As It Is On Mars, Revised Second Edition Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Currently, I'm about 2/3 through this book, so I'm not saying anything about the ending! The characters spend the whole book speaking in pages of expository technical details on how to survive on Mars in a forced and stilted fashion. Their dialogs are about as far from "realistic" as you can get, so for me they fell flat.
The opening for the book was an absolute killer for a novel; two large chapters of Congressional hearings, after a 2-page prologue explaining some of the lead-in events on Mars. If I wasn't such a Mars fanatic, I wouldn't have made it past these chapters.
Technically, I'm enjoying the book. Most everything in it has been completely predictable, but that might be due in part to the fact I've read most of the other "Mars" books currently in print, so the way they set up their colony, such as it is, is old news to me. It's not a page-turner, but I'm not stopping either. It's a bit of a treatise on setting up a colony, in many respects, so some readers may get a lot of pleasure out of it for that.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the book are Cronin's insights into Zen Buddhism, perhaps because I know nothing about it.

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In this new edition, the story is unchanged, as is the length of the book, but there is a significant improvement in how the tale is told in the beginning chapters.In Chapter One of the old edition, the scene was a Congressional hearing, where we find out only indirectly about the catastrophe on Mars. In the new Chapter One, the scene is the NASA landing site, where we directly experience the horror and anguish of the two survivors as they deal with the disaster and its aftermath. This edition also has three maps, and minor updates to reflect the latest Mars science and geology. The tale continues to be set on an accurate Mars, and lays the foundation for the very different struggle in Book Two of the Series, Give Us This Mars (2003), and finally the Great Martian War in Book Three, Give Us This Mars (2005).

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