Red Mars

A wonderful read. Definitely not a light read. It's long rather long and a fairly difficult. It features science, politics, religious debate, romance, sex (tasteful). The author does a simply fantastic job of making you really despise a character, then that character saves the day. It's less about redemption and more about not judging. Also it's part of a trilogy. All three books are excellent and are very believable (mostly) accounts of how Mars may be colonized and how a relatively utopian society may possibly be formed. One negative is, even if you really, really like this trilogy, I'd avoid the "spin offs" made by the same author. They are not to the same standards and don't really continue the story.

Robinson's writing is at once engaging and persistently challenging, as one reads page after page awaiting his next plot twist and scientific creativity. Expect to think and to consider his many political, technological, economic, and social ideas, woven together to create space opera at its best. Truly a contemporary tip of the hat to the Golden Age of Science Fiction's greatest series, Robinson grounds his science fiction in plausible science and its rational extension into an alien world. Most enjoyable!

And it's heavy on the science part! Everything in this story is startlingly believable. Its only flaw is the inevitable march of technology we've experienced since, but all in all the zeerust has been fairly mild thanks to some very wise focus on the author's part. Easily enough you can imagine their reactors being molten salt cooled instead of water cooled, thorium breeder instead of uranium, augmented reality HUDs instead of screens. The AIs seem close enough to the trajectory of Siri and Cortana, too.