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Rxke

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2003-11-03

Posts: 3,669

Re: KSR's Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars... - What do think of his books?

however the characters that inhabited his stories were one dimensional and made of cardboard. They didn't feel real, and they were not interesting.

I wouldn't know about that... After all I'm only a first-generation AI in beta testing stage...

Seriously, you have a point, though he did his best to errrr... threedimensionalize some characters in the end, like Ann and Sax getting closer toghether..

I guess he made them one dimensional types to make it simpler for him and the reader to lay out the whole Red vs. Green theme, and some other stuff I currently can't express correctly, (Boone vs Frank vs Nadia's appoach re: politics/goading/leading people) because I'm waiting for the caffeine to kickstart my brains.
I mean the self-diagnostic boot-up process to finish//// END OF TRANSMISSION 

DanielCook

Member

From: Atlanta, GA

Registered: 2004-02-19

Posts: 90

Re: KSR's Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars... - What do think of his books?

Morn'

I guess having a "cast" of 100 odd characters did not really help with character development - people already complain that the books are too long.

(But in my opinion, a good book can never be too long)

As some of the First Hundred got killed off or cast aside as the story progressed, it did allow more focussed character development for the "central" cast members, like Sax, Nadia, Art and Ann.

KSR wrote a fouth book set in Mars, called "The Martians" - contains a set of short stories / vignettes based either in the traditional KSR Tri-color Mars, and expanding on some plot points or general history, or set in an alternative history where the First Hundred never went to Mars ... It was interesting enough, but too disjointed.

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-- memento mori

Tom Kalbfus

Banned

Registered: 2006-08-16

Posts: 4,401

Re: KSR's Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars... - What do think of his books?

I can't help but think of how badly all those investors and stockholders of the Transnational companies got screwed when Mars had its revolution and reordered its whole society and economy to exclude them, they are the ones who paid for the terraforming of Mars, and they got royally screwed. The were the big suckers of the whole Red, Green, Blue trilogy, and its not that their all rich either. I try to put myself in the shoes of a transnat investor, and I keep on coming up with the question of why should I pay for this all if the Martians are simply going to rebel and steal my investments.

As for the misbehavior of the Transnats, we'll every good story needs a villian or obstacle to overcome, and the transnats were it. Terraforming Mars takes a long time and any author of such a trilogy needs a filler to keep the story going while the reader waits for Mars to be terraformed. 200 years is a bit short, but I think projecting society and technology 200 years into the future is very difficult, I don't think it will stay the same as it is today, but what changes will occur in 200 years is also hard to say. Transnats served as the badguys in these books, and I understand the literary need for such. Heck I might have used them myself were I reading the book, but them in Blue Mars, trying to make general conclusions about economics and transnats based on the behavior of some of them was a step too far. I don't think you can say much about economics based on the behavior of fictional transnats. The conclusion I come to is that the Transnats weren't governed or regulated very well by their respective governments, they were allowed to build private armies and fight wars with each other. I think a more realistic solution would be to have stronger national governments with monopolies on military force which is what is in effect to day, rather than to revolutionize the concept of private property and reorder society. In better only to make sufficient changes to solve the problem at hand rather than to reorder the way everyone lived to solve those problems.

I think misbehaving companies don't require sweeping statements on economics in general, only that those misbehaving companies be policed and the offenders punished. A corrupt corporate manager is not an inditement of Capitalism, just an inditement of that company in particular. In the Red, Green, Blue trilogy, the Transnats were simply allowed to get away with too much, and the solution was simply, enforce the law and don't let them get away with flouting it.

I think a better way to do a terraforming story, is to put the main characters at the end of the terraforming process. One way I suggested in another thread is to present an alternate history where Mars was already terraformed and had humans on it. the terraforming was done by aliens in the distant past, and NASA astronauts are presented with the final product of a terraformed Mars. the technology is still reconizable because its todays technology, the society is recognizable because it is today's society and politics, it is only Mars that is different, and the worlds space programs as a result of this different Mars are also different. In NASAs case, the Apollo program was followed by a manned exploration of Mars, when the Mariner spacecraft came back with positive results of very flagrent Mars life on its surface, it is really transplanted and modified Earthlife. now you may ask why did the aliens do this? They didn't do it for the Earthlings, but for themselves, but then some disaster over took them living only the finished product of a terraformed Mars. In this case I do not have centuries to kill and to tell the story. Mars is done, and all that is left to do is for astronauts to explore it.