About this title: The first book in Robinson's much-lauded Mars series introduces the first 100 settlers on Mars. The debate commences among the scientists: original unique splendor of the red planet or Earth-like clone? Winner of the 1993 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780553560732ISBN:0553560735
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover worn with creases. Edge, corner and seam wear. Light stain at top edge near spine for first few pages. Foxing. Tight, square book. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 592 p. Mars Trilogy. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Spine is well creased. Covers show wear at the edges and corners. Good Grade C average reading copy. Binding is Mass Market Paperback. Pages tanning. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Description: Good. Spine is well creased. Covers show wear. Good average reading copy. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780553560732ISBN:0553560735
Description: Good. No Jacket. Good. No DJ Issued Good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover has mild edge wear and a bit of corner creasing. Spine is lightly creased. No faults to inside of book. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 592 p. Mars Trilogy. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Pages are clean and in very good condition, stamp on the inside of the front cover, no writing or highlighting on inside book pages, average wear on the cover. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Spectra
Date Published: 1993-10-01
ISBN-13:9780553560732ISBN:0553560735
Description: Good. Clean copy with normal wear for condition. Spine condition is normal or better for the condition. May have book store stamp, price marking or former owner name. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780553560732ISBN:0553560735
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Book is like new with very minor edge wear to cover. A great copy! Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 592 p. Mars Trilogy. Audience: General/trade. read more
"Red Mars is a book that snuck up on me. It's a massive brick of a book, and at first I was contentedly chipping away at it, absorbing the copious embedded science and the ensemble cast, letting everything fall into place. It was only about halfway through the book that I began to realize how brilliant it was, because it was at that point that the setup really began to pay off.
What Red Mars does remarkably is inject the human element into what would otherwise be a dry, lifeless treatise on science and engineering. This consideration warps the science by pulling back the veil of objectivity and revealing the scientists to be ideological and passionate, working toward divergent ideals. It further asks not only what the exploration of Mars might look like, but more crucially asks how the colonization of Mars might unfold, with all due historical and economic consideration.
Throughout, the story is told from the perspectives of multiple characters, who see the world very differently. It is easy, as a reader, to imagine that the narration on the page is merely a record of how things are in a story, but author Kim Stanley Robinson expertly contrasts the perspectives of his characters, helping the reader to understand the limits of each of their visions. In this way the author succeeds at showing us Mars and the future through many different eyes.
Mars is itself, of course, the unspeaking companion of each of the narrators. Rendered in colossal detail, it is without question a character unto itself, changing over the course of the novel. Never has a setting been so completely realized in speculative fiction.
In sum, Red Mars may be summarized as follows: Humanity will shape the places it goes, and be shaped by them. As man terraforms Mars, so too will Mars areoform man."
"If you ever want to read about middle-aged engineers having sex, then this is the book for you. Aaargh, there were so many horrible sex scenes, some of which involved middle-aged engineers in communal hot baths...Or middle-aged engineers rooting on dirigibles, one "leaning in to bite her breast". Aaaaaargh.
Okay, the first chapter of this book is, like, totally awesome - describes the celebration held when the first proper town is built on Mars - which is spoiled when one of the leading colonists arranges the assassination of another. On the basis of the first chapter, I thought this was going to be one of the best books EVER. But in the second chapter, the engineers started having sex. Weightless sex. Sex after getting all sweaty while wearing shorts and tank tops. Aaaaargh.
But aside from the engineer sex, after the first chapter the book becomes profoundly turgid. Everything is described to within a centimetre of its imaginary life (in fact these descriptions include measurements in metrics), and the characters - especially Nadia, a middle-aged engineer - are heart-breakingly boring. The difference between the first chapter and the later sections are so marked that I began to suspect that an editor had substantially rewritten the first chapter.
But even the first chapter came to be tainted. I started tossing up whether to abandon this opus around p 214. To help make up my mind, I skipped ahead to see what I might miss out on. And I came across a long italicised section where various 'voices' describe what they were doing when they heard that the guy who was assassinated in the first chapter was assassinated. So, so awful. But even though even the first chapter was now ruined for me, it felt like things had come full circle: like the assassinated engineer in question, JFK was a middle-aged man who had a lot of sex."
"Stanley Robinson has written a very interesting series of novels (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) that speculate about what would happen should Mars be colonized. I have completed only Red Mars so far, but if the others are as intriguing as the first they will be well worth reading. Truly the book is a political treatise as much as an action science fiction novel. As soon as the first ship lands and the colonists begin to build a base they are bifurcated into two factions: those who would preserve Mars in its pristine, primitive state, and those would want to begin the "" process that would try to recreate an earth-like environment. Both visions have a certain utopian quality to them. Earth has become overpopulated and hopes that Mars will solve some of its mineral scarcity problems. Soon the corporations have begun to dictate policy and by the end of the book a revolution is underway to cut the tie to earth and stop immigration of those looking for a way off the dying Earth. The original " Hundred" become mythologized and after a treatment to prevent radiation illness turns out to virtually provide an unlimited life-span, they become revered (and feared - several are assassinated) for their supposed wisdom and insight. There is an underlying theme of the paradoxical utopian questions " is to be done?" and " have we accomplished?"
The story is told from several points of view and I found that of Nadia Chernyshevsky (most illuminatingly there is a Russian dissident named Chernyshevsky who wrote a volume of utopian fiction from prison entitled What is to Be Done? in the 1860s) the most compelling. She gains enormous satisfaction from the buildings and creations of her problem-solving accomplishments, but she is also sympathetic to the goals of the revolutionaries after it becomes evident how the political and ecological situation has deteriorated. The bad guys are clearly the multinational corporations who create their own security forces to suppress dissent and owe allegiance only to the profit motive. Another appealing character is John Boone (get the allusion?) who wants to build a better social fabric on Mars based on the physical realities of Mars, inevitably a harsh world. He becomes a wandering Socratic proponent of a plan for the new society. His answer is often to create dialogue among the many parties and in the end - nope I won't tell what happens to him - tries to build a culture.
Robinson speculates throughout on what constitutes nature and speculates through the characters about whether we have an obligation or right to create or model the natural environment for our own purposes."
"One of the greatest books about teraforming Mars. Robinson goes beyond the SciFi and goes into social aspects and how political agendas, religion, culture, racism, and just plain bias play in the outcome. There are many important characters and all have background, so character development is long and slow, but well worth it, being that the character of the characters is a big part of the story. This is more a book about the people that happen to be on mars doing a job, than the job they are doing. When it comes to creating characters, I don't know of a author that is better than Robinson. There are so many with detailed backgrounds and personalities. These are not character, they are people in a book.
Beyond the people, the story is also great. It makes the whole idea believable. The technology he uses is just a bit beyond where we are in reality, so you get the feeling it could happen. So, the story feels real. It is a view of the near future, where we are no better than we are now. There is no utopian world working together. This is what would happen if we really did this.
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