Rating: 
Summary: Every page is a struggle to read
Review: It's hard to believe the same author who co-wrote (with Jerry Pournelle) such masters as "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Inferno" could write a book whose every page is a struggle to read.Unless you're already familiar with the Hanville Svetz short stories, "Rainbow Mars" will make no sense to you. Either way, it will produce a level of boredom that should be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. The book consists almost entirely of dialogue between many characters, and it's often difficult to decipher who says what. There is no character development, little narration or background information and almost no explanation of the scenes or action sequences. For example, when the two main characters spend many pages descending the beanstalk from outer space, it's difficult to tell where they are in relation to each other or to the Martian surface. When it appears that Svetz is about to crash to the ground, a few sentences later we see he's still a few hundred miles up. If you want a humorous science fiction book about time travel, read Robert Silverberg's "Up the Line." It's one of my all-time favorites. If you want alternate history, read "What Might Have Been," a 2-volume collection of short stories, edited by Gregory Benford and Martin Greenberg. Or you can watch Sliders on the Sci-Fi network.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: Larry Niven has written some of the best science fiction ever, but this book is very disappointing. It reads a bit like a fever dream, and is never very coherent nor logical.
Rating:
Summary: Mixture of Old (Wonderful) and New (Lackluster)
Review: Larry Niven has written some wonderful books featuring some of the best ideas in science fiction. This book is half-and-half. The wonderful part contains a handful of delightful short stories from his 1976 book "Flight of the Horse," now sadly out of print. The not-so-wonderful is an almost unreadable new novella set in the same universe. Mars is popular these days, and Niven should have been able to do a smash-bang job of working it into the "Horse" universe. Instead, he wrote a lot of dismal dialog and murky exposition with none of the life of the older stories (which I eagerly reread, confirming that they've stood the test of time). I could give this a mixed review: a compromise between five stars for the old material, and one star for the new. But save your money and look for a used copy of "Flight of the Horse." And shame on Niven's publisher for not just reissuing a great older book and leaving well enough alone.
Rating: 
Summary: Niven's Narrative Style Applied to an Interesting Conceit
Review: Larry Niven's style is always accessible, intriguing and "sci fi". His characters tend to be ordinary folks caught up in extraordinary situations, whether they wear a janitor's togs or a general's bars. Although he gives his books a contemporary feel, they also hearken back to the 1930s and 1950s magazine based stories. Mr. Niven himself wrote for some of the later magazines, and this novel is a sort of long sequel to a series of time travel stories. Niven's approach to this Mars time travel satire mines liberally from science fiction that has gone before. Its central conceit is satisfying and useful--what if every science fiction story and misplaced scientific theory about Mars were true? Analogously to Heinlein's Number of the Beast, Niven harvests from a rich field of Martian myths and stories. Although this is a time travel work, Niven thankfully spares us any "hard science" effort to explain the time paradox. He's out to mine a solid satiric story from his material, and he manages to accomplish his goal without unduly burdening his story with inside jokes. This book uses the traditional Niven narrative devices, but it feels much more like comic material such as "Hitchhiker's Guide" than the "fantastically improbable crisis made real through good characterization and patient explanation" which usually denotes Niven novels. Yet, although the work is a satire, it rarely plays for cheap laughs. The author creates a dilemma, builds a series of characters to resolve the dilemma, and winks at the audience quite a few times in doing so. It feels like a book-length issue of Astounding Magazine, re-issued in 2010. Fans who want a detailed and realistic bit of Niven unreality will be disappointed. Fans who don't mind a stretch will be pleased. This one marches to a different drummer, but the beat's not at all bad, and sometimes you can dance to it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Time-Travel Romp
Review: Nobody does clever like Niven does -- he sets limitations on his technologies and then explores the boundaries right at those limits. This new story combines his fantasy time travel with chemical rocketry to get us to a Mars that teems with old friends.
Rating:
Summary: Straight from Svetz report.
Review: Rainbow Mars is a exciting book about a team of three people who go back in time to save aliens on a dieing Mars. I recommend this book to the more mature reader. Even if there is no swearing in it there is some sexual conduct. I also recommend this book to anyone who likes a good absorbing fantasy book. It also includes short stories by Larry Niven,who is one of the main characters named Svetz. Other than that it's a cool book about your wildest dreams.
Rating:
Summary: One of Niven's Best!
Review: Rainbow Mars is a revised collection of some shorts that he published in the early 70s (under the title Flight of The Horse) with a great novella added named Rainbow Mars. These stories follow the adventures of Svetz the time traveller. But, Svetz is more than a time traveller. Svetz can go back to alternate worlds. In one Svetz story, he brings back a unicorn. In Rainbow Mars, the novella, Svetz go back to several fictional Marses of Burroughs, Wells, and others to bring back high technology. Niven goes one step further and looks at the question of why Mars is apparently a dead desert planet. He introduces plants that can grow to become space elevators - they can grow up to aerosynchronous orbits and beings can use these plants to get into space (see Clarke's Foundations of Paradise or Sheffields Web Between The Worlds). If you think about what a plant needs to grow, you can see why Mars is a dead desert planet, and why such a plant on Earth would be a disaster. Svetz has to use time travel to prevent a catastrophe. This is one of Niven's best novels.
Rating:
Summary: a lot of fun
Review: Rainbow Mars is a very enjoyable and fun adventure by Niven. Those who are familiar with the old Science Fiction stories about Mars probably will enjoy this book more. This book is not as good as some of the classics by Niven but it is still a top-notch novel.
Rating: 
Summary: A Pleasant Romp
Review: Rainbow Mars isn't a contender for Best SF of the Year. But it's a good read, with some chuckles and some mind-bending time travel pradoxes. You'll get most out of it if you're quite familiar with classic SF set on Mars.
Rating:
Summary: A Pleasant Romp
Review: Rainbow Mars isn't a contender for Best SF of the Year. But it's a good read, with some chuckles and some mind-bending time travel pradoxes. You'll get most out of it if you're quite familiar with classic SF set on Mars.
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