HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

After reading your comment I must say that I'm somewhat left with the impression that you must have read a different book than I did.

Most of the Mars Trilogy just discusses the colonization and the issues that come up with doing so. There's a lot of discussion about setting up different sort of habitats, a space elevator, greenhouses etc. Much of this is discussed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAu5PD4OS-w#t=5m00s

There's certainly a lot of KSR's politics that bleed out of that, but he doesn't take the easy way out. His characters don't magically cure cancer, they come up with an assortment of medical treatment that among other things reduce cell division error, given the timescales involved (2020-2200) it's not unplausable that something like that would be invented.

They don't come up with a political system that everyone agrees with. There's a civil war over it (and almost another one). The end product is a federated system on Mars where each colony on the planet has control over its own affairs within some limits. Terraforming is a federal issue, so is water management, the right to health care and other things like that. The full text of the constitution is available in "The Martians". It's quite interesting.

Finally out of around 100k lines in the novel around 100 contain the word "sex". That's a fuzzy metric, but I didn't find that it discussed partying, drugs and sex out of proportion.

⬐ mkramlich

thanks Kim ;)