Mars trilogy

I getting thought anything by Kim S. Robinson. I read the Mars trilogy 20 years ago and plan to re-read it once I'm done. Recently went thought "Ministry for the future" from him. Weird mix of factual non fiction and SF. Read like a fan fiction of a iPCC Report. Outside of hard SF, Ursula K Leguin. Great world building.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Jam packed with ideas crucial to the next 100-150 years. I reference these the way more insufferable people reference Ayn Rand.

On the mars issue the mars saga (red mars, blue mars and green mars) is also pretty amazing to read.

This is very close to how I feel about Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I read them because many of my friends who were also sci-fi readers raved about them. I enjoyed Red Mars but I really had to slog through Green Mars and Blue Mars. Red Mars was fun and interesting, but I could have done without a few hundred pages of Sax Russell talking about plants in Green Mars. I think worldbuilding books take a certain level of investment, even among voracious readers.

Neal Stephenson, Anathem Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons Greg Egan, Diaspora and Permutation City Frank Herbert, Dune Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy Vernon Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky [Note to Hollywood: can we please have a Culture movie?]

I have strong opinions about this. My criteria for a book being science fiction and not fantasy is that is must be based on scientific thinking. The author must have done some work to determine whether whats happening in his book is at least plausible according to real science, and then work out the details of how it would actually function. So I regard most "science fiction" books and almost all "science fiction" films as really being fantasy. Essentially they are works of fantasy or dramatic fiction re-skinned with lasers and aliens instead of magic and goblins (to a great or lesser extent). So dune is a great book but it is 90% fantasy, there is only a little bit of research done by the author on desert ecosystems. My favourite real science fiction author is Arthur C clarke. some good books by him... earthlight the fountains of paradise islands in the sky the sands of mars rama songs of distant earth Also would recommend accelerando by Charles Stross and the mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Mars Trilogy ... it made me come to closer to hard science fiction than ever before ...

The trilogy of Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, and Mona Lisa Overdrive is still my favorite work of fiction, and also, to my mind, exemplifies the kind of taut, awesome writing that I would want to do if I wrote novels. It the only series of 3 books I have read more than once. I caught these books at just the right time in my life (age 13 or 14), leading my high-school fascination with Japan and rekindled interest in computing, and probably played an inordinately large role in me ending up as a programmer who lives in Tokyo, two decades later. I like great sci fi best, but I think most of it is crap, including virtually all of the old pulp sci fi and Asimov I grew up reading (which was basically all of it), Star Wars/Trek, etc. Other than Gibson's stuff, some of the truly spectacular sci fi I have read is the very-dense-and-not-at-all-thriller-ish Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), and the fast-paced-and-awesome Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. That led me to read all of Wilson's books, many of which are also good. Also Haldeman is an author worth reading, though not all of his books hit their mark.…

If you like sci-fi - try the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy. Not exactly recent, but I thought quite good.

The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think it paints the most realistic idea of space travel, interplanetary society and Mars colonization....just about the most exciting stuff ever. Also, it's pretty hard sci fi and so the reader learns a lot about Martian geology and such along the way.