[Yapyap]

Still making my way through Red Mars. It's become vaguely more interesting - enough to keep me reading for now, although not nearly enough to get me enthusiastic.

Also, it features one of my major pet peeves - Western authors who haven't bothered to make any effort to look into the naming systems/customs of other cultures and therefore come up with entirely unlikely names for their protagonists.

Spoiler:

"Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky" is an impossible name for a "Russian" born around 1975-1985 in Russia. So is "Maya Katarina Toitovna" (never mind that "-vna" is more likely to be a patronymic suffix than a surname suffix).

Just .. why those Western-style middle names? Why? Where are the patronymics? Why are there unexplained middle names that were a legal impossibility? Heck, even non-Russian, non-Slavic people (i.e. people with entirely different naming customs) in the USSR born at that period were not allowed to have middle names - at best, hyphenated double first names were allowed, but not without a hyphen.

(I suppose "impossible" is maybe untrue; I'm sure there were some, some, rebellious people who might have secretly given their kids unofficial middle names. But it wouldn't be commonplace, it wouldn't have been their legal name, and it would be something outlandish enough to remark on.)