Krishna
A word of warning up front – I have reviewed this book purely on my personal preferences of what a story should be like, not based on the artistic merits, world building or the realistic sounding engineering and politics of a Mars colony. Because this book is all about those.
Frank Chalmers and John Boone are part of the initial group of people who colonized Mars. The city they built there was going to be named Nicosia.
Frank is quietly promoting the idea that John is against foreigners – to a group of Arabs. This is successful and John is taken out and murdered. Now Frank is in charge, as he always wanted.
But the book pauses and takes you back to an earlier time, with the same characters. Maya is the leader of a group that travels to Mars to live there for the rest of their lives. (The year? 2026. Quite eerie to read this now!)
They made the spaceship Ares spin at a particular speed to produce a pseudogravity that emulated the gravity pull of Mars. (I cannot imagine how you can live in a spinning rocket unless that was planet sized, and not go nuts, but what do I know? OK, are they strapped into chairs? No they are having a cocktail party, freely moving around, enjoying the pseudogravity!) Maya, from the Russian contingent, is the co-mayor of the expedition.
She has sex several times with Frank, but Frank was always ’empty’. Some of the times she had sex when she ‘really did not want to’ but scared that she ‘already gave the wrong impression to him’ and so it would be easier to ‘go along with it’ than rebuff him. Any of this make sense to you? And then she stopped.
I may be an exception among the readers of space operas and science fiction but what bothers me even more than the above is a lot of pseudo scientific blather about the escape velocity needed for the spacecraft to escape the gravity of earth (tediously described) and whether it is more or less than that required if they were to escape the Martian atmosphere. Nothing to do with the story, at least as far as I can see it at this point, and tedious without advancing the narrative.
It appears that only the people who could pass the screening process were allowed to qualify and there are interesting discussions about how the selection process was done (hint – was not composed of the best qualified people who applied). John Boone had an awesome reputation already and Frank was already jealous of the attention John was getting from the crew, though he was (with Maya) one of the two co-leaders of the entire team.
Arkady’s simulations are at once inspired and slightly mad. Maya and John now meet alone and – what else? – have sex.
There are some genuinely interesting discussions and operations in here. Don’t get me wrong! This series is famous for many right reasons. The main issue there is that I probably am not a fan of this scientific engineering fiction. Even so, I liked how they controlled the descent into Mars, how the heat shields were deployed and also the transparent dome in the front for a ‘windshield’ view of the approaching Mars.
But for me, the discussion of the difference between (invented) molecular flow, continuum flow and transitional flow was too much. Who cares, even for a story?
There are other things in the story and don’t know if they are real science or part of the scientific mumbo jumbo. (Some of you may know). Mars had an atmosphere and water and rains once. Being too small and too far away, the atmosphere collapsed. The oxygen was the one which caused the planet to turn red.
All interesting but when Kim starts to talk about unvarying days except for a cloud on some days and extra wind, you start to wonder. Mars has an atmosphere to produce clouds? Rain too?
They build and build and go prospecting to the equator. They find mountains of ice but worry it will melt as humans heat the environment for them to live in. There is a truck load of Engineer’s dream in there – and technology – but would it appeal to a layman? If the layman is me, certainly not. You may feel like nodding off at various points in the book. The human drama (Ann losing some fingers in an accident and the never ending gossip about Frank and others, Maya being a crybaby all the time etc) is briefly interesting, but not being central to the plot in any way I can see, only briefly holds your interest.
Want to hear details about how a group of bright scientists – you wouldn’t know it to see their childlike quarrels – tame the inhospitable Martian atmosphere? Excruciating details with the problems faced, instrument malfunction etc? Then you are in for a treat! The rest of us just struggle through the details or just stop reading at any point in the book.
But you still wonder how. They come from a moon of Mars to Mars proper in space ships with burners. Where do they get fuel from? And so on. Extracting water from thin air, as the author mentions? Hmmm. Easy enough to write in imagination.
Where the book gets going is when the author describes dry ice and ‘real’ ice from water – either of the mountains or the ones that were produced by their machines. Where it becomes even more thoughtful is when the group debates whether man, having landed in Mars, has the right to alter its atmosphere for the benefit of colonization of a new planet. Both the against arguments of a passionate Ann and the dry scientific argument for of Sax are both very thought provoking. So, yes, I will admit that parts of it are interesting indeed!
And then it sinks low again. The ruminations of the psychiatrist in place about old ‘humours’ and the new psychic symptoms is boring to the extreme.
Then he goes into a Kumbaya session where Hiroko and her farmhands are naked, eat dirt and worship the land of Mars. (Not kidding). The French psychiatrist Michel also joins in, naked and chanting. Looks like the author decides to go on another one of his meaningless tangents.
There is subtle sex everywhere – men and women pairing and rivaling and quarreling. The justification is that this is the ‘new colony with new rules’ and earthly standards don’t apply.
John and Okakura witness sabotage. Wonder who would blow up an installation so that a truck flew and landed fat below!
Anyway, even with stuff happening, it is a hard read. It is like going to a serious astrophysicist (not Neil Degrasse Tyson but imagine your dour university professor) and asking that person to tell you a story. It gets very boring with interesting bits now and then thrown in about how they colonized Mars, the petty jealousies, the officials and on and on and on. God, you want the book to end soon.
In case even a tiny bit of interest is left, John Boone goes hopping from place to place, playing politics, takes part in a longevity program and then keeps going from place to place in a series of utterly boring travels. Absolutely soporific prose – at least for me. He goes and talks to South Africans, Lebanese, Chinese, Japanese, Sufi Arabs from Qatar and so on. So boring, like watching Epcot Centre of the Disney Parks.
The blatant attempt at John’s life when he goes outside for a walk, his learning of the fears of the people from Arkady and then an attempt to frame him by putting a dead body on the cot and how he is alerted and averts the trap raise your interest in the story and remind you that there is indeed a story behind all this engineering claptrap. So that is a good thing,
I got thoroughly bored with the sex hate love claptrap of the human interactions and if possible even more boring engineering claptrap of the sky elevator to send mined metals back to earth for money. Also boring is the continuing UN claptrap of Arabs, Egyptians, Sufi muslims, Chinese and others trying to keep their own traditions up there. And how India’s population was swelling and how ‘an epidemic or two will take care of it’.
Now that John is dead, it is all Frank Chalmers. How he travels incessantly – sometimes because he is angry at something in one location – what a boring novel!
If you want a lot of fake politics and fake engineering and rebellions and desertion, read this book. None of this is my cup of tea and so I found this difficult going.
There are people escaping into the wilderness (protected) and also lots of sabotage, so that Martian authorities are on the backfoot. No one likes Earth dictating what should be done.
This is told in painful detail running pages after pages and people taking sides. Very painful reading.
And then disaster, and they lose people and then disaster they lose people; in between a whole lot of technical mumbo jumbo.
Finally they reach Hiroko who tells them they start over again. Probably in the second book (sequel).
Sorry guys, I picked up the wrong kind of book and this is not at all the kind of story I want to read, famous though it is.
So, for me it is a 1/10
— Krishna