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Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is a glorious beast. It is one of the most extraordinary science fiction epics I have ever read. Vast and complex and meticulously researched, character-driven but interplanetary in scope, gritty, political, beautiful, inventive, and always surprising. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me shiver in awe.

So why only three stars for Blue Mars, the final installment?

Well.

Blue Mars is set after the colonization struggles of Red Mars and the political upheavals of Green Mars. The blurb on the back promised even higher stakes this time: When a global flood wreaks havoc on the overpopulated Earth, immigration policy becomes a critical and divisive issue as the Martians draft their first global constitution. With desperate Terrans spoiling for interplanetary war, the ongoing dispute between the Red (conservationist) and Green (pro-terraforming) factions on Mars threatens to erupt into yet another civil war. And then there is the rising popularity of the Mars First party, comprised of native-born Martians who want to cut ties from Earth completely. The first few sections of this book certainly seemed to be setting up for some magnificently messy conflicts.

But then it all just kind of... fizzles. Instead, we spend a tiresome majority of this book with various characters who have decided to check out from life and wander the Martian wilderness. About a third of the novel is just descriptions of various regions of the planet and what they look like now that the terraforming has really taken hold. It's not that I dislike this kind of thing - Robinson's prose is the pleasant kind of didactic - and it's not that this wasn't a prominent feature of the first two books - because ohhhh yes, it was. It's just that the first two books also had plenty of fast-paced, shocking, heartbreaking sections too. Blue Mars just slowed to a crawl and never picked up any more steam.

Much of Blue Mars is a meditation on mortality, or the lack thereof. In Red Mars, the scientists develop a longevity treatment that pauses aging. As a result, we are able to follow the same core group of characters throughout all three books, despite that the events span roughly 300 years. At first, I was really happy with this development - it sucks to get emotionally invested in characters and then have to watch them all succumb to the ravages of time. But by about halfway through Blue Mars I was begging them all to just die already. Their same old interpersonal dramas, their increasingly antiquated beliefs, their unending complaints as their bodies and minds reach the limits of their useful life. It was just a parade of misery. I wanted to read about the younger generations of Martians, their new ways of living, their visions for the future, their energy.

Or failing that, uh, whatever happened to that population crisis on Earth? And everything else the first quarter of the book seemed to be setting up? It's not that those issues aren't dealt with later on, but they never take center stage and they never really turn into anything worth caring about. I miss Red Mars and the way it had all those, you know, events.

So Blue Mars was a little disappointing, a meandering, largely plot-free doorstopper of a book. But I still love KSR, and I still wholeheartedly recommend the Mars trilogy - it's so big and so ambitious and so thorough and so fascinating. It's a world I think about often, a messy utopia filled with characters that will always have a special place in my heart (even if they did overstay their welcome a bit by book 3). Ever since finishing it, I've had the urge to pick up Red Mars and embark on this 2000-page journey all over again. But I'll wait. I'll let it settle a bit. I'll go explore some other worlds for awhile.