Proper Science Fiction at it's finest and most provocative. - Rated 
Kim Stanley Robinson's RED MARS is arguably one of the best hard Sci-Fi novels ever written. The scientific detail is part of the beauty of serious speculative Science Fiction. But to be fair this is not a novel for an intellectual light weight or if someone just wants a bit of mind numbing rubbish to kill a Sunday afternoon. But if you have a love of science and the truth. And if you care about the future and enjoy a story with a huge sweeping vista and some first rate and very timely speculation on how humanity might be able to use our amazing scientific achievements to save ourselves you will most likely love the brilliant Kim Stanley Robinson's RED MARS - the first in the trilogy (Green Mars and Blue Mars follow) that tells the epic saga of the generations of the near-ish future who terraform Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson's RED MARS - do yourself a favour and buy a copy now.
Mars could be the sort of place to raise your kids - Rated
Mars is the new frontier. Trillions of dollars will be needed. Hundreds of years will pass. And it'll take 2000 pages to get there, but one day we will make Mars habitable. Business backing will diminish. Human interest will wane. Political in-fighting will tarnish the plan. Rebels will fight for independence. But slowly the planet will cease to be red and become green and then later it will turn blue.
This is good old-fashioned Hard sf. It has lots of science, all believable. And lots of characters, all indistinguishable. Robinson spent a huge amount of time researching this trilogy. Unlike most authors who use their research as a backdrop to their tale, Robinson is determined to ram all his knowledge down your throat. No detail is too small, no fact too irrelevant. He's spent years finding out how to terrraform Mars and he's going to make sure you spend years reading about it. But the massive amount of information finally breaks down your defences and you have to give in and accept it. The drawback, as with Robinson's other novels, is his turgid prose style. He has the knack of making the most exciting of scenes feel lugubrious.
If you can get past the dullness that Robinson is determined to invoke, there's a lot to get involved with. If we ever do terraform Mars, I can't believe anyone would have the courage to do it in any other way than the way Robinson has deemed it must be done.
The reverse of "dumbing down". - Rated
The three volumes of the Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue) total over 2000 dense pages of relentlessly serious and intelligent science, engineering, politics and future history. I have just finished reading the entire sequence for the third time and have enjoyed it more each time. I love fiction based on real and deep intellectual ideas and this delivers big time. The author is clearly a true renaissance man, comparable in many ways to Neil Stephenson in his breadth and depth of knowledge.
First, however, let's get the inevitable negatives out of the way.
For some reason, Robinson chooses to open the first volume of the trilogy with a gratuitously nasty flash-forward to the ugliest incident in the whole of the series. I defy any reader to get through these forty-odd pages without asking themselves if they really want to spend 2000 more in the company of this man. For "this man" read either the author or the character Frank Chambers! I count myself fortunate that I read one of the other volumes before backtracking to Red Mars as I am not sure I would have persisted otherwise. I'm guessing that Robinson is an academic and this choice comes from the same impulse of intellectual arrogance that makes a professor hit his students with the hardest part in the first lecture in order to "weed out the light-weights".
Next, I found the whole "red/green" political axis rather hard to take although I did smile at the nice subversion of what "green" means politically here-and-now! Would an expedition really be sent from earth not having resolved whether its basic mission was colonisation and terraforming or scientific investigation and conservation? The whole equipping and staffing of the mission would be different and this debate would have been resolved before they set out, with any dissenters excluded, or excluding themselves, from the mission. The entire idea of "terrorist geologists" struck me as preposterous and incomprehensible, but that is probably just me. Given some of the ridiculous and irrational ideas seemingly intelligent people will kill for, perhaps the mystical integrity of a lifeless world is not such a stretch!
Finally, I was on my third reading before I realised the other factor that is almost completely missing - a sense of humour, or any character with the capacity to enjoy life! I imagine someone pointed this out to Robinson, because he makes a half-hearted attempt in the final volume with a minor character called Zo Boon. Just as I was beginning to enjoy her sassy company, Robinson loses authorial patience with the brat and kills her off! Bummer!
On the positive side, Robinson has the knack, very rare in science fiction, of combining realistic hard science with real-world politics, sociology and psychology. The world he creates feels real and visceral and complex and chaotic, like this really could be how it will be. As far as I could tell his science and technology is real and feasible without being either too timid or veering into utopian or dystopian allegory. It is almost a textbook on how to bootstrap a dead planet into life. There is a certain amount of stereotyping in the characters, but they are still believable and rounded and Robinson writes women fully as well as he does men (if not better). But that said, the real characters in these books are intellectual ideas and Mars itself.
There is rather more geology and botany than I have patience for (the descriptive sciences not being my fascination) but I did learn a lot about engineering, planetary science, politics, economics and futurology, all while being entertained wonderfully. Read these books - they will expand your mind and make you yearn for a future filled with possibilities.
Waste of time and money - Rated 
Boring to read. Uninteresting characters. Not very good language. Too long. Very unlikely that we will send 100 scientist to Mars, at an enormous cost, without a really good way of controlling them.
It actually rates 6 stars!!! - Rated
Perhaps THE finest science fiction book I have ever read, and believe me I have read a lot of them. I am an avid sci-fi reader, having read anything from Star Trek & Star Wars to classics like Asimov, Clark & Herbert, to Philip K. Dick, Iain Banks, Ursula Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson etc etc etc... In all of these books I have found something to thrill my imagination. However, all of these authors usually emphasise one aspect of sci-fi, be it science, technology, philosophy, ethics, or simply genuine space opera with grand battles & laser guns. Nowhere have I found all of the above elements equally balanced. Robinson manages to create an account of a future Martian exploration that is simply breath-taking, both in conception and in execution.
Red Mars explores all posible aspects of a full-blown attempt to colonise Mars. Based on a solid, detailed & completely realistic account of the science and technology necessary for humans to colonise & terraform a new hostile world, Robinson goes on to explore the ethical, business, political, economical, religious and of course personal aspects of such an effort. What is amazing is that he manages to mesh everything into a coherent, albeit complicated, total, so much like real life itself that one cannot help but believe that once we decide to travel to Mars, that's how we are going to do it.
And he manages to do that without losing the human aspect! There are people among the First Hundred that we feel could live next door. Yes, they are brilliant scientists & cosmonauts, especially gifted and carefully selected, but they are also human like you & me, they have weaknesses, feelings, allegiances, preferences, agendas both obvious & hidden.... My personal favorites were Arkady, Nadia and Hiroko, but I loved the portrayal of each and every one of the characters, both good & evil.
I could go on writing pages, but I actually need only one word. The book is simply A MASTERPIECE. Read it, and then read it again (as I did). Because every time you read it, you will find something new to make you think, to make you laugh, to make you dream. Just read it.
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