I just completed the final book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Blue Mars. Paging an editor to the Robinson suite. Any editors in the house? I've never skimmed so much in my lifetime of reading, which is too bad, because Robinson displays a prodigious knowledge of all manner of scientific research...a little too much, in fact, and paragraph after paragraph of introspective rambling about the planet by various of the novel's characters and descriptions of every last crater get to be a bit much. This is 760 pages with about 100 where anything really happens. The whole thing could have been wrapped up in about 350 and still made a good book with plenty of space for flexing the author's polymathic muscles.

I read the first book, Red Mars, years ago, so my memory of it and the second book, Green Mars, are a bit hazy, but I'd agree with most of the Amazon reviewers that Red Mars was the best of the lot (and do I recall that the Muslim Brotherhood was instrumental in some of the nefarious goings-on in that one?). Things actually happen in that book, and the speculation on what an expedition to Mars and how it may develop are truly interesting.

The politically-minded will get a kick out of Robinson's utopian vision of the development of a sort of Marxist (or is it some sort of anarcho-syndicalism?) solution to Martian economics, the building of a disarmed society, and the alacrity with which both Martian and Terran society adopt to the "one child per family" solution to massive overpopulation on Earth and potentially Mars as well once longevity treatments start allowing people to count their years in the centuries. But hey, what else do you expect from an intellectual from Davis, California.

I almost feel guilty for saying anything negative about the book, and particularly for skimming anything at all, given the obvious effort that went into it, but there it is. A classic, for sure, but a classic that badly needed an editor.