Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant and realistic
Review: I just stayed up till dawn to finish THE FORGE OF MARS, and I am still reeling from this magnificent book. I loved the contrast of Navajo culture with the high-tech of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, and I didn't want the story to end.In this book, Balfour creates a fully-realized world fifty years from now, with dark conspiracies behind the scenes and characters striving to come to grips with the modern world and forces beyond their control. The writing is extraordinary, compelling, and generates a sense of wonder. The stories of Tau, Kate, and Zhukov are exciting, disturbing, and enthralling. Balfour carefully lays out several different strands of story and then braids them together with unerring skill -- the kind of plotting that trips up a lot of writers but looks easy when done by a master. On the surface, it is a gripping adventure story; but it is much more than that, for Balfour regularly brings us face-to-face with the moral dimensions of his characters. We care about their world, their struggles, and Tau's efforts to unravel the great mysteries. I want more. Right now.
Rating: 
Summary: Not that impressive
Review: I picked this up on vacation and probably wouldn't have finished it except that I didn't have many other choices. The plot "twists" are either obvious or don't seem to bear on the article at all. I still can't figure out why some of the key characters even went to Mars at all. Or why the "shadowy cabal government" wanted them there in the first place. The characters were creative if not engaging. I just didn't find myself caring about what happened to them. If you're looking for something in the "alien artifact" genre I'd look at Jack McDevitt first.
Rating:
Summary: A Fast- Paced Adventure!
Review: In this circa mid 21st century tale by this relatively unknown author, a group on Mars discovers remnants of an alien culture that colonized Mars in the distant past. Unbeknownst to them, another group on Earth for decades had other pieces of the alien technology, kept in secret. One of the groups wants to use the technology to gain international power and they will stop at nothing to unlock the secrets of the alien technology. Nanotechnologist Tau Wolfsinger, of American Indian descent, and his girlfriend and others, are caught up in this power struggle, and there are unforeseen consequences as a result of messing around with the alien artifacts. No more about it, no spoilers! This story was well written except for a couple of things, one was the battle tanks on Mars in the mid 21st century. Give me a break, sending even lightweight tanks to Mars in the year 2050 would be prohibitively expensive. Otherwise, no major criticisms, and this novel was written in an easy to read style and should keep your interest. Character development was superb, well worth reading, and you will even learn a little about American Indian philosophy and rituals.
Rating:
Summary: Marvelous characters
Review: On the surface, Bruce Balfour's new novel, The Forge of Mars, is a science fiction thriller with enough realistic science in it that you come away with the feeling that you've learned something. A Navajo NASA scientist is given the opportunity to pursue his groundbreaking research on Mars, unaware that shadowy government forces with their own agenda have manipulated him into a confrontation with a powerful alien intelligence. However, if you look for deeper meaning, you realize that Balfour's novel is about the human mind, human weaknesses, and how our personal interpretations of reality can alter the world in which we live. Balfour mixes a literary effort with the excitement of a mass-market genre. His style is simple, but poetic, vividly painting both the stark realities of the Martian landscape and the turbulent mental landscapes of the main characters -- ranging from a Navajo scientist fighting the shadows to a Russian general fighting for a lost ideology. I was sorry to see this story end, and I hope to see more from this author in the near future.
Rating:
Summary: Great ideas -- writing could use a little help...
Review: Somewhere very close to "hard" sci-fi (firmly rooted in 'real' science, e.g. Clarke, Robert Forward or Greg Bear), but slightly orthogonal, is what I call "nugget" sci-fi -- stories chock-full of ideas, science, and technology we already glimpse, but can't yet buy or experience. These books send you running to Google every 6 pages or so, to look up a concept, scientist, technology, or widget you just know has to be based on something that's already out there. Neal Stephenson is a great example, averaging what at times seems to be a nugget per page - Perl scripts, crypto systems, nausea-inducing organic compounds - there's a Cracker Jack prize in every chapter. Bruce Balfour's got that - but without Stephenson's wordsmithing brilliance. The book hooks you from the get-go with the premise of alien artifacts on Mars, tied to the 'meteors' that wiped out the dinosaurs and made a Really Big Noise in Tunguska, Russia a century ago. (The tried-but-true technique of shuffling through 3 or 4 characters/scenarios chapter-by-chapter, ending each one on a cliffhanger, was old when Gibson stole it from TV soaps, but hey - Tom Clancy's guilty too...) The problems are two. First, Balfour's got an obvious axe-to-grind with NASA's bureaucracy, which he displays like J-Lo ripping on a cheating ex-boyfriend. I don't disagree - I had dinner a while back with guy here in Silicon Valley who's spending part of his [money]+ million IPO money, alongside James Cameron (Titanic), to send an animal-carrying mission to Mars to prove that NASA belongs in 1984 (and I mean the Orwell book, not the year). So NASA's shot through with career bureaucrats - fine - but Balfour's scenes of Our Hero Tau battling with freakish cartoon figures of administrative toadies are both ridiculous - and obviously personal. The other problem is Balfour's basic writing skills, especially early on. Instead of explaining a concept to the reader between character-based scenes, in a narration (which he finally gets partway through the book) -- he stages amazingly phony-sounding dialogues where two geniuses go at it with what sounds like dueling recitations of entries in an encyclopedia. The net result is that - in a book filled with fascinating ideas and a lot of "WHAT is going on!?" - there are far too many places where the reader is jarred back out of Balfour's world into this one, asking "WHO the hell talks like that?!", or "WHAT is his deal with NASA?!" The suspension of disbelief simply gets suspended, too often, by axe-grinding and/or amatuerism. That said - this guy has a serious future of Neat Ideas. A good editor, a bit more practice - and maybe some anger management counseling - and Balfour could have a serious hit on his hands.
