Heather read and liked Matt's review of Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1):

"I just finished reading this for the second or third time. I wish I could bump this up to 3.5 stars, which more reflects what I feel about it.

To begin with, I should come forward with my biases. This is a book you'll either love or yo...more I just finished reading this for the second or third time. I wish I could bump this up to 3.5 stars, which more reflects what I feel about it.

To begin with, I should come forward with my biases. This is a book you'll either love or you will hate. For my part, I love the planet Mars. Or at least, I love the idea of the planet Mars, because I've never been there. I'd love to go though. If someone from NASA told me that I could go to Mars, and there was only a 50/50 chance I'd survive, I'd be like, "That good, huh? I'm sold. Let's do it. When do we leave?" My wife might talk me out of it (she hates the cold), but if I didn't have obligations to family, I'd be there in a heartbeat. I've got this big wall poster of Mars, laid out in all its plucky glory - the Tharsis bulge, the big volcanoes, the massive flood erosion systems. I want to walk on its surface under the red sky and feel the thin cold wind, and this is a book for Mars geeks by a Mars geek. Like Nadia, I want to wildly dance for joy on the Martian dust. If you don't love or can't love the idea of Mars, then all the talk of its ferrous oxides, sulfer drifts, salt pans, and garnet sands is going to bore you to tears. If you do however love Mars, reading this is something like biting into a big decadent layered fair trade organic chocalate bar with 71% dark rich Costa Rican cocoa. So that's my bias, and I think it's a good one, but if you can't entertain thoughts like that be prepared to be bored by like half this novel.

So what is this novel about? Well, obviously, it's about Mars, but more than that it is about humans on Mars and how people establish an identity and a cultural identity in particular. It is a story about the tension between existing cultural identities and ways of looking at the world, and adapting and adopting new identities. It's a story about conflicting mutually exclusive goals, and how we go about resolving - or more often than not - failing to resolve our differences. In that I think the book succeeds marvously, because the resulting Martian culture with all its disparate influences seems in many ways believable to me and even in some ways compelling so that I'm sucked into it and want to proclaim my allegiance to the Red or Green tradition, and twitter stories about Big Man and where I was when Boone died around the nuclear powered blog fire.

The best part of the story by far is that KSR doesn't attempt to tell a story as big as the colonization of Mars from the prespective a single person. Instead, the story sprawls across a huge cast of characters and expanse of time. Our viewpoint shifts from one major character to another, and people we thought we understood suddenly seem strange and different when seen from within or through someone elses eyes. Like many sci-fi authors, KSR can have his didactic moments, but unlike many his are softened by the fact that none of his characters are in and of themselves really the voice of the author. All of the characters even the most heroic turn out to have flaws of one sort or another, and so rather than being forced to read the dialogue as 'KSR believes this and is willing to hit you over the head with it', you can read the poltiics as 'John or Arkady (or Saxifrage or whoever) believes this, just as many real people do'. The politics of Mars as KSR envisions them turn out to be messy, very human, often petty, and with few simple answers and little in the way of clear answers and simple solutions. That's refreshing, even when KSR's biases are showing.

So why not more stars? Well, the book has big Martian sized problems to go along with its delights. For me, the chief of these is how easy the conquest of Mars is made to seem. It reads like the conquest of Mars as written by someone that has never even been camping, much less someone acquianted with the hardships of an outdoor life. Given the enormous challenges of living on a planet with a thin poisonous atmosphere, a surprisingly small portion of the book is devoted to the theme of 'Man vs. Nature' and most of the time when it is, the cause of the conflict is man's own efforts - as if Mars in its natural state isn't absolutely deadly to human life. I personally have a hard time imagining that something on the scale of the colonization of Mars would be safer, less arduous, and less frought with danger and hardship than say the colonization of the New World. KSR just doesn't seem particularly interested in that part of the story, which to my mind is perhaps the most critical part of the story.

Instead, all the meticulous scientific research is undermined by hand waving all the hard problems away with a wave of the techno-magic wand. The colonization of Mars begins not on a comparitive shoe string, but with an abundance of material massing at least one-hundred thousand times the mass of everything we've ever lifted into orbit. Energy sources are never scarce, and manufacturing capacity quickly soars to an unlmited degree. Technological challenges are quickly overcome by the liberal application of newfoundium and sometimes unobtainium. Almost everyone who dies dies through direct or indirect human agency. Accidents, especially serious ones, just don't seem to happen - Arkady's all to believable problem runs are confined to simulators. Thus, all the quite evident bloody striving of the author to create a believable story of planetary colonization is largely wasted and at times the story resembles just another escapist far future space opera.

But most of the rest of the novel's problems are also its strengths. It's sprawling scale is suited to the story, but makes it easy to get lost. It's changing points of view and flawed heroes means on the other hand that the book lacks a consistantly sympathetic protagonist to get behind and root for. It doesn't help the matter that many of the most likable characters end up dead.

It's not a book for everyone, but since humanity seems unlikely to grow up and start thinking about leaving the nest in my lifetime, this is probably as close to Mars as you or I will come. And, though it is a flawed story, it's still an extremely powerful and often moving one that I have little doubt will be read with interest and appreciation by anyone that actually does take up the struggle to live on and with Earth's redder sibling.(less) "