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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

I've very mixed feelings about KSR. His ideas are interesting and worth thinking about, but I've always found his writing style unbearably flat and boring. I really wanted to read the Mars trilogy, but gave up after the first volume, the writing was so dull and lifeless.

So here we go again - a book that seems like it's focused on interesting ideas, but is that worth plowing through acres of arid prose?

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I got through about 2/3 of Red Mars and put it down a few years ago. Even though it was fascinating and unbelievably well researched, it just felt like work to read it. A few years later I decided to try again and ended up reading the whole trilogy. And loved it. I think you have to adjust your expectations a bit and look at his writing for what it is; an exploration on "what would it really be like if X happened".

Most sci-fi is a narrative set in some kind of technologically-different universe. His is more like a serious meditation on what that universe would be like if it really did exist.

I put down Red Mars around 2/3rds of the way through a few years ago for the same reasons. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Red Mars has kind of a weird rhythm to it. I think Robinson was trying to make a sort of "fake history", so plot lines and characters kinda peter-out or go no where in a way that happens in real life, but not in most fiction (GRR Martin is the only other author I've read with a similar style). I really like the technique, but I can see why its not everyones thing.

The later books in the series slowly take on a more traditional structure, with focus more on a smaller cast of "heroes" about whom most of the action takes place.

It's not the structure of the narrative. It's the writing style itself. Feels very detached and cold, very clinical. The characters have the emotional personality of shadows on a wall; they may have guts but have no heart. When people were dreaming in the 1960s about computers writing literature, this was the stereotype of computer-written text.

Meandering plot lines I'm fine with. I kinda like it in fact.

That's an interesting critique that is very opposed to my own reading. Do you have specific examples? From my perspective, things like the Sax/Anne debate about terraforming Mars, or Frank's resentment at living in Boone's shadow, or Boone's amusement at/exploitation of being a larger-than-life figure struck me as very well developed emotionally.

A matter of taste, I suppose. The Mars trilogy was the first thing I read by him, and I was completely sold by the time I realized the reason people suddenly seemed different was he'd switched narrators without explicitly saying so. I felt he perfectly managed to make a very technical story primarily human and personal without significant compromises. That said, if you didn't buy into it from the start, the trilogy would have been a pretty tough slog.

I read the whole trilogy when I was 16 I think.

What a great set of books, and I secretly hope it will one day be made into movies or a serie (HBO please ? ;-) )

The story is great, and I would probably watch those movies.

Apparently a series has been in the works under a number of networks for a while now, with SyFy and AMC failing to produce and currently Spike TV working on it. From the reporting it seems it's not exactly a sure thing yet, and given the nature of the books, I'll be surprised if anything other than a bastardized good-vs-evil story every comes out in moving picture format.

I found the same thing but would also recommend checking out Aurora, one of his later books; he's definitely less dry when it's a self-contained story.

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