Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A lot of what worked for me in Red Mars becomes utterly tedious in Green Mars: the endless travel over the surface and the descriptions of the landscape. In the middle of the book during the long Maya section I nearly despaired and put it down. I do admire the exhaustive ambition of the book, the need to create an absolutely believable century of Martian development. But I don’t admire it so much that I wanted to read the same passages over and over again: they traveled across Mars in rovers and saw many, many things. This kind of writing occupies a good third of the novel, and I think I am being somewhat conservative in the estimate. The character writing is about the same as in the first novel, a bit flat and dry, and as the cast of characters proliferates it becomes noticeably more difficult to care enough to keep them all in the head. So I focused on Maya, Nadia, and Sax, who are the actual stars of the novel. So much happens to them in the course of the book that sheer accumulation of events should bring about some sense of change in them. But they remain essentially the same monotones; Nadia and Sax are interesting but in exactly the same way as in Red Mars. Perhaps Sax is the figure who goes through the most changes, given what happens to him at the hands of one of the First Hundred. This is not to say that the character writing is bad, but it is simply workmanlike. The voices of the characters in dialog are all the same. The book follows the same arc as Red Mars, a great deal of travel and visiting of sites on Mars while the unrest of the Martians leads to revolution. You can feel it coming three hundred pages away. But the book is relentless in insisting that all three hundred of those pages are necessary. I can’t help but feel that a more artful writing could have made this book much shorter and much different from the first volume, but it’s hard to argue with the book’s success. I am going to take a good long break and read something else before I tackle Blue Mars. Otherwise I am certain to dislike it.