[fluffy bunny]

Red, Green and Blue Mars- should I bother?

[SusF]

They are pretty good, especially the first two.

Susan

[Vitriol]

Long, though.

Red Mars is brilliant however, so stick with it. The others are good, but not as good.

[Rob B]

I tried RED MARS a couple of times and found it very b-o-r-i-n-g, didn't care about the characters or what was going on in the story. I couldn't bring myself to get past the first half of the book.

[Vitriol]

I can see why; a bunch of characters stuck on board a spaceship for hundreds of pages, doing very little. You definitely need a certain sort of (deranged) temperment to enjoy it!

Green and Blue are much more action-filled, as is the second half of Red.

[Valeyard]

Red Mars - I was really looking forward to this. The series had won some big awards and I was looking forward to a good, well researched, story about the hard life on the Mars frontier. Unfortunately, it was one of those books were you see from the very beginning what is going to go wrong and it was just so blindingly obvious that they weren't prepared to go to Mars, that it pissed me off royaly. By about half way through I just wanted all the characters to die.

[Hobbit]

I like these books - they are quite heavy, but really made me think in terms of the social, political and environmental implications of such a move. I have a lovely signed copy of Antarctica too which is worth comparing with the Mars books. He has a new book out here uin the UK in Feb/March.

Hobbit