an intriguing plot, maybe we can petition Robinson's editor to pass his stack of references to Orson Scott Card for the next sequel.
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