"Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson

I had this book on my reading list for a long time, but deprioritized it multiple times, as stories about Mars never much interested me.  Mars has always seemed mundane, and little green Martians never stroke any kind of connection to me, neither did stories of Mars colonization (why waste all that money, time and resources when we can just build generation ships like Clarke's Rama, or make asteroids inhabitable).  On the other hand, this novel has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and that is usually a good indicator of an amazing novel (to think I'd never discover The Wind-Up Girl or The Three Body Problem if I didn't scour the Hugo and Nebula awards - two best Sci Fi works of modern times!).

Not in this case.  The novel is pretty average; the science is OK, but nothing special, the characters are paper thin, hollow shells, uninteresting and devoid of complexity, basically just reciting replicas without any real feeling.  John Boone, the wild west super hero that's addicted to drugs, Frank Chalmers, the bad guy who is really just incompetent and petty, and Maya Toitovna (I can't help but reading her last name as Hoyti-Toytovna each time :) the materialistic Russian chick who uses her vagina to achieve her goals, and of course the all-mysterious Hiroko Ai (Ai is love in Japanese), who is supposed to add exoticism to the story, especially with her relation to The Coyote (another useless character), and her acting as the Queen Mother Bee to an army of children later.  Why do Western authors think Japanese are exotic?  Japanese cultural tropes are a mainstay in the Western World, only if you take a little time to look.

The "First 100" get over to Mars on Ares, the long-haul ship assembled in space.  Once they get there, the primitive primate brain takes over and they fuck (a lot!), cheat each other, kill each other, split in petty little groups, based on petty beliefs and become a sort of the Wild West for Earth, which is overpopulated and ran by huge corporation (TransNats).  Eventually there's a rebellion because the TransNats keep sending more immigrants to Mars and the local infrastructure cannot support it, many people are killed, most infrastructure is destroyed, but not everybody and not all, because, of course, we have a sequel coming!

Overall a very boring and disappointing book - I will not be reading the sequels.