© 1993 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Verdict: A really, really good book I just didn’t like. Wish I did, though.
Ever meet somebody, maybe a co-worker or a client at a
job, or someone you’re thinking about hiring to do some work on your house or
finances, and discover that, through no fault of your own, despite your
actively struggling against it, you find that you have zero rapport with that
person?
Well, that’s kinda what happened when Hopper met Red
Mars.
I wanted to like it. I really did. The book is chock
full of nice meaty science – geology (areology),
chemistry, a bit of biology, climate science and orbital mechanics, to name
just a few broad topics delved into. It even has a Space Elevator, first
conceived, I believe, by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel The Fountains of Paradise (reviewed elsewhere within these
electronic pages)! There’re hints of a new religion forming on Mars, religion
of any and all types of favorite interest of mine, and, of course, there’s
sociology and politics as the red planet’s population grows from a hundred to
something like a million over 575 pages.
There was plenty of intriguing science. I’m embarrassed
to admit I know very little about terraforming, despite it being such a
familiar topic in SF. A great deal of the novel revolves around the
terraforming of Mars. Algae to introduce oxygen into the air, techniques to
thicken the atmosphere and cloud cover to heat the cold planet, giant tunnels
burrowed hundreds of meters into the ground to release the planet’s interior
heat. Additionally, Phobos is hollowed out and manned, and Deimos’s orbit is “corrected.”
All that was good, to say the least.
There were some nice other touches, too. I thought the
names of two of the settlements, Burroughs and Bradbury Point, quite poignant
in passing. And that artificial satellite, the one that anchors the space
elevator, is named, simply, obviously and essentially, Clarke.
What I just couldn’t get on board with were the
characters, the plot, and the writing style. And those are not a minor things.
I really didn’t like any of the main characters. One
was perpetually grouchy, one acted like a middle school cheerleader, one was a
flamboyant anarchist who’d never be allowed to colonize another world. Lots of
bed hopping and petty high school jealousies. From the best and the brightest.
It reminded me of the soap opera worlds of Ben Bova. A lot of the chicks – too many
in fact, had a wee bit too much Mary Sue for my old dinosaur bones. And the
only character I did actually like [spoilers!] is assassinated 25 pages in.
I found myself not enjoying was the writing style.
Never having read Robinson before, I don’t know if the book was an exception or
not. But to me it felt wordy. Wordy like Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which I had to read
for a college lit class. Lots and lots of words describing the characters’
feelings and the labyrinths and wormholes where speculation on the possible
meanings and implications of those feelings. More than a few times I felt
myself lost in the woods, my mind thinking about upcoming chores or events of
the day past as my eyes roved down the page.
And speaking of feelings, I felt Robinson would take a
long, long time to come back to a point, or reveal a plot point, so long that I
sometimes forgot what we (the author/reader partnership) were building towards.
It got downright frustrating, and more than once I thought of putting the book
down. See my previous post on why I dared not.
There was no sense of how much time elapsed between
chapters and parts. I found out later that something like fifty or sixty years
transpired during the course of the novel. And a little past the halfway point
the story shifted abruptly from the challenge of terraforming another world to
the politics of environmentalism and immigration and revolution – three things
of which I do not find particularly interesting.
So I’m going to give Red Mars a bifurcated grade: A / C. A for the science, C for my
enjoyment of the book. I neither recommend nor dissuade the reading of this
book and its highly successful sequels. Hollywood has been interested in the
series, since James Cameron expressed interest in the late 90s, but it’s been
in development hell since. I’d be curious to see what a big screen adaption of
the book would look like.
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