For those who have read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, a question.
I ordered the Mars Trilogy of books from the library. Blue Mars and Green Mars are there waiting for me, but Red Mars isn’t there yet (natch). Could I read Blue Mars and Green Mars first, then go back and read Red Mars, or should I wait for Red Mars before I start?
I really don’t want to read them out of order unless they’re more or less self-contained.
It’s been a long time since I read them, but most of the characters are introduced in the first book and continue through the next two. Some of them are very long-lived. You wouldn’t be able to start with book two because you wouldn’t know who all the people were. As I recall it, there’s little or no recap in books two and three.
Be patient. They are good books, well worth reading.
Another no - you would be almost entirely lost from the start. All the background for the physical, social, political, and cultural development of Mars is set up in the first book.
I have some leisure time coming up - I think I will read the trilogy again myself.
It’s more or less all one big long story; at least that description is more accurate than saying they’re self-contained. I guess it depends on how much that matters to you. I wouldn’t do it, if it were up to me.
Well, crap. Since I’m #2 of 6 holds on 3 copies of Red Mars I guess I’d better renew the other two. In the meantime they’ll just sit there…taunting me…
Very glad. That trilogy is one of the nicest pieces of hard sci-fi writing I’ve ever run across. Difficult science, difficult politics and difficult people… put them together and you get something excellent.
This. Don’t try to read them out of order. I tried the same thing with S.M. Stirling’s Nantucket triology; reading Against the Tide of Years before Island in The Sea of Time. It was very confusing. Somehow I got the impression that Swindapa was an old man and completely missed that the events with Walker in Achaea were taking place over a decade while the Nantucket stuff was happening in real time.