Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Red Mars
(Book 1 of 3)
Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION:  Mars.  The red planet.  For untold centuries, it has gleamed in the night skies.  It has been an omen, a warning, a god.  Now, in the twenty-first century, it is about to become something more: a home.  After John Boone's successful manned Mars landing, momentum quickly gained across the overpopulated Earth for a permanent colony.  Now, Boone and ninety-nine hand-picked international scientists, from engineers to geologists (or areologists) to bioengineers and more, are on their way to establish the first manned outposts.  The logistical challenges of sustaining life on the frozen planet will be difficult enough on their own, but each of those first hundred colonists brings with them something potentially more powerful and dangerous than the thin toxic atmosphere or the ever-present threats of global dust storms and meteor strikes: their emotional, illogical humanity.
This begins the saga of Mars, a story spanning generations, written in tales of raw courage, international greed, love, rivalries, revolution... and even murder.

REVIEW:  I've been feeling a need for some sci-fi to balance out the fantasy in my reading list, so when I found this for a buck at the secondhand book store, I gave it a try.  I actually placed this on the line with Excellent.  Robinson somehow manages the tricky feat of incorporating human storylines with global - even interplanetary - sciences, such as terraforming, space travel, minerology, geology, psychology, and anthropology, among others.  I'm not exactly a science major myself, so a good deal of it went over my head, but I found the ideas fascinating, and fascinating ideas are why I read sci-fi (and fantasy) to begin with.  I also found it vaguely depressing; when this book was written in 1993, it seemed entirely plausible that something like a Mars colony (or even a permanent moon colony) would at least be in the works, if not actually started... and that America might be in on the ground floor of such a project.  That was before we became a nation of short-sighted, undereducated slobs who seem to relish in our own growing ignorance and lack of scientific leadership... but I digress.  Getting back to the book, several of the characters ran together in my head, but the main ones stood out decently in my mind, even if I sometimes had to think a bit to remember who they were, why they were on Mars, and where they fit into the overall story when they popped up again.  The action picks up as the book - and the colonies - go on.  I clipped it because some of the politics grew overly tangled, and every so often the science tangents interfered with the story rather than enhancing it. (It could be because I haven't read any "hard" sci-fi in a while, so I was a bit thrown while I reoriented my brain.) On the whole, though, this is a suitably epic tale given its vast topic, and I plan to keep an eye peeled for a budget-friendly copy of the second book, Green Mars.