Mars Trilogy

I finished Blue Mars yesterday, which means I’ve wrapped up Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. It's been a while since I first started the trilogy (late March) and it certainly feels that way too. These books plod, and I mean plod, their way through two centuries of the future history of Mars. The books have no overarching climax, or even a per-book climax, so it often felt like reading a history book. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely didn’t make for exciting reading.

The books contain many subsections, each continues the story from a different character's perspective (third person) with a focus on that person's insights and interests. The characters, the first 100 colonists to Mars, are quite a varied group which makes for interesting interaction as they set out to make Mars their home. As you would expect, some of the colonists are more outspoken than others and over time they become the leaders of the group. The books tend to follow these leaders, while other colonists are left as names and faces in the small crowd. And thanks to a conveniently developed medical treatment, the human lifespan is greatly increased which allows some of the characters to live through all 200 years of the trilogy!

So, the characters land on Mars, set up shop, and start working on making the planet habitable. And that's it... There are many things that happen along the way, but it all unfolds more in a real-life way than a fiction story arc kind of way. More people come to Mars, some go back to Earth, people die, babies are born, times of peace and science, times of war and revolution, natural disasters, human disasters... on and on it plods.

Besides the colonists, there is the title character of Mars itself. A great deal of time is spent describing the Martian landscape and its slow reaction to the colonists’ efforts to change it. The seemingly endless geological descriptions often slowed my reading pace to a crawl, but in the end I think it made me appreciate the outcome more.

And that actually sums up how I felt about the whole trilogy. It wasn’t an exciting read, but it was thorough. And, perhaps because of its thoroughness, it felt very rewarding to read it in its entirety. Plus, it wasn’t all dry science, the characters were a joy to get to know and grow old with. By the end of Blue Mars there are only a few of the original 100 colonists alive and even they don’t have much longer to live. So, the end of the trilogy really coincides with the end of the people you’ve grown to love. A bittersweet goodbye as you’re proud of them for accomplishing an enormous task, but sad to know that you’ll never hear from them again.