Weekend Reading Roundup (02 October 2017)

[nanila]

How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

Returned to Mars

[ed_rex]

On a whim, I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars from my shelves the other day, dusted it off, and suddenly found myself about two thirds of the way through it. Probably for the tenth(ish) time.

One of these days I'm going to do a major write-up of the entire trilogy, but for now I'll just say that Robinson managed at least two really neat tricks. He beautifully subverted the Heroic (almost always) Man trope at the heart of way too much science fiction (I'm not giving away too much in noting that the book's most charismatic character is killed in the book's prologue), while building an admirably complex society that no one is in control of, or even has a handle on. And he makes the long hard slog of politics interesting. How many other epic trilogies include not just one, but two, constitutional conventions?