Is it May again already? No one has called an RRT* on this blog? It's still breathing... barely. I'll try to get it stable again here, I don't want to have to move it to the Intensive Care Unit for blogs (wherever that might be), or - God forbid - have a funeral for it.
I guess I should start by making my excuses. I've been training at a new job that is in a city an hour away from the one I live in. I'm tired a lot and busy a lot and I haven't been reading a lot. And the book I have been reading, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, left a lot to be desired. It took me two months to get through it.
I've been wanting to read Red Mars for many years. It won a Nebula Award for best novel in the early 1990s and the concept is compelling: this is a story about how Mars is colonized and the different personalities who envision different fates for the planet. Robinson does a great job of imagining what the science and politics might look like in that eventuality and he creates a lot of conflict. So you might think this five hundred-plus page book would be a page turner.
It is not.
The major problem I had reading through this book is that, despite a huge cast of characters, I felt indifferent toward all of them. Much more time is spent on what the characters are doing with their work than anything else. It's hard to feel anything for anyone when all you know about them is that they are brilliantly intelligent and hard-working.
The book does try to hook you in with a love triangle between three of the protagonists, Frank, John, and Maya. Within the first thirty pages or so you know that Frank is angry about something, enough so that he kills John. This frames the book and we are taken back to the beginning of the colonization, but it's never clear why Frank committed murder (was passion or jealously over Maya? professional envy? politics? who knows!). Neither is it clear to the reader why any of these three characters would be attracted to the others. The descriptions of sex on the flight to Mars or on Mars read to me like really boring robots engaging in sex. No offense to robots but that is just not hot. Or interesting.
Other characters in the book have strong points of view; Ann believes Mars should be left alone entirely and merely studied, while Phyllis, a business-minded Christian, pushes for it to be utilized as a new resource for the overflowing population of Earth. There is a woman named Hiroko who creates a secret, hidden colony on Mars.
Part of the problem is that there are so many characters that you get to know very little about any of them, and part of it is that so much is written about what they do that the reader never understands why they feel how they do.
There are two further novels in Robinson's Mars trilogy, Green Mars and Blue Mars. I'm curious to see if they are better than I thought Red Mars was, but that assessment is going to have to wait. I have a lot of other stuff right now on my Shelf of Ten, and a lot of it looks a lot better than reading more of Robinson's vision.
The next book on my Shelf is Stephen King's Blockade Billy. It should be a much faster read.
*Sorry, I really can't give up the health care metaphors at this point, apologies to anyone reading this blog, most of whom probably have no idea what I'm on about.
