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I have this problem with KSR in general; IMHO, the Mars Trilogy is much less annoying in this regard than "The Years of Rice and Salt", which inspired that sort of reaction in record amounts. Another writer who inspires that reaction in me is Robert Sawyer.

The basic problem isn't really that they're bad writers; far from it, they both write beautifully and tend to develop interesting and well-thought out plots. The problem that both of them have (having not read anything by Anne Rice, I'm uncertain if she falls into the same trap) is that they like to incorporate pet ideas into their stories which are either uninteresting to the reader or which, if completely stated out, are objectively silly, and vigourously push these plot elements. The result is that my suspension of disbelief, essential for enjoying a novel, gets shaken up from time to time. I'll provide a few examples:

"The Years of Rice And Salt" is the KSR book I most recently read and is the most egregious offender in this regard. The biggest and most serious flaw, IMHO, is that KSR wipes out an entire chunk of the world (Europe) prior to the Renaissance, and yet technological progress somehow is not adversely affected by this. This flies in the face of all logic; if the area which (from the Renaissance on) is the main mover in terms of innovation and change is suddenly eliminated, you would expect to see... less innovation and change. Certainly not none, and I'd figure that the ball would have started rolling somewhere else sooner or later, but it's not unreasonable to expect that progress would be retarded about 100 years or so. "The Years of Rice and Salt" also featured KSR's love of Sufi mysticism, an annoyance in both this and "Red Mars" which severely destracted from both the alt-history of "Rice and Salt" and the SF "Red Mars".

On the other hand, Robert Sawyer seems less enamored of certain ideas than blinded by them. His Neanderthal stories depict a totally unbelievable civilization, and in general there is such a strong PC streak underlying the assumptions of his book that surely I can willingly suspend disbelief at how easy it is to travel to a parallel dimension because R. Sawyer obviously comes from one.

The king of all offenders in this category, however, is actually Arthur C. Clarke himself, who in a few of his books is *so* outrageously, illogically, and irrelevantly antireligious that it's like being mortally insulted throughout the whole story. "3001" was so hideously bad in this respect that I've basically sworn off his books entirely.

I know that the upper stage will require a nontrivial amount of fuel. The idea is to replace the first stage of the rocket, not the entire rocket or everything but a tiny corrective bus-like stage. It's more like a very long cannon that accelerates a rocket at non-lethal-to-humans speeds. The air evacuation part is merely to reduce air resistance, and it might not be worth it in terms of energy saved, to be honest.

The Soviets deployed space weapons not-so-secretly in response to paranoid fantasies of US space weapons real and imagined for a long, long time, so this is no surprise. They armed a few of their Salyut space stations, after all, in case the US armed an Apollo with machine guns and flew up to shoot it down. Not kidding.

No point to it, Errorist. First off, that property applies to water, which has a variety of odd properties for a liquid of its molecular weight. Second, it wouldn't work to orbital heights.

The biggest problem with the 'pipeline to heaven' is the mass of the liquid in the system, which would quickly prove to be prohibitive. It's far simpler to build a normal elevator with a tanker car of sorts.

The ultimate wag-the-dog scenario. If the US, Russia, China, and EU collaborated on it, there's really not much other people can do about it, and it gives you the best possible excuse to slap around the usual suspects for starting wars (ever notice that, apart from WWII, all the modern wars are set in motion by some pissant little country that has no particular world power? (1)) into some semblance of peace. Let's put Cobra on this idea.

(1) Whether you agree with the war or not, the late Iraq War is definitely thought of as being part of the greater War on Terror in the US, so that war is not a counterexample. The only example of a major power starting up a major war in the past hundred years is World War II.

Then use either use storable non-cyrogenic fuels or try something else - long coiled tanks that an aerogel ball can be pushed through like a piston by compressed gas, a rigid umbrella-like device that can open up inside the tank and pull down to force the fuel/oxidizer out, building a tank that has an insulative blanketlike thing around the gas bladder so IT can expand (regardless of whether or not the cyrogenic liquid can be stored in a flexible bag, the gas is storeable)...

The EU does believe it to be 'the wave of the future'; however, Europe is so economically/demographically screwed that i can only call this a hallucination. From my perspective, it is not Washington but Brussels that is the center of the surreal, generating phone-book sized constitutions, having thousands of elderly people die in national heat waves, having the vapors over genetically modified foods, and seeming to take joy in reflexively opposing the US on any given issue.

I have other thoughts on the issue, but I've basically decided that the best course is to simply let Europe twist in the wind until it wants to get serious again. As far as I'm concerned, NATO is almost dead, certainly on ice, and shared cultural roots be damned.

Odds are still better than the astronaut corps.

FL definitely to Bush. Kerry is getting crushed like a cheap tin can. So much for exit polls; of course, they called the governor's race 2 years ago "a virtual dead heat" and Jeb Bush won by similar numbers.

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,128 … tml]Bionic Rat-brain computers fly planes.

No further comment necessary. However, the next generation of rover control 'hardware' has probably been found. This sort of computer could autonomously guide a rover around, I bet.

Requesting reinforcements... an army of straw men is advancing on my position.

I'm saying that, on Mars, in the context of a colony that has no or few resources to spare, the option to incarcerate an individual for long periods of time is not available. The option to invest a lot of time and money into ensuring that the innocent are not executed is also not available. Thus people will be executed, and if there is any sort of sizeable violent crime rate, there will be innocent people executed. If you cannot deal with this, don't go to Mars. At least, don't go until the colony is larger and can support those sorts of things. No amount of airy argument is going to budge this reality.

As for an earlier comment of yours:

No, deterrence is irrelevant for violent crimes under the conditions of an early Mars colony. As you pointed out, criminals are motivated by fear of capture, not fear of punishment. However, a criminal that is dead (or permanently behind bars, although that isn't a realistic option for Mars at first) isn't able to commit the same crime again. Most people who speed are 'serial speeders', so to speak, most people who rob banks are likely to do it again.

I also don't advocate the death penalty on Mars for minor offenses; there are likely to be any number of unpleasant crap jobs around the dome that can be doled out to people who have engaged in petty nonsense (small time theft, fistfights, etc). In the case of murder, rape, etc, however....

Actually, if I recall correctly, this is not quite an accurate summary of events. The terrorists had kidnapped the man and were threatening all sorts of nasty things to him. The KGB abducted two members of the group, shot them full of bullets, stapled a note to one's forehead saying "Two a day until we get ours back" and dumped them on the doorstop of a sympathizer. Various terrorists started turning up in Beirut dumpsters over the next few days.

The Russian was released.

That terrorist group never bothered the Russians again.