MobileRead April 2016 Discussion: Red Mars (spoilers)

[Dazrin]

Some related discussion going on in the 2016 challenge thread:

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Ya, still going ok overall but trying to read Red Mars and Green Mars one after the other did not help my progress. I don't think I will hit my monthly page goal of 2,000 pages this month.

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

584 pages pages for Red Mars and 592 pages for Green Mars. Evidently Kim Stanley Robinson doesn't believe in writing short novels. Yes, Red Mars kind of slowed things down for me this month as well.

How was Green Mars? Others have said that Blue Mars and Green Mars were better than the first book in the series.

Originally Posted by Dazrin

I didn't think Green Mars was much if any better than Red Mars, more of the same style and again the action was almost completely limited to the very end. Both books had an emphasis on how much power corporations have in politics which is certainly as applicable today as it was then.

At this point I am more interested in the "science" of how they are terraforming Mars and the end result of their attempts at independence rather than the people in the story. I mentioned in the Red Mars book club thread how I thought things would end and it still looks like my guess is generally right, one of Sax's statements shows that some of the Martians are thinking that too. Finding out if that is the case or not is really the only reason I am considering Blue Mars in the future, but 761 pages is more than I want to try right now even though it might be a faster moving book given the setup at the end of this one.

Originally Posted by CRussel

The attempt read Red Mars knocked me down quite a bit this last month. And I can't see myself trying to read Green or Blue. The problem for me isn't the science or the overall situation, but the nearly total lack of characters I care about.

(but this probably belongs in the book club discussion thread.)

[JSWolf]

I did find the book could have been trimmed down without losing much if anything. For example, the scene with the psychiatrist just before he joined Hiroko's group could have been cut or seriously shortened.

I did like seeing how humanity handled colonizing Mars and they turned out (overall) to be no better then humanity is on Earth.

Just as we got to know John, he was killed and then we got to know Frank and when we find out that Frank killed John, there goes any liking for Frank. Phyllis turned out to be a traitor to the first 100. It was an interesting mish-mash of characters. I am going to continue the series because I want to know what happens next.