October 26, 2012

• Red Mars: Remarkably disappointing.

  JDN 2456227 EDT 13:54.

   

  I had very high hopes for this book. It should be right up my alley: It’s a hard-SF novel about the colonization and terraforming of Mars, something I’ve been passionate about as long as I can remember. All those mountains and canyons it mentions are mountains and canyons I’ve learned all about and always wanted to see with my own eyes. I would like to be one of those first hundred astronauts (I’m probably most similar to Frank, or maybe Michel). The novel comes highly acclaimed and has won several awards.

  But reading it… I found myself generally disappointed. I guess it’s competent, a mediocre SF novel in general. I’ve certainly read worse. Perhaps my high hopes were my downfall, as I had expected one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, on a par with Dune or Contact, and received instead something decent, but deeply flawed, more like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

  Robinson spends long, flowery passages describing the terrain of Mars; and even as someone who finds the terrain of Mars enthralling, it just gets old after awhile. The character conflicts that start out interesting don’t change over the course of the novel, and as a result become grating. The plot takes far too long to get going; on page 200 you still don’t know what the story is about aside from “they’re colonizing Mars.” It seems like he just thought that the basic premise was so fascinating, he wouldn’t need an actual plot.
  Worst of all, Robinson makes a few really spectacularly egregious scientific errors. Most of the science seems to be fine, but when he gets the conversion wrong between Kelvin and Celsius, and does so consistently several times, I just can’t trust anything else he says about science in the rest of the novel. This is not Science Marches On, it’s not even a minor error that one could easily forgive. It’s Physics 101 stuff, and it should have been caught by an editor.

  Overall, it’s… okay, I guess. But it’s pretty disappointing, especially for someone who loves Mars as much as I do.

  • 2:04 pm
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