[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]Oh, and has anyone here read Kim Stanley Robinsons' Mars trilogy? I'd like to know what you think of it if you have.[/quoteost_uid0]

Bloody awful. I managed to struggle through all three weighty tomes (in the wrong order: Green, Red, Blue) because the various technological gizmos and scientific wizardry held my interest.

[quoteost_uid0]some of the social elements are rather outdated [/quoteost_uid0]

A lot of the golden age stories make references to closing circuits or contacts and tripping relays, rather that hitting buttons or flipping switches. Computing seems to be a rather labourious process too, involving city-block sized banks of vaccuum tubes and several hours to figure out a simple orbital problem. These days a desktop computer could work that hour very quickly. It's always interesting to see what people in 1950 thought 2000 would be like.[/colorost_uid0]