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Red Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
Nebula 1993

So realistic it's easy to imagine people in the not-so-distant future reading this book with a completely ho-hum attitude. I remember seeing a moving in the 1950's that made a dramatic big deal about people flying to the moon and taking the first few steps on an explored place in space. I don't even remember the name of the movie but it strikes me how similar it was to the actual event many years later.

We could easily have an experience like this with Red Mars . The technology, terrain, and human dynamics were so well researched, this modern fiction could easily become tomorrow's newspaper headlines.

You quickly learn Martian geography and things like the Martian mountain, Olympus Mons is 3 times taller than Everest, 100 times the mass of the Earth's largest volcano, Mauna Loa, and the highest mountain in the solar system. Martian geological history including events like huge meteor strikes so large that pieces from the collisions flew all the way to our Earth and moon.

The story evolves around an interesting premise that people in a gigantic human-wide project like colonizing Mars would quickly break down forms based on chauvinistic, nationalistic barriers; but then, unfortunately, just as quickly rebuild equally divisive separations based on new philosophical and political principles.

I really liked some of the discussions on topics like "eco-economics" - a system that rewards people based on their contributions to the planet rather than "parasitical jobs . . . advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money."

The story itself though was slow-moving and lacked much excitement. Well thought-out discussions held my interest but without frequent speed-reading times, I wouldn't have been able to plod my way through to the end.

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