Blue Mars

Rating:
Summary: Possibly the best book of the series!
Review: While others may not be too fond of this book, I found it to be incredibly fascinating. I especially liked all of his discussion about the process of human memory and the theory that atoms are actually composed of even smaller strings of matter. The focus of this book tends to drift away from Mars in this book and into the colonization of other planets, including Mercury, Pluto, and even other solar systems. Could more book series possibly be coming? Let us all hope so!

Rating:
Summary: Maybe I shouldn't write this, I didn't finish the first 50p.
Review: What a boring book! I was lying down and reading it and started to fall asleep. I can't offer any improvements, because I have mercifully blocked it out from my mind. I put it down and read another book which I had read a few days before because it had more excitement and suspense than Blue Mars.

Rating:
Summary: 200 pages too long
Review: With all the hype with this book I expected better than I got. The book would have been good minus the thinly veiled socio-political commentaries and disertations. ( adding to about 200 pages)

I got to the end wondering if this had a real point. The plot lines referred to in Red and Green Mars must have been great because they sounded better than the ones in Blue.

All in all, not a coherent book.

Rating:
Summary: It was tedious and technical rather than entertaining.
Review: The first two were riveting, but this final one was more tedious and it took a real effort to finish it. It reminded me of a writer who had written on one topic too long and was lost in detail that was probably interesting to him, but he had forgotten that most of us read to be entertained AND informed. In fact, for me, the story became more and more difficult to stay focused on the closer I got to the end, almost in the tradition of Murphy's Law that the work will slow down as it nears completion. Too bad.

Rating:
Summary: Summary of Blue Mars part 2 of Mars trilogy
Review: The book Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson was the eptomine of Science fiction. One reservation is the large amount of the f- word which was not nessesary in all places. I believa that Kim Stanley Robinson must be one of the best science fiction writers, equalling Isaac Asimov. I liked this book because of the detail to place names and the depth of the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Long and boring............................................
Review: Because I read the trilogy together, I'll review it as one.

The plotting is plodding. The fun characters all get killed in the civil war in Red Mars, so we're left following the lives of the the ones who played it safe, e.g. boring. The descriptions are verbose. If I never hear or see the word "piste" again, I'll be a happy person. The only reason I can see for the major breakthrough that extends everyone's life, is so we can follow the same (boring) characters through 1600 pages and 200 years.

On the positive side, there are enough high points in the political (not scientific) struggle for the reader to have fun.

All in all, the Hugo and Nebula voters had better do better in the future. They voted for hype and not substance.

Rating:
Summary: Closing book, tired ideas
Review: I would have rated Red Mars and Green Mars as the best SF books I've ever read (10+), but I was disapointed by the ending Blues... It seems that KSR lost himself in utopia, trying to build a perfect world of harmony, without changing the raw material, the human itself. Blue Mars is less credible than the first, less "polished". Since I don't doubt of the talent of KSR, I expect this to be the result of the pressure from the editor... too anxious to satisfy the demand of the readers. Or maybe KSR was not willing to close the cycle, making his characters immortal? Who knows? Still, the Mars trilogy remains one of the best (if not the best) depiction of the conquest of a whole world. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: Proper ending for the brilliant series
Review: Just like in Frank Herbert's Dune series the longer you go in the series the more theoretical the books are getting. But the less action is nicely compensated by the completness of the world, the well known characters. I was not able to stop reading this book. I wish I would have more books like this.

Rating:
Summary: When are the movies coming out???
Review: To some the Bible is their daily sustinence for well-being and forseeing what their future will bring, but for me the Mars Trilogy is a window into our future. So realistic and plausiable it's frightening. I just wish somebody would make a movie trilogy out of the masterpieces that Kim Stanley Robinson have created, by someone like James Cameron or George Lucas, to inspire the general public about the 'martian frontier' and the key it holds to our species evolution.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent but demanding series.
Review: It is a little bit difficult to qualify this novel in an isolated way since the plot and characters were long ago set up in the prior two novels: Red Mars and Green Mars. Anyway Blue Mars is a memorable novel in itself and the series it closes is one of the better if not the best hard SF series ever written. KSR depicts in a colourful and extraordinary full of detail text the economic, political, social, scientifical and moral transformations that the terraforming and colonization of Mars involves as a new fresh start for Mankind. The result is nearly encyclopedical. You can even learn something reading this series of books on topics as diverse as psicology, memory, botanics, geology, astronomy as well as economics and politics and and and... They are not however gripping books in the sense that you cannot read them in a night. No, on the contrary the depth of their pages obligues you to put some distance to the text and invites to several time outs during its reading. One might say that the series could even suffer from overachievement in its tremendous degree of detail, making it a no easy reading for all publics.