Readers familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series will be familiar with this story. This novel has its own take on the Mars colonization story, but is similar enough that sci-fi readers may not to read this one in the same season as Red Mars. This book gets bogged down is logistics and details a lot, so it is a bit slower-paced, despite opportunities for a faster, more action oriented plot. I was frustrated at how the main character, a journalist, has no interest in investigating the terrorist attacks going on in her wake, despite losing or nearly losing friends and being at risk herself. If her PTSD is why she doesn't want to investigate, that needed to be said, because otherwise it ddn't make sense. The set-up seemed to be leaning to a crime-novel sort of story, and the crime even gets solved, just with all the middle bits of that narrative missing. Instead we got LOTS of tangential discussion about politics, economics and philosophy, and scenic travels on Mars.
So, this was not a 5-star book for me. I did like this one, though, and would recommend it, just not to everyone. Many of my friends would get mired in the tangents and DNF this book rather than stick it out for the next plot points.

This is an interesting example of a book that I don't think is particularly well written, but scratches a certain kind of itch in me that the areas which I thought were clunky or cute didn't really bother me. It was also interesting to see how I would deal with a Mars colonisation book so soon after reading The Weinersmith's "A City On Mars", which went into great detail to debunk the