this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
62 points (95.6% liked)
Science Fiction
16903 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don’t know why but unable to finish a Kim Stanley’s book.
He tends toward extreme optimism about humanity which can be a nice change from constant doom but also rings hollow and feels trite sometimes, depending on my mood.
Actually, the optimism in ministry for the future depressed me and made me not finish it. Even though at the time I was wanting for some optimistic climate fiction.
Here we have this huge threat to humanity and way too little is done about it. But then all the 'solutions' in the book are so unrealistic, like russians using oil equipment in antarctica to help the world… it just made me more depressed about climate change that the solutions he came up with are more fever dreams.
the first chapter was very well done though and should be required reading
That’s not why I find Stanley hard, kind of like over optimism. My problem tend to be with the flow of his writing
There's a section in the Mars trilogy where several pages are given over to describing how a farm is laid out, with the wind coming over this rise and hitting this rock, which means a little pool of moisture forms in this particular spot, making a little ridge in the soil that shelters a bit of grass. Oh and someone blew up a space station with a missile.
I've heard that some people just can't get into them, which is fair enough, but I cannot relate.
I agree though that he's not everybody's cup of tea.
I finished the first of the Mars trilogy. I just found it for the most part very boring. I started the second but moved on to other books. I'm sure I'll finish them but they just need to be after things I desire to read more.
The first book is a slower burn, stick it out it's worth it.
It does have one of the coolest moments in all sci-fi though, where
Spoiler
the rebels crash a moon into the planet as a form of direct actionIt's been a while, wasn't that the
Spoiler
space elevator that came down?Yup!
Spoiler
The cable wrapped it's way around the equator.I couldn't get enough of them, myself.
I actually love that people enjoy different things though. How boring would life be if everyone liked the same stuff?
Right!
And I love Reynolds, hahaha
I have tried a couple of time Stanley’s and I will probably tried Red Mars in the future again