Saturday, February 18, 2017

Review of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Author:  Kim Stanley Robinson.
Title:  Red Mars.
Publisher:  Bantum Spectra.
Copyright:  1993.
Pages:  572.

Overviews and Impressions:

The technical aspects of this hard sci-fi book are awesome.  The social implications aren't.  The whole premise of the novel is the colonization and terra-forming of Mars by a group of American and Russian scientists.  Afterward, the UN allows for mass-colonization of the northern part of the planet.

While a group of scientists set up another secret colony in the southern polar region.  There are space-lifts and the usual cyber-punk frontier "Rim" towns.  The idea of a quiet American "revolution" against the international land-grabbers struck me as disappointing.  I thought more could be done with it the social development of Mars.  The author assumes the worst excesses in human nature regarding interplanetary settlement in the mid twenty-first century.

Still recommended for the technical descriptions of the Red Planet....

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