This book felt like it took forever to get through. I loved the first book in the series. It was a great concept. And I loved that the following two books continued, following many of the original characters over almost 200 years of colonizing and transforming Mars.

What I did not like was the constant meandering and rambling that happens. The author often goes into several pages of explanation for something like how memory engrams work or how tidal action works. Some parts feel like you're reading an encyclopedia. I was often left unsure as to what the main story was supposed to be about.

It's a shame, as the book has some wonderful imagination in it. The city on Mercury. The asteroid colonies, the base on Miranda. We get a glimpse of all of those. But, by the time I got to the end, I couldn't wait for the book to end. ( )

I found this to be the best of the three books in the series. Like the other two, it's very long and requires some patience to get through, as the pace varies a lot from some short bursts of action and some much longer philosophical reflections on life, society, politics and environmental issues. What was particularly interesting (and unique to this volume) was a visit back to Earth by some of the characters, including NIrgal, who was Martian-born and so had never experienced Earth before. The description of a post-flood Earth with all its changed landscapes and adaptations was fascinating, as was the description of what the unfamiliar gravity, atmosphere and environment would do to someone not used to those conditions, There were a larger number of shorter chapters in the book, which seemed to make the reading easier!
Overall, a great work of imagination, and scarily predictive of where we are now in terms of increasing concern about environmental impacts and Earth's resources (not to mention SpaceX!) ( )

This book is too long and boring for me. It's not to say that there aren't good moments, there are, but mostly in the final third of the book. It took me more than a month to read it, because I was so bored.
Still, as it happens with other stories told in several books, it is at the very end that you realize the whole story that's been told to you. It is a very satisfying story of the colonization and terraforming of mars in 200 years. All in all, they are good books, but they would be more appealing to a wider audience if each book was shorter, at least 100 pages shorter. As it stands, i understand that it can only appeal to hard sci-fi fans.
I will read more books by the author. ( )

I guess this is intended to wrap things up somehow. I think it got a bit more evanescent than I can properly process. I think it was in Green Mars that we heard a lot about Nirgal's vision of green and white, some kind of alchemical fusion thing. Here it's more green and red, Sax and Ann. I can get with that a bit. I am preoccupied with philosophy of science. Science is surely some kind of disciplined engagement with the world. The most basic polarity would be perception and action. Ann would be the passive perceptive appreciative pole; Sax is the active controlling creative pole. But these two poles can't work in isolation, they have to marry. Well, get in bed together anyway!

So maybe that does wrap the whole trilogy up, tie together the major themes and tensions. ( )

Same as Green Mars. The three are really one looong epic. ( )