Rating:
Summary: action packed science fiction
Review: Tau Wolfsinger is a brilliant, cutting edge scientist who works on Artificial Intelligence for NASA. He is unhappy because he can't get funding because he's too independent a thinker and the powers that be believe that Tau's ideas that an A.I. can build a city is to dangerous to explore. His personal life is going down the tubes as well with his fiancee Kate heading to Mars for a long time. Evidence of an ancient civilization has been discovered on the red planet and Kate is one of the archeologists going to excavate the site. Neither Tau nor Kate know they are being manipulated by a shadow government known as the Davos group who want to find out how these ancient artifacts can be used to further their goals. They believe Tau is the best person to figure out what these artifacts and portals are all about so they give the scientist the funding he needs providing he does the testing on Mars. Bruce Balfour does an excellent job of explaining the concepts of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and nanotechnology in layman's turns. His protagonist is a mild-mannered person who can play hardball when the situation warrants it. THE FORGE OF MARS is an action packed science fiction thriller that is a one sitting read. Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: Irony, joke novel, or simply bad?
Review: The novel starts of with promise but then the griding of the authors personal axes starts to whine in your ear. And it gets louder and louder as the pages turn. The NASA sections are just plain unbelievable. Why must every Sci-Fci author paint them with the incompentant pen pusher brush? The scenese of modern society are not beliveable. The characters are less complicated and real than the plastic toys you find in McDonalds fun meals. Once on mars it just gets more and more stupid until you wonder at your own personal skills in picking this book up and not noticing the smell it gives out. A stinker. I thought it may be trying to be funny ala "the stainless steel rat" but I suspect the author just can't write.
Rating:
Summary: Irony, joke novel, or simply bad?
Review: The novel starts of with promise but then the griding of the authors personal axes starts to whine in your ear. And it gets louder and louder as the pages turn. The NASA sections are just plain unbelievable. Why must every Sci-Fci author paint them with the incompentant pen pusher brush? The scenese of modern society are not beliveable. The characters are less complicated and real than the plastic toys you find in McDonalds fun meals. Once on mars it just gets more and more stupid until you wonder at your own personal skills in picking this book up and not noticing the smell it gives out. A stinker. I thought it may be trying to be funny ala "the stainless steel rat" but I suspect the author just can't write.
Rating: 
Summary: Starts Slow, Gets Better
Review: The Story: Man has put two colonies on Mars - one Russian, one American. Alien artifacts are found there suggesting that Mars has been visited before. What do these discoveries mean for Earth? What can we get out of the artifacts? Commentary: I usually start with the positive, but I'm breaking with tradition and starting with the negative, for reasons that should be clear by the end of this review. The first third of this book is very disjointed, to an extent that the pace and flow of the story is disrupted. There are also many elements, introduced in the first third, that bear strong similarities to other works (i.e., the film "Stargate", the names look a lot like place-names out of Mary Stewart's "Merlin" trilogy, the colonization process bears a strong resemblance to the colonization described in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars"). If I had stopped and rated the book after that first third, it would have gotten two stars for the disjointedness and lack of originality. However, after the first third, three things happen: the pace quickens, the flow smoothes out and becomes more coherent and cohesive, and the more original elements in the story (i.e., nanotechnology, aliens being machine entities, artificial intelligence) become dominant. The last two-thirds of this book would get four, pushing five, stars. It actually gets to be quite a thriller. It stumbles a little right at the end, leaving the possibility that the aliens might return (sequel set-up?). Overall, this is a good book, if the reader is patient and tolerant through the first (roughly) 130 pages. Then, hang on!
Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre book with a bad ending
Review: This is my first Amazon.com book review. Everyone who knows me I read a lot, but this is the first time I've written about a book I've read here. I started off feeling the book was "OK"... it didn't keep me up at night, but it was an enjoyable enough book... Then later on in the book when everyone got to Mars things started to take a turn for the worse. What little bit of a "plot" that had been developing in the book started to fall apart. As other's have commented here the characters seemed to be "cookie-cutter" style, lacking depth. I just don't know where to start... the "Russian tanks" that are on Mars (yea... when earlier in the book they are talking about shipping a hand full of people at a time Russia would ship "TANKS" to Mars...), or the "un-killable" assassin that shows up on the ship, just before they blast off back to Earth, or the changing timelines (they have a ship that will be at Mar's in a few days, then a few days pass (while he is off in an alien world learning "the way of the warrior" and adding in a little randomness into the alien AI), and then after all of that they are still a few days away... I've seen a number of people here give RAVE reviews, and I guess I just look at the book differently. Anyway... I do not feel that I could recommend anyone buying it... that is unless you already like the writings of Bruce Balfour. If you know someone who has this book, or if you can get it from a library, then it might be worth checking out... but at today's book prices... in my opinion, no.
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