So, in the Nadia passages, we gets tons and tons of somewhat tedious nerdy detail about allen wrenches and tractors (and we learn about the machines to colonize Mars). In the Maya passages, we get hour after hour of self-centered relationship watching (and we learn about the relationships between the people that colonize Mars). And in the John passages, we get high minded political theorizing, with a glaring blind spot for the darker side of human nature. It’s an effective device, but you only once you realize you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator (a bit like Gene Wolfe’s work, there). And an irritating narrator makes for an irritating chapter.

Also, for what it’s worth, his wife is a geology professor at the University of California. That explains the regolith (and about 100-or-so other pages).

Green Mars was somewhat as good, and Blue Mars is still a struggle for me — yes, I reread them fairly often. I find that the characters are for the most part quite real in my mind (I don’t get how someone could hate Nadia!), and any semi-plausible science doesn’t bother me in the least.

The Years of Rice and Salt totally grabbed me with its premise, which includes reincarnation, but completely petered out halfway through…plotting does seem to be Robinson’s weak point.

I found his Forty Signs of Rain trilogy fairly pedestrian…seems like he wanted to write film scripts this time. Though I haven’t read it in a long time, I remember his novella A Short Sharp Shock being interesting.

I still giggle remembering the space elevator wrapping itself three times around Mars.

I definitely agree, though, that the same structure makes for really boring SF (see comment above).

Robinson is not as good at plot as he as at description, and while you may feel like he’s writing a story it’s more a tract on geology, space travel, terraforming, social engineering, and several other subjects. I always felt that the descriptive portions (who knows what regolith is? I do! I do! Now, anyway) were the strength of the material in all of the books.

He does throw in plot to keep people interested, but it’s more like opera than standard fiction. You have long arias that don’t advance the plot in any way, but that instead give commentary on a situation, then short passages of arioso or recitative that are boring as hell (in general) but that advance the plot. Some may feel that the “hard” parts of the book are the boring sections, but to be honest if you’re reading for plot you’ll be very disappointed at the end of the series, which is exciting but really doesn’t wrap anything up. It’s more like a travelogue through the future than a story per se.

If you liked this book and wonder how the world would be different had the Black Death killed off 90% of Whitey instead of 25%, check out The Years Of Rice And Salt by the same author. It’s a series of vignettes that pass through time, with a rather weak unifying element of the personages reincarnating from generation to generation. Still, it’s much better than Silverberg’s Rome book that just takes major historical events and wraps them in togas.

They’re in a dirigible, right, flying over Mars, and the winds pick up and start to push them off course. Their (electric) motors aren’t strong enough to push them upwind and get them back on course. Crisis! Do they get blown off into the Wild Pink Yonder, never to be seen again?

No! One of them has a brainwave. The dirigible’s carrying a cargo of windmill generators. So, follow me closely here, he hangs all the windmills out of the gondola, into the wind. They start turning, and generate electric power; he runs cables to transmit the power into the engines, and the extra power is enough to put them back on course!

Seriously. A central element of the plot of this book makes as much sense as Popeye sitting in the back of a boat blowing into the sail to make it go faster.

But this series is the primary reason I planted saxifrage in the rockery