Blue Mars

The last in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Blue Mars kind of wraps up the story that unfolded in the two previous books. By "kind of", it does it in a slow, meandering kind of way. The book is trying to be a history of the settling and terraforming of Mars, as seen through the eyes of the first humans on Mars, and it really feels that way. There's a whole lot in all three books that is unnecessary. Like real history, deaths can be quite abrupt and not really have a good reason; a lot happens that isn't important, or related to any big thread of history, but is documented in any case. These books could have been a lot shorter, without losing a lot of their substance. But their bulk, and focus on the characters, meant that a huge big pile of ideas could be comfortably slipped in. Robinson has clearly thought a whole lot about how humans will colonize the Solar System; and in bringing together a lot of ideas that people have come up with over the last century, alongside quite a few of his own, he seems to have set the standard for describing how this will happen - a lot of what I read in this series reminded me very much of Charles Stross' Saturn's Children (written later, and has many ideas for how each planet will be settled directly taken from the Mars series, as far as I can see). Of course, the way Robinson writes the Mars trilogy has a certain "rightness" to it - coming out the end of these three long books, I really feel that if we're going to colonize the Solar System, this is exactly how we'll do it.

All in all, it's a very impressive series, and I'm glad I read it. If I had my time again, though, I would strongly consider reading the Cliff's Notes version, to get to the good stuff a lot quicker.