Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

[lightreads]

Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

4/5. Classic scifi trilogy about the terraforming of Mars over several centuries. I admit to some skepticism to start with here. That's generally my stance in re white guy scifi considered part of the canon. And some of the boy-girl stuff in the beginning of this did not reassure me.

But. The scope of this. It truly is an intellectual tour de force through political theory, environmental science, physics, neurochemistry . . . the scope of the imagination over erudition is really impressive.

But the thing that will stay with me from these books is none of that. It's Mars. The long passages in these books where one character or another exists, usually alone, on the Martian landscape. The intensity with which that landscape lives and changes. The beauty of the writing. It's really something. Even when those passages are brooding in a sideways manner upon political theory that I don't at all buy.

Comments

[readerjane]

Yes! I loved the way Mars was really the main character.

So many great moments. "I'm Nadia Cherneshevsky, and I built this town."
The mass exodus at the end of book 1. The moment when elder Sax and Maya, metering the colors of sky at sunset, get a brief glimpse of Earth Blue.

I was impressed by the way Robinson leaves Hiroko as Schrodinger's messiah and doesn't try to resolve her story - nobody quite sees her alive (probably) but nobody finds a body either.

If it's available, do read The Martians, his collection of short stories. I like the way the fourth-generation Martians react when Mars starts getting cold again.

[lightreads]

Yes. And the little red men are just allowed to exist in the nebulous space between cultural myth and actually-the-book-knows-they're-real. And Coyote. Basically everything about him.