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Blue Mars  By  cover art

Blue Mars

By: Kim Stanley Robinson
Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
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Publisher's summary

Acclaimed visionary author Kim Stanley Robinson is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winner. Blue Mars is the final volume in Robinson's seminal science-fiction trilogy, which began with Red Mars and continues with Green Mars.

The once red and barren terrain of Mars is now green and rich with life - plant, animal, and human. But idyllic Mars is in a state of political upheaval, plagued by violent conflict between those who would keep the planet green and those who want to return it to a desert world.

Meanwhile, across the void of space, old, tired Earth spins on its decaying axis. A natural disaster threatens to drown the already far too polluted and overcrowded planet. The people of Earth are getting desperate. Maybe desperate enough to wage interplanetary war for the chance to begin again.

Blue Mars is a complex and completely enthralling saga - as convincing and lushly imagined a future as anyone has ever dreamed. Richard Ferrone narrates this sweeping epic with engaging personality and finesse.

©1996 Kim Stanley Robinson (P)2002 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

  • Hugo Award, Best Novel, 1997

"Robinson's achievement here is on a par with Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Herbert's Dune." (Publishers Weekly)
"A well-written, thoughtful conclusion to the trilogy." (Library Journal)

What listeners say about Blue Mars

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Trilogy Started Strong

Really enjoyed the first book. Second book started wearing on me. Third book just gave me more and more of what I didn't want.

The original 100 should have died in the first or second novel. The characters were a bit old to even start the journey (50's) in my opinion. The author then creates a way for these characters to continue living on and on to pollute Mars for all future Earth immigrants. The unbelievable thing is that these militant terrorists/scientists are willing to let the most caustic and opposition characters live on. Ann would've been assassinated like 80 years prior to the end of the story. Killing thousands of humans so that the rocky landscape can remain? Not buying it. I single out Ann as she is my least favorite.

It is a well written series and narrated well. The technology is done very well for 90's writing; doesn't feel unimaginative like other SciFi written in earlier decades.

I don't agree that most of the personnel selected to establish a Mars colony would be terrorist minded and anti human in environmental policy. Makes for nonsense drama throughout.

Anyhow. I was able to finish. There is that.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A fine end to a good series

As is the previous 2 books, Ferrone's performance has no emotion or enthusiasm. The only real problem with this book is when it jumps forward in time, it doesn't tell you the date. It covers over a century, jumping decades at a time, without tell the reader/listener where you are.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

How To Create A worker's paradise on mars

This book was a complete waste of time, a soap box for the author to play house with a bunch of communists, using contrived dialog, situations and events to create a new version of the glorious October Revolution.

The Soviet revolution ultimately failed, as does this novel.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

good series

This is a pretty darn good series, though a bit preachy, it has a good story line and it is told in a fresh manner. The only suggestion I have is that the narrator purchase a dictionary so that when a word he is ineasy with can be pronounced correctly.

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Brilliant about everything but human beings.

The series started out with KSR in the seat of Ben Bova...but it tragically ended with KSR happily taking up his intended seat as Joseph Stalin.

it was evident from the beginning of the series where KSR was taking us. but the story was intriguing. I did however stop caring for the few characters I thought were okay. KSR does not understand human beings and our motivations. this stood out to me because everything else was so researched and described.

Eventually i understood why this departure from reality was necessary. He ignored human nature to create characters who he then used to justify the whole point of the books...communism. It is socialism to be sure but a rose by any other name and all.

I understand communists [liberals] say there is a clear difference between socialism and communism and this is true. There is a difference between opening a door and turning the knob. Those who advocate for and support socialism sould understand naturally the one comes before the other. Furthermore one necessarily leads to the other.

The drivel in KSR's whole series and especially Blue Mars reads like the manifesto of any "great" communist.

That whole agenda aside Blue Mars was unreadable and damn near unlistenable. I wanted all the charactors to die. i wanted reality to step in. and i wanted a clear story. sadly i was let down. KSR chose to carelessly cast disjointed words at the page in lieu of writing anything of substance.

but when you write outside the reasonable pocket of reality one can not pen reality. Kim, write a 4th book. call it black mars. insert realistic human nature. then watch democracy rightfully and logically insert itself on the red planet.

this book was drivel, a manifesto, detached from reality where it really needed reality, and pointless to those who are humans in modern society. one would have better luck finding reality in the worthless crap put out by Scientologiests. Or better luck doing so by reading Tolken, because even though engrams and elfs are not real, they are closer to humans than the charactors forced upon us in the Mars Trilogy.

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3 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Don’t. Just don’t.

A slog. A story in search of a plot. Disappointing after the first two books in the series l

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

This Trilogy is Killing Me!

Third time is not the charm. This book is just as much of a slog to get through as it's predecessors "Red Mars" and "Green Mars". I picked up this series because the creator of the highly popular tabletop strategy board game called "Terraforming Mars" credited Kim Stanley Robinson and the Mars Trilogy with his inspiration for creating the game. For those unfamiliar with that game, it's awesome! However, maybe it's because Kim Stanley Robinson has no background in engineering, say like The Martian's author Andy Weir, that this book doesn't resonate with me any more than "Red Mars" or "Green Mars" did. Once again, the timelines covered in the plot of the book happen WAY too fast and are far too vague in the technical details.

The main characters, in dealing with the sociological, ecological, cultural, and political consequences of colonizing Mars, still just sound buffoonish. The author seems to have thoroughly researched the technological concepts, but has almost ignored researching human nature and the realistic ebb-and-flow of political economy. As a result, these characters serve no purpose other than to push forward the authors premise of the merits of some sort of socialist and communist utopia. The characters are thus not remotely relateable and just sound more like reflections of Kim Stanley Robinson's inner consciousness and worldview. Thus, the characters sound silly, dealing with non-plausible political paradigms that make you scratch your head they sound so unrealistic. I couldn't related to ANY of the characters, since they seemed non-human to me.

I need drink to collect myself after listening to this trilogy... Seriously, this trilogy almost killed me with boredom and a lack of awareness to what ACTUALLY motivates individual human beings. My neck also hurts with how many times I shook my head thinking "what is the author remotely doing here?!" Hence, I think it's safe to say that I won't be touching any of the other Kim Stanley Robinson works here on Audible.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Not The Best of The Series

I was disappointed in how Kim Stanley Robinson made such a big leap in the timeline and took too much of the story off Mars. Also, there was too much repetition of sailing on Mars' ocean. This was boring for me. And I hated the fact that we never learn what happened to Hiroko! That was an unsolved mystery!

The most interesting part to me was Sax's attempt to discover the reasons for the memory problems of the elderly whose lives had been so greatly lengthened by the gerontological treatments. I also enjoyed following the evolution of Sax's relationship with Ann.

Lastly, I didn't like the way the story ended. All in all, I got the impression that Robinson had run out of ideas for this third book of the Mars series.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The end of a great adventure

Well the story that started in Red Mars and continued in Green Mars is now ending with Blue Mars, its a great ending but there could have been more and maybe one day another book is written that follows up where this one left off

Everything is totally changed and people no longer have to wear space suites to go outside, soon they will be able to breath the air with the aid of a mask to filter out CO2, and latter without one

I said in the other reviews that these books are "dated" and they are but this one is more normalish

there is major problem with sci-fi books written before the internet was invented, many authors just miss this totally and there is no mention of a data base that can be accessed - this is missing that sorta, they have wrist devices that have cameras and can communicate but they are lacking what the internet is and can be in the future

But do listen to these 3 books because they are great, I say do it before they get much older and become really "dated"

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Why was this so praised?

This is by far the best book in the series, but I still don't understand the critical acclaim for it. The parts that took place on earth were very interesting. Over all it was still an annoying soap opera that was hard to understand the scope of since everyone lived so long. I was also really annoyed about the sexualization of a tickle fight between a 150+ year old and a 5 year old. Why couldn't that be left to childhood fun? Why did a grownup perspective have to be put on it? There were a lot of things that I wondered why they were put in or done a certain way with this series, that was just the last.

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