Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.

The Short of It

Plot: An international coalition of 100 scientists is sent out on a mission to establish the first colony on Mars, but interpersonal strife mars their mission. 

Page Count: 592

Award: 1993 Nebula.

Worth a read: No. Fight me.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: (Technobabble * Technobabble) < Technobabble["Red Mars"]
Review: Undeniably a masterpiece of hard SF. Incredibly in depth and thought through systems and technologies with a rigorous scientific approach. Also heinously tedious and drier than pre-terraforming Mars. Characters tend to be irrationally inflexible or utterly spineless. Shocking levels of high school-esque romantic drama tossed in to the mix. Pacing is a full on dumpster fire. One can recognize the brilliance of Robinson without finding this remotely enjoyable.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

I took a science fiction class in high school. For our final assignment each student picked a book and did some form of creative project related to it. I'm sure context clues give it away, but I picked Red Mars. After trying and failing to get into it, I gave up, and just made a small model of the ship. An easy way of avoiding reading further.

Imagine, then, my shock and wonder when I started Red Mars anew and found myself enjoying it! Such a remarkable use of detail! What an excellent teaser to kick things all off!

Well, somewhere around page 100 or 2000 the rose colored glasses fell off. And no, it is not 2000 pages, but it certainly feels that way.

Robinson's research skills are excellent - or at the very least, his ability to convincingly sell what he writes as hard science. I lack the scientific background to provide useful commentary on the accuracy of what he proposes, but for the sake of this book is comes across as well-considered. Almost academic. Scratch that - fully academic. There are points where the general feeling of reading this book is akin to reading a textbook. 

A very smooth segue to pacing. This has got to be one of the most dreadfully paced novels I have been cursed to encounter. The opening offers a tantalizing mystery. We're drawn into chaos and action. There's a murder on Page 20! But who is responsible? And why? Inquiring minds wish to know!

Well, they can shove it, because it's time for some extended flashbacks. Don't worry - if you think you'll still care about that mystery by the time you get back to it, fear not. And no one in-universe will care that much either, so it's all good. "Oh yeah," you'll say to yourself, stroking the full beard you've grown since starting the book, "I could swear something happened right at the start of this thing." But by the time you've flipped back to recall what it was, you'll have passed peacefully in your sleep. Your grandchildren, who were also born between you starting and trying to finish Red Mars, are happy to put you to rest. They know things are better now that you don't need to keep reading.

Anyway, yeah, pacing is terrible. Massive stretches of dialogue which are just people discussing hard science, paired with equally massive stretches of people arguing about the ethical ramifications of those same technologies. And then to spice things up, we have some petty squabbles break out. Rinse and repeat for 600 pages and then do it again for two more books.

A hundred scientists are sent out in the first group. While we don't know all of them, we're supposed to be engaged invested enough in the lives of a good ten or twenty that we care. Do you know how hard it is to make 20 engaging characters? How many character traits are there, when you really get down to it? Hungry, hangry, peckish, ravenous, snacky... I mean, that's about it. Instead of aiming to have 20 engaging characters, Robinson takes the bold and innovative approach of having none. We need to be able to identify each as separate from their peers and thus each is reduced to a single trait that is obnoxious enough that we cannot help but tie it to a single person. Good job making them unique, I guess. They run the gamut from sullen to strident to grating. Also, I know that they're all a bunch of nerds, but they're also adults. The romance plots are almost more unbearable than the rest. Fear not, dear reader, it's a tie. Everything is unbearable.

The setting is a ship and then it's on Mars and they live in a dome and stuff. The hard science world building is what you're here for. It's just not a novel. I can't condemn it as a detailed description of a ship and/or dome city, but... it's just so tedious.

I've been putting off writing this review because I'm getting worked up by just putting this stuff down. There are going to be a bunch of people who disagree with me on this one, and that's fine, because I'm not backing down. This trilogy damn near broke me. 

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

My father sometimes made omelets when I was little. They were a fun weekend brunch. The fillings were anything and everything in the fridge scrambled into eggs, with a hefty portion of cheese in there too. Yes, I now know that's not an omelet, that's a scramble. That's irrelevant for this metaphor, so hush up for now. 

Do you know how an everything omelet tastes? It tastes like everything. There's no single clear flavor that comes through.

Red Mars is an everything omelet. We've got space colonization, Cold War politics, and the rise of transnational mega-corporations. Whoops, shouldn't have ended that list, because there's also socialist utopian ideals, terraforming debates, class war, polyamory, overpopulation, religion, climate change, space elevators, World Wars, police states, and the decline of the United Nations. 

I like to thing that Robinson was partway through slamming every SF concept together like action figures when he thought, "Wait a moment! This isn't enough!" That's probably when the longevity treatments to make humans almost immortal came into play. As if the rest was not enough. There is just too much here. Anything that is either scientific or moral is discussed at extreme length, leaving almost no room for an actual story between our various sermons and lectures. 

Over the course of the novel we cover something like fifty years. One would think, given how people get old and such, that at least we would be rid of some of these awful characters. Of course, another delightful byproduct of characters living much longer is that they don't just vanish from the story due to age. Each needs to be extracted from the novel one at a time.

Whenever tragedy befalls a character we dwell on it in such a way that it is clear that we, as readers, are meant to be invested. The feeling is much more, "Who died? Wait, was that the strident one who wanted terraforming or the grumpy one who wanted terraforming? Oh no that was the strident one who didn't want terraforming, got it."

This book has two sequels and I read them both immediately after this.

Can you blame me for putting off writing reviews for so long, Stranger?

And don't forget to read a book!