Rating: 
Summary: I don't even know why I finished it...
Review: ..I think it was a complete lack of other material to read. That, or a firm if naive hope that something, anything, would tie the book together or justify everything that had come before. Alas, it was not to be. I was happy at seeing the 'ending,' simply because it was all over. Robinson must have felt the same way judging from how it was written. (I don't blame him.) The book desperately needed a good editor, but it seems no one wanted to slog through this whole mess once. (Again, I don't blame them.) Everything seems to happen in an abstract, third person style. "This happened, this other thing happened, this person died, these people got married." Maya goes through another intense personal disaster, and hardly even reacts. Jackie is taken out of the story for... for some reason. No one seems to care. Nirgal is simply forgotten about. Ann and Sax become dramatically different people, practically out of nowhere. No one reacts. There's nothing real. No emotion. Nothing that makes you care about anyone or anything that happens. Read "Red Mars" if you're curious about the story (beware: it's also flat and lifeless and emotionless, although not nearly as bad as the others), but don't bother going any further. It's not worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: 1 star is one too many
Review: Disappointing. The author started out promisingly enough with 'Red Mars', but by 'Green Mars' becomes too involved in his strident anti-capitalist agenda to present a decent story. 'Blue Mars' simply continues in this vein, hobbling an otherwise promising story idea. Too bad, Kim, next time stick to the science over the transparent dogma.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing End To Memorable Saga
Review: Having thouroghly enjoyed Robinson's superb storytelling and characterisation in Red and Green Mars, I was bitterly disappointed to find that Blue Mars is at best a brave but failed experiment. With an almost total absence of plot and character interaction in such a long book, it took me great determination to finish this third and final part of the trilogy. Perhaps Robinson was attempting to convey, in the form of what almost amounts to a 'tone poem' the melancholy decline of his characters while Mars itself finally blooms into a life-filled planet. Praise is due to the author for not simply repeating a formula in any of the books and attempting to develop his characters and future world in a more complex and mature manner, but Blue Mars will stretch any reader's patience and staying power. Perhaps it is best to stop reading the saga at Green Mars triumphant and optimistic conclusion. Even Robinson's previous convincing scientific extrapolations seem both unadventurous (the prospect of possible life on Europa and Titan's promising organic atmospheric are never explored) and insufficient to support such a long novel. A beautifully written book, but with no dramatic content.
Rating: 
Summary: Still a great book
Review: Like a lot of other reviews have noted, this one's a change of pace. I enjoy it as a book I pick up every once in a while to dip into, but it's not an easy straight read.5 stars for KSM's ambitions. It doesn't always work, but it's an incredible try. There's some digressions that don't work so well. Speculation about theoretical physics 200 years from now -- what it'll have to say about superstring theory -- is pretty pointless. Similarly, speculating what neurological psychology will have to say about memory, etc. 200 years from now is too difficult -- it's too much work to sort what KSM is describing about 20th-century paradigms from what he THINKS 22nd-century paradigms will be... KSM's terraforming speculations work well because he's using a lot of ideas that're already around (plus allowing for some more developments to make them possible) and then letting us see what a world (physical + sociopolitical) this'd make. And it's an amazing vision.
Rating: 
Summary: Melancholy Saga
Review: Although not a big fan of the author, the series is a classic. Blue Mars is a fitting and consistent end to the saga. My world view and politics do not gel with any of the characters or political factions but that does not detract from the play of political system ideals. I found Blue Mars, in its melancholy way, to be the best of the three novels. Although I found Moving Mars more entertaining, and I look forward to reading Gregory Benford's Mars novel, no one can detract from Robinson's homage to the Red Planet. The passages which some found repetitious if read carefully, transport one to the new Mars created in the novels. All in all, I highly reccomend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Forget it
Review: I struggled through out of principle, I wanted to say I at least finished it. Midway through the second book I had stopped caring about the characters. It is hard to wade through 600 pages if you don't care. Again technically good, but if you want to read about technical stuff get Mars Direct. Don't waste your time unless you really care.
Rating:
Summary: True fans will see Blue Mars from the proper perspective
Review: Although Blue Mars may not be the same kind of solid masterpiece of fiction that Red and Green are, it does not detract from the Trilogy as a whole being a masterpiece, and it serves its purpose well as its own kind of masterpiece. I like to look at each volume of this trilogy in terms of its color. RED was exciting and adventurous; the settlers touched down on a barren but beautiful alien planet and set out to conquer it. GREEN was deep, passionate, and surreal; Mars was beginning to sprout life, the aged settlers were as wise as any century old genius should be, and young Martian born generations were rising up to create a culture of their own. BLUE is calm, seductive, somewhat depressing, but in a beautiful way that makes you marvel at life. The revolutions are over and the original settlers are winding down toward the ends of their lives. Meanwhile, the younge generations have come into adulthood and Mars is now theirs. The Martian culture has finally evolved from several diverse cultures into itself. BLUE is less plot driven than RED and GREEN. While RED and GREEN planted the seeds and guided the growth of life and culture on Mars, BLUE waters it. All the action has been taken care of, and now we sit back and marvel at the results of two centuries of ingenius passion and ambition that has created an entirely new world. One of the brilliant things about this final volume is that blue Mars can be interpreted as a utopia or a dystopia, depending on the reader's politics and values. Robinson stops writing plot and devoloping new characters, and simply carries out the plots and characters he has already developed to their logical conclusions, and he lets you decide how to interpret them. It seems almost as if Robinson stopped writing altogether, and just let the world and characters that he had already created age on their own like a fine wine. BLUE is more brave and experimental than RED or GREEN, and in a way it is also more brilliant. It seems more a work of philospohical poetry than a novel. The blue hue of this volume also serves up a beautiful sense of depression, that is not disappointed or regretful about the past but rather sad that everything will soon be over. I am convinced that Robinson interviewed several senior citizens close to the ends of their lives before writing this book, because the mood of the 200 year old characters and of the book itself is so incredibly convincing that I feel like I already know what it will be like to be at the end of my own life several decades from now. The beautiful thing about this sense of sadness toward the end is that while the characters are coming to the ends of their lives, so are you, because throughout this 2000 page epic you have felt as if you were there inside the minds of these brilliant people, who seem like real historical figures out fo a real life future history that was somehow brought back in time and depositied in the 1990's, and when they cease to live, you cease to live through them. Blue Mars is like The Martians, the book of short stories filling in the gaps of this epic, because it is not so mcuh a story that takes place on Robinson's Mars as it is a study of Robinson's Mars, for true fans and only true fans to enjoy. So if you loved RED and GREEN, do not let the negative reviews on this page discourage you. Those people are not true fans, they have not lived on Robinson's Mars as some of us have, and Blue Mars was not meant for them to understand in the first place. Blue Mars is for the Martians.
Rating:
Summary: A fitting end to a landmark trilogy
Review: Blue Mars grabbed me and swept me through its pages as well and as quickly as the first two books. Robinson deserved his Hugo for this, and more. If you liked the first two books, this one will not disappoint.
Rating:
Summary: a disappointment, a waste of time
Review: red was good. green was ok. blue was like dragging myself through literary molasses. i found myself skipping entire paragraphs and still being in the same place. the descriptions have been given before and they just drag on and on. also, there is a fair amount of repetition in how the characters are feeling. i like to finish things, and so i somehow read through it. didn't enjoy it at all, however.
Rating:
Summary: Red fired me. Green grew on me . Blue drowned me.
Review: Recently I finished the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. The first book, Red Mars, was extraordinary, worthy of its Nebula award, as I could envision the initial colonization of the planet perfectly. The second two, though, were a bit of a trial despite their Hugo accollades. I recommend the first for its images of settling Mars alone; the description of Mars and technology are vividly wonderful; Green Mars get a bit obsessed with government, but enlighteningly so. Unfortunately the characters are portrayed maladroitly throughout...the author fails to capture anything but a monochromatic scientist in any of them; dialogue so infrequent I often felt like I was reading merely a list of events. And when dialogue does show up, it often resorts to interpretive description like "Sax made a sound of disappointment" or "Maya made a noise which made her disgust clear" instead of describing the sound to immerse the reader. I recommend all to read Red Mars, and then like the fantastical Highlander forget there ever was a sequel.
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