Green Mars

Green Mars, the second novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, is more of the same. It follows a reasonably large group of settlers and Martian natives (humans, born and raised on Mars) over a number of decades. It's pretty slow going, and not a lot happens. After the huge, disastrous, failed revolution, this book is mostly leading up to a second revolution, to free Mars from Earth and its greedy megacorporations.

It feels like about half the book could have been comfortably removed, without reducing the book's impact, or the overall plotline. It feels like the story is meant to be about the big picture of Martian colonization, terraforming, and politics as seen by its early settlers, but there is just a bit too much detail about the personal lives of a group of not particularly likeable, not particularly interesting characters. I don't feel like I'm getting to know them any better, or that their personal travails are adding a lot to the story, so a lot of this could be cut down, an you'd still have the big picture as well as the people picture.

That said, the tale of making Mars a world habitable by humans is unfolding rather majestically. Robinson really knows his stuff, and goes into quite an amount of technical detail describing how the atmosphere is being remade, how oceans are being created, how plant life is being seeded across the planet, and how human society is being rebuilt to adapt to this new world and the new technologies that have been developed. It's fascinating, and the series is well worth the read for this alone. It really feels like a a realistic portrayal of how the settlement of Mars might unfold.