Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars

[Jason McCullough]

In an endeavor to find something more cheery to think about related to space, I've been reading up on terraforming mars, and the red/blue/green mars trilogy. Should I get them? Comments?

[Captain Cookiepants]

I'm a big Tom Holt fan, and STILL I found these books insufferably dense.
It's not the fact that they were dense that drove me away, it's more that they seemed...lifeless. They were dreary to read. Imagine reading Tom Clancy's loving but personalityless (that's not a word) descriptions of tanks and crap for 400 pages. I know not of the third book and half the second, that's where I finally gave up and read 'Archie Comics'.
Not a big fan of science fiction, more of a 'fantasy' person, looking over my shelves I can reccomend 'Robert Asprin's Phule's Company series, they takes place in space and alien worlds; don't listen to the reviews or blurb, it's NOTHING like the WACK HIJINX!!!1 they inexplicably describe. . But that's fantasy like I said, can't help you on the science fiction end.

I do know what you mean though, seems like we're in a perpetual 'day of mourning'.

[Dean]

I've got to disagree. These books are some of the best hard science fiction out there. They chronicle the first 100 colonists of Mars and aren't afraid to make you care about characters before killing them off. There are a whole bunch of smaller stories contained in the larger narrative (rather like The Martian Chronicles).

It's an epic, and a pretty darned good one.

[Dave Markell]

And I have to agree with Captain Cookiepants :) . "Caring" is exactly what I did not do about almost all of the characters in this series. While the SF was as hard as SF can get, I found character development to be sorely lacking. It was a chore to plow through all three of these tomes, though initially I was very excited by the prospect of reading them.

[Jim Hoffman]

I'm reading "The Martian Race" by Gregory Beneford, about half way through and liking it so far.

It's about a situation somewhat like the X-Prize (http://www.xprize.org), but the goal is Mars, for under 30 billion.

[DennyA]

Mars and Return to Mars, by Bova, are also very entertaining reads.

[Anonymous]

If you're already willing to read something straight up about terraforming mars, the the KSR trilogy will be great -- like a science lesson with a story. He greatly exaggerates the timeframe to serve his own narrative ends (he admits this in the notes somewhere), but the science is pretty good.

[Anonymous]

The order is actually Red, Green, Blue, by the way. I read them last year and although I recommend em I liked each book slightly less than the one before it.

Just finished Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, have you read it?