Book Review: Red Mars

 

© 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.