Red Mars

This was an interesting book to read, for several reasons. First was the position that it occupied historically; published in 1993, it represents the state of where science fiction was prior to the WWW. It also obviously predates the popularity of cyberpunk within science fiction; throughout the entire text, there is minimal use of computer networking, and nary a leather jacket or jaded hacked is in sight.[return]As far as the book itself is concerned, it's definitely an interesting read. It's hard SF, which I'm usually rather ambivalent about; I find that a lot of hard SF authors have a tendency to place the science as the most important part of their work, which means that the fiction, the story, ends up suffering as a result. Robinson manages to avoid that, however, by creating characters that are believable and sympathetic. While it's obvious that he's done his research with this book, at the same time you don't get the feeling that he's dumping his research into the book in order to show how much research was done, if that makes any sense. [return]Telling the story of a group of one hundred scientists, chosen to create the first human colony on Mars, the book follows them through space travel, settlement, and the inevitable terraforming of the planet to make it livable for human occupation. A lot of the book is made up of philosophical debates between the characters: do we have a right to change the ecology of this planet , what's the best way for us to organize our society , how much control should we allow corporations to have over our future, and that sort of thing. Basically, conversations that we have here and now on Earth, but given a Martian twist in order to allow for a discussion free of the momentum of tradition. It will be interesting to see how Robinson can maintain the momentum of this story over the next two portions of the Mars trilogy.