Red Planet Blues

This book talks a bout the life of a detective called Alex in Mars, it shows you a futuristic life style and how people are living there .
In the beginning of this book someone comes and hire Alex for a job, its not complicated case and its quite predictable.. But thats not the whole story, it was like an opener to the book.

I don't want to spolie anything, let me just say that the ending of this book and the whole story were really good. Robert is a good writer and his books are awesome, am a big fan of the WWW series.

The narrator Christian Rummel did a great job with the voices and the accents.

summing all of that, is another great book with great plot.

Highly recommended, specially if you have read Robert J. Sawyer's books

Yes! The Story moves right along and the Narrator does the interesting men, women, and others unusually well. Spoiler: Sorry, No bug eyed monsters. That's a good thing!

The story is interesting and the pace is steady. No long boring blah blah blah will the Alien get the hero.

This was my first. Christian Rummel's performance made a very good story even better. I'll be looking for more of his audio books.

I liked moments like: How did you manage to get my Mars rover covered with mud? and how fast a normal dog could run under the only dome on Mars.

Another well written, interesting story by Robert J. Sawyer. Red Planet Blues is a solid mystery story. My personal favorites are Homonids & Rollback.

As a voracious reader of the Younger Boomer persuasion, I may not be among the author's - or performer's - target demo, but I found Red Planet Blues' plotting hopelessly contrived, unnecessarily convoluted and forced and its characters totally flat, predictable and embarrassingly stereotypical. Its reader's delivery portrayed an adolescent's interpretation of the tone and cadence an "old-fashioned hard-boiled gumshoe" might employ - but, in Mr. Rummel's defense, Mr. Sawyer didn't give him much else to work with.
If Sawyer was aiming for a sci-fi inflected riff on John D. McDonald or early Robert Parker, he's way off the mark.

It would take an exceptional amount of work to make this book into a four or five star listening experience for me.

No

Nothing

The reader was actually fairly good.

Sometimes we listen to a futuristic novel and say to ourselves, "Yup, that could happen" or, "That is in the realm of possibility." We did not make our purchase expecting Fantasy, or Sci-Fi Comedic Opera; we purchased good old-fashined science fiction. Even if our story has a crime thriller theme, we still made our purchase based on the expectation of some solid, thought-provoking, science fiction brain-candy. Well, my experience with with Red Plant Blues was just the opposite. I found myself saying, "This is totally bogus. This is not Sci-Fi, it's a Jack Reacher on Mars novel." (Note: For those who have not listened to a Reacher novel...think Dick Tracy on steroids [sans the badge])

Everything about the novel, Red Planet Blues, is far too fantastical to even contemplate. Not that human-consciousness androids are out of the realm of future possibility, its merely that Robert J. Sawyer, the author, presents them as such ludicrous characters that they lose their viability as plausible entities.

The novel begins by asking us to empathize with a down and out private detective who is (for reasons unknown) exiled to Mars. The theme is thus: A Private-Eye, with nothing, gets a case that could make him rich if he pursues an unethical pathway (if he was ethical in the first place - we don't know that). However, the plot is so muddled with extraneous characters and unbelievable events that we, as listeners, lose sight of the big ethical questions. Hence, we are left with listening to a drama unfold about a guy that does pretty dangerous stuff on Mars without a believable motivation to risk dying in the near vacuum of its hostile planetary atmosphere. As the audience you will say to yourself..."That was pretty stupid, why did he do that?"

If you can suspend credibility for ten hours and listen to this book as a sequence of interesting, but wholly unbelievable incidents on a planet with a hostile environment, then by all means, go for it. Otherwise, let the data-bits of this novel rest on the Audible servers.

In memory of Mr. Ebert...two thumbs down!

In true form, Robert Sawyer came up with a unique story line. It is fast moving, exciting and as all Robert Sawyer books, a unique twist in his story. I'm a fan of Sawyer, and I read every book. .He never disappoints. Though Hominids will always be my favorite Sawyer books, Red Planet Blues is really very good. He creates a believable planet history, love how he deals with aliens. It's hard to put down and once completed, you will ponder concepts for some time. Great author, one of my favorite sci-fi authors.

In general, I like Robert Sawyer. But I have to say that his Ontario is a lot more credible than his Mars. Wonder why? The central premise of this work is easy to grasp, and since it's obvious enough from the blurb, I can't call this a spoiler: this is a Raymond Chandler style Philip Marlowe mystery, transported to Mars. Cute, clever idea, right? Wrong. It's been done before, many times, and much better. The Marlowe character, an off-the-shelf, hard-bitten, morally ambiguous noir-detective, is pure cardboard. Every twist and turn of the plot, even those meant to be surprising or genre-stretching, can be predicted from the first half hour, leaving the listener resigned rather than intrigued.

Christian Rummel's narration is excellent as always, but he deserves better material. This is the first Sawyer I've heard since his enjoyable WWW trilogy, and I have to say I'm disappointed.