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More than a review of the book itself, this is a brief review of the whole trilogy.

In Red Mars robinson sends his crew of highly-cold-war-themed characters to the Promised La-- I mean, to Mars, where humanity can begin a new era of terraforming, colonization, and all-around awesomeness. But as soon as they arrive there, the colonists, all of them Spacefaring Badasses (except the radical Christian) decide that they wish to establish a New and Utopic Society, and that they deserve, nay, are obliged, to detach themselves from Earth to make a Better World.

In Green Mars, they do just that. Nobody questions their inherent assumption of uniqueness and manifest destiny. Except Earth, who is playing the villain, trying to keep Mars bound to metanational corporation and capitalism, and destroy the primeval planet for its own nefarious ends, like, well, alleviating hunger, and population density.

Somewhere in there, together with everything else, the author introduces the plot device of the Longevity Treatment, so that he can have the same characters reappear throughout the generation-long task of terraforming a planet.

This Avatar-like scenario (except for the Martians, thank God) is brought to an all around successful conclusion in this current book, Blue Mars. If the Gratuitous Caps, the Slightly Cynical Tone and the Allusions to Americana are not sufficiently revealing, let me state explicitly that I did not altogether approve of the series.

It had some merits. The first book was actually entertaining, and the beginnings of terraforming on an alien, uninhabitable planet were researched with the caution and precision we would expect of a hard sci-fi author like Robinson. But the veer into politics, and, later, the lengthy, rambling digressions into more terraforming than we ever cared about, including depths of canals, precise dating of geology, etc', created books that were overly long, occupied often with things that didn't interest me at all, and characters that were flat as a cardboard cut.

And speaking of politics, I found it smug, sanctimonious, and on many levels just a little too pat. The utopia and perfect harmony blooming out of the empty; the manifest destiny of Mars to "educate" the screwed-up, old-fashioned Earth, the liberal values replacing all tradition, the "assimilationist" policy favoured even by those characters in the books who purportedly wanted cooperation with Earth. I felt like reminding Robinson that Melting Pot strategies stopped being popular already in the sixties.

There was something generally dated in these books, and it was not the science. Some of the cold war vibe, perhaps, but more than that, this notion of a perfect society that can be better than other societies due to an inherent virtue of being as liberal and harmonious and rational as it was possible to be. The clear-cut idea of humanity hurtling through the medieval primate urges of its patriarchal past into a clean pure future where American - that is, Martian - values (except capitalism, of course, which was replaced by an only slightly edited and miraculously viable socialism) guide mankind into the glorious Golden Age culmination of human history.

I can't deny that the author did at least try to attempt to insert inherent human frailties, like greed, lust for power, dogmatism, reactionism, and xenophobia, into the mix, but his solutions were often as one-sided as the problems he tried to present, and grated on my admittedly much-too-cynical nerves immensely.

It's not a bad read, but by the end of three books, I was quite done.