Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

He studied the men’s faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt about it. They weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars, they put the lie to John’s vision. Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.

This paragraph is why I'm abandoning this book.

“Beta males,” John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobiology. “Brilliant sheep.”

Frank confirmed to be an incel in spirit, if not in deed

“Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”