So I seem to be on a trilogy kick. Has anybody here read Red Mars, Green Mars, or Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson? Or for that matter has anyone here read any of Robinson’s books? I’ve read a couple: New York 2140 and Aurora.
I’m roughly half way through the first book of the trilogy, Red Mars, and it only took me this long to figure out the titles of books are reference to Mars going from a dead planet (Red) to a living planet (Green) to an Earth-like planet (Blue). Mars is being colonized and terraformed by settlers from Earth in the not-too-distant future.
It starts out like this:
Kim Stanley Robinson in the Mars Trilogy is not near the stylist that Cormack McCarthy is in the Border Trilogy, but yowza can he pack a bunch of information into his books. They’re big fat books but he doesn’t waste any space on fluff. They’re all packed with info. For me it took a while to get into his rhythm but now that I’m there I’m rocketing along smoothly.And so we came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West — it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.
Anyway it’s been fun so far.
Comments anybody?