I’m about 3/4 of the way through Red Mars, and oy, what a slog it has been! I kind of liked the parts right after they landed on Mars and had to build stuff, but other than that–not so much.
It’s basically a romance novel. I don’t read romance novels because I don’t care about imaginary people’s complicated and torturous interpersonal relationships. I don’t care about them even if they happen in the future. On Mars. And I don’t care about complicated political finagling either. I’m bored out of my gourd.
I have Green Mars and Blue Mars sitting on my shelf. Are they any better? Should I force myself to finish this brick of a book so that I can read them? Or are they more of the same?
For what it’s worth, I liked Antarctica quite a bit.
Hey, thanks for the link! I haven’t read your whole post yet, but I notice that you used “slog” to describe it, too. Looking forward to reading the whole thing.
And thanks to you others as well. I shall put the book down. I almost always finish books that I start, but I’m willing to abandon them in special cases. I think this may be a special case.
Yes, save yourself the time. I only bored (pun intended) my way through the book because the friend who gave it to me was obsessed with the book and was begging for my comments. It wouldn’t have been bad if something actually happened in the book, or if KSR had tossed out the pretense of it being “hard” SF. Some of the ideas he has his characters expound, like the whole business of putting heaters on the planet to warm the atmosphere are so astoundingly stupid that no one qualified to go on an actual mission to Mars would ever think of them. I started the second book, but never finished it. It was, however, slightly better reading if you went into it thinking that humanity had become retarded some point after the dawn of the 21st Century.
I LOVED the Red Mars up until the good characters all started to die. I can’t believe Boone, Chalmers and Arkady all die. You gotta be fuckin kidding me. The rest of the characters sucked SO much that I stopped reading the series in spite.
I enjoyed the trilogy (I have been a boring old fart since at least the early 1980s), but if the style doesn’t interest you then stop reading. Life is too short to read “entertaining” books that don’t entertain.
I didn’t find them boring, but it’s not exactly a tight, exciting narrative. The story stretches out over two centuries – with some of the characters taking the entire trip, and being very, very old but still poking their noses into politics on the planet they helped colonize. (Imagine James Madison and John Quincy Adams still being around.)
I’d say they’re more political novels than romance novels. A lot of events, in retrospect, don’t really make sense, and are only there to make some sort of point.
Not only do they not get less boring, they manage to get worse as time goes by.
On my first attempt to read the books I only managed to make it through about 150 pages of the painfully annoying characters. I wouldn’t have even touched the books again if it wasn’t for the fact that the first one somehow managed a Nebula and the other two managed to win Hugos. (And let me just add as an aside that out of books that won the Nebula in the 1990’s I four of them went high on my “Dear god how did this trash get published” list; there was something funky going on that decade.)
The later books add Robinson’s idiotic theories on politics and economics where for some reason having scarcer resources means that one should be on a barter system. And in the end two hundred years later the only people who can do anything of importance on Mars are the first ones who got there or their children. Apparently the other ten generations or Martians and shifting population demographics just sit around on their hands letting them decide what to do.
This thread is a bit disappointing. I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Bread and Salt awhile back and really enjoyed it. I was looking forward to trying the Mars trilogy.
I enjoyed the series greatly but I think many people suppose the series is going to be about people transforming Mars in Earth’s image (terraforming) and are quite disapointed to find that this is not the theme of the books at all. The series is about Mars transforming people in its image (aereoforming). As such, it is primarily about people.
But if you’re not enjoying Red Mars, I certainly wouldn’t continue through the series. It might surprise you to learn though, that in later books Sax becomes the most important character, while the ever-annoying Frank becomes more and more marginal.
As I said, I did like his Antarctica, so who knows. But Antarctica was really very similar to Red Mars in a lot of ways. I might try some of his other books from the library, but I won’t hesitate to quit reading them if I get bored.
