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A great continuation of Red Mars, which continues to build on the world, giving you a really deep sense of what Mars is like, and the politics it's undergoing. Long, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Tons of science to be enjoyed. There was also a lot of descriptions of how people were figuring out how to survive and thrive on Mars, and I loved the science of all the attempts to terraform, mostly by our scientific hero, Sax. But I think my favorite were the space elevator and its construction, and the soletta - I mean what an amazing, big thinking idea to heat a planet using a giant magnifying glass in space?

"This huge delicate object, ten thousand kilometers in diameter, bright and stately as it wheeled along between Mars and the sun, was called the soletta. Sunlight striking the soletta directly bounced through its blinds, hitting the sun side of one, then the Mars side of the next one out, and onward to Mars. Sunlight striking the annular ring in its polar orbit was reflected back and in to the inner cone of the soletta, and then was reflected again, also on to Mars. Thus light struck both sides of the soletta, and these countervailing pressures kept it moving in its position, about a hundred thousand kilometers out from Mars—closer at perihelion, farther away at aphelion. The angles of the slats were constantly adjusted by the soletta’s AI, to keep its orbit and its focus. "

"And then, as when one tugs open venetian blinds, the sun came back all at once. Blinding light! And now more blinding than ever, as the sun was noticeably brighter than it had been before the strange eclipse had begun. Now they walked under an augmented sun, the disk appearing about the same size as it did from Earth, the light some twenty percent greater than before—noticeably brighter, warmer on the back on the neck—the red expanse of the plains more brilliantly lit. As if floodlights had suddenly been turned on, and all of them were now walking a great stage."

I also loved the descriptions of the politics on Earth, especially around Praxis and it's dynamic founder, William Fort, and how the interests of all the transnats (trans nationals) resulted in what was happening on Mars. Because it does seem we are headed that way, with a few corporations that will dominate and get larger and larger because in am era of software-has-eaten-the-world, and we-are-running-out-of-natural-resources-on-earth, these companies can and will simply dominate entire spaces, and eventually surpass governments as the dominant centers of power. However to keep growing revenues as we hit tipping point of running out of natural resources, human resources and non-natural (produced) resources - is a bigger and bigger challenge, especially as numbers get larger. So you have to think on truly terrifying large scales - and thus an opportunity like Mars seems very appealing. Anyways, this seems (to me) like the path we are on, so it was interesting to see how Robinson was describing it and playing it out. But as William Fort put it:

"They don’t see the possibilities.� “The possibilities for …� “For development! Mars isn’t just an empty world, Randolph—in economic terms, it’s nearly a nonexistent world. Its bioinfrastructure has to be constructed, you see. I mean one could just extract the metals and move on, which is what Subarashii and the others seem to have in mind. But that’s treating it like nothing more than a big asteroid. Which is stupid, because its value as a base of operations, as a planet so to speak, far surpasses the value of its metals. All its metals together total about twenty trillion dollars, but the value of a terraformed Mars is more in the neighborhood of two hundred trillion dollars. That’s about one third of the current Gross World Value, and even that doesn’t make proper assessment of its scarcity value, if you ask me. No, Mars is bioinfrastructure investment, just like I was talking about. Exactly the kind of thing Praxis is looking for."