Red Mars / Green Mars / Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

The following is a review of the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I decided to post them all as one post since I feel like they all really go together. One word of caution, llllloooooonnnnnggggg. You can't really judge how big a book is on a Kindle until you realize you've been reading 2 hours/day for a week and are only 25% of the way through. All 3 books are lengthy but I thoroughly enjoyed the saga.

The story follows the lives of the first 100 people to colonize Mars. They don't really have a goal when the international team lands on the red planet but the books are about what the first 100 do and how they work to achieve their vision of what the new world should be. The time line is fairly unrealistic (they first land in 2026 I believe for example) and the rate at which humans develop new technology makes the Renaissance look like the dark ages. But the story doesn't focus on the science fiction so much as the human and cultural forces experienced by the people there and their relationship with those still on Earth and the terrans who followed them to the red planet. The first 100 were a diverse group so while the narrative wanders back and forth among them, the reader gets to look through the eyes of biologists, physicists, geologists, ecologists, engineers, psychologists, and anarchists and get a feel for what they think is important in life and their fight to get it.

The settlers go about creating a completely new world, as opposed to a second Earth. I really enjoyed many of the changes proposed to traditional society but the author. One major element the author projected is the predicament Earth will be in in the next few hundred years. To me, the major point of the trilogy was to get people thinking about what the future holds for the world and what can be done to change it. He proposes some radical ideas which would likely never be possible on a world with so much momentum in one direction but the first 100 got the privilege to start fresh and do it right from the beginning.

This isn't so much your typical aliens vs. humans, pew-pew shoot em up kind of sci/fi, but more of a fictional anthropology set in the future. I really really liked it and felt fulfilled when the 3rd book was over. There is excellent character development and enough drama and excitement to keep me entertained all while exploring what we think of as human nature and how that can change depending on cultural influences.