Rating: 
Summary: What the Heck?
Review: It seems to me that most of the reviews in this column are giving "Blue Mars" 6's and 7's. This seems to be mostly due to the fact that they consider it to be not the makings of a good story; that the events don't have enough 'tension' or there isn't much of a 'climax'. I think that this is partly true. "Blue Mars" wasn't written because it was a good story: "Blue Mars" was written because that is the way it would have ACTUALLY HAPPENED. I spent many sleepless nights up thinking about this book. Perhaps we all should.
Rating:
Summary: The last in an epic line of books
Review: In this day and age of whimpy sci-fi that is sold as Top Of The Line, Blue Mars is a book that truly lives up the its predicesors. Filled with intricate details and a superb plot that gives one a sense of closure rarely seen in any series, this book is certainly a milestone in novels of outer space exploraion and will be a ruler used to measure books for decades to come. Bound to be placed next to DUNE and FOUNDATION, Blue Mars is already a classic.
Rating: 
Summary: Robinson blue it
Review: In these days of literary bloat, it feels odd to complain of not getting enough, but that's certainly the case with BLUE MARS. Robinson's previous Mars books gave us a combination of competent characterization, plotting, and science that is too rare in science fiction. Unfortunately, BLUE MARS does not meet the same standard. Robinson dispenses with plot entirely and skimps on characterizations, leaving a book that reads more like a travelogue than a novel. Robinson The characters jet around the solar system, entering and then abandoning storylines on flood-ravaged Earth, Mercury, and the moons of Uranus, before returning to Mars. There are enough ideas here for three novels and a few short stories, and it is supremely frustrating that Robinson throws most of them away without any resolution. These loose threads might have been forgiveable if there had been a central plot, but Robinson provides none. There are two or three Big Problems, but they are resolved in a cursory fashion. In a few cases, the main action takes place offstage.
Vivid characterizations drove the previous books. However, Robinson is as profligate with characters as with storylines in BLUE MARS. To be sure, some of the old stand-bys remain interesting, but intriguing new characters appear, disappear, and change with little explanation.
The compaction of so much material into such an inadequate space leads me to think that the project grew beyond its original scope, and that Robinson was so tired of Mars that he decided to polish it all off at once. That's a pity. There's enough here that this book is well worth reading, but it could have been so much more.
Rating: 
Summary: Robinson goofs again
Review: On p.652 Robinson says, " the rods in the retina tend to see best in the three primaries. " WRONG! The cones, not the rods, percieve colors and the colors they perceive are vermillion, green and violet, NOT the three primaries but closer to the three secondaries. He goes on to say that a green and red spotlight combine to form a color but he doesn't know what and says, "Look at an artist's color wheel." WRONG AGAIN! The color made by a red and green spot is yellow, the same color your eye sees if the vermillion and green cones in the retina are stimulated. An artists color wheel will show the results of mixing pigments, not light. He is confusing the subtractive process of reflected light, in which pigments mask out all but the color you see and the additive process, in which light adds to light, the "secondary" colors blending to create the "primary " colors. Does Robinson research anything or does he just rely on his own faulty and vague recollections?
Rating:
Summary: Egregious errors
Review: I don't know how to rate this book because most of what Robinson is talking about is way over my head, but I found two glaring errors within two pages of Blue Mars. On p. 599 he says the current caused by the Coriolis effect in the southern hemisphere is clockwise. WRONG -- it's counter-clockwise. And on p. 600, he has Maya climb up in the halyards of a sailboat. Lots of luck Maya; the halyards are the lines that raise the sails. Maya could climb the shrouds, if the shrouds are fitted with ratlines, but not the halyards. Mistakes like this make me question the accuracy of everything else in the book.
Rating: 
Summary: An absorbing Read
Review: The scientific attention to detail was fabulous and far out weighs the attempt at a social structure that would never function The characters are real
the landscape touchable........and the growing atmosphere can be tasted Waiting for the next step out into the galaxy from Kim Stanley Robinson
Rating:
Summary: A Science Fiction Megaclassic
Review: I don't see how anyone can give this book and it's predecessors less than a 9. I disagree with some of the political and economic evolution. Robinson has a mildly socialist leaning, but the politics is such a small part of the entire experience of these books. Experience is the operative word. These books, unlike any I have read in a while, take you into deep characterization of the people and deeply into being on Mars. It changed my perception of Mars forever. I found myself deeply affected by the descriptions of the landscapes and geography of Mars. It is almost as if Mr Robinson lived on Mars hundreds of years hence and came back to describe them to us. I felt as if I have been to Mars. I cried at some points in the book. I really felt what these characters felt. Sometimes it seems long, but, I appreciated the detail because in the end I had a much deeper appreciation for the situations of the characters. I will never forget Sax and Nadia. Even Boone, who does not live past the first book reverberates with clarity as I write this months after reading the first book. This is such a rare combination of hard science fiction, good story telling and deep characterization that it must rank as one of the best science fiction stories of all time. I eagerly await the time when we can test all of Mr Robinsons extensive theories and see how the real colonization of Mars unfolds.
Rating:
Summary: Robinson's concludes his trilogy with a utopian novel.
Review: If you haven't read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" and "Green Mars", don't even think about reading the last book in the trilogy, "Blue Mars". Instead, get those books immediately. There are very few books that can unequivocally be labelled, immediately upon their publication, as classics. These three can be. There's a reason this series has been awarded two Hugos and one Nebula. For those who have read those other novels, you will not be disappointed by "Green Mars". It is the same rich mix of science, politics, loving descriptions of landscape, and human drama as the other books. (These are the only novels I can think of where an index would be worthwhile.) On the political front, Mars holds a constitutional government and has to deal with the problems of Earth wanting to dump their surplus population there. Sax Russell, the archetypal man of science, puts his formidable talents to work on stopping "the quick decline", a syndrome of memory blackouts, rapid physical de
Rating:
Summary: Should have been a 10
Review: I hate to give a book by the brilliant Kim Stanley Robinson a mere 7, but this one--in fact the whole
huge trilogy--could have used another revision (a task I wouldn't wish on anyone). The grammar is shaky at points and a lot of the sentences could be clearer--not what you'd expect from Robinson's lapidary short stories and earlier novels. There are enough scientific bobbles to suggest that Robinson didn't always understand what he was writing about, and he could have taken out a TAD of the areology. I would have liked a harder look at Robinson's usual socialist/anarchist politics. Who gives the scientists at Da Vinci food? What
happens to people who don't feel like working? How did Nadia handle her departure from power?
But it's a tribute to Robinson's incredible achievement that I must imagine any reader of these books has a vivid picture of Nadia, and Maya and John and Frank and Sax (the most successfully drawn character) and Ann and Jackie and.... Surely any reader knows just what I mean when I wish we had seen more of Nirgal, and experiences a pleasure of familiarity on reading such phrases as "long run-out", "ecopoet", "Dorsa Brevia", and "the four great volcanoes". Though things get a little mechanical at times, Robinson made Mars real and his characters real to me. Too bad his incredible achievement was a really good trilogy, not an incredible trilogy like his Three Californias books.
Rating:
Summary: UNDER-RATED OR MISUNDERSTOOD?
Review: Red and Green Mars form the necessary foundation for full appreciation of the Blue. Excellent books on their own, with the addition of Blue Mars to the trilogy they form a truly unique vision of a highly desirable (and possible) future.
Blue mars is quite possibly the most thought-provoking book I have ever read. The plot may be disappointing, but the conclusions reached in the book may well prove to be uncannily prophetic. A must-read
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