John Jr.’s Reviews > Blue Mars > Status Update

“There were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker” (634).

“They were specks in this universe, specks! But what ideas they had. People would do anything for the sake of an idea, anything” (504).

“It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past” (375).

KSR may have been optimistic to write this trilogy. A work this substantial must call for a level of belief—that it can be done and is worth doing—on the scale of President Kennedy’s declaration about going to the Moon. Now that the trilogy, like the lunar missions, is done, it has the lasting value of conveying to readers some of the same optimism.

I’ve read one novel in the Mars trilogy in each of the past two summers, and now I’m happy to be reading the third. Looks like I’ll be here a while. Good!