Shards of Honor
Puppy: on
Due to technical difficulties here at freeshell I have been unable to blog for the last few days. Now I have a patch for the difficulty and I’m back in blogness. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It’s not going well. I had my doubts about Red Mars and the other Marses only compound its flaws. I have to wonder what people saw in these books to give them so many awards.
I couldn’t bring myself to take Blue Mars to Nantucket with with me over the weekend, so I read Shards of Honor by LMB instead. After running around in circles on the martian landscape, a book with a plot was a great improvement. Maybe the fundamental flaw of Robinson’s books is the absence of weddings. That’s one martian literary tradition Kim Stanley Robinson failed to include in his trilogy; Edgar Rice Burroughs wouldn’t dare to publish a Mars book where no fair maidens were rescued and married. In Shards of Honor the fair maiden rescues the man, but that’s a minor detail. Sergyar isn’t Mars.
The book I’m currently reading instead of Blue Mars is Startide Rising by David Brin. I read the first Uplift novel a while back and was a little disappointed; it was a good mystery but not the epic I was expecting. Startide Rising is looking little more epic, fortunately, and it even has a plot. Just no areography, please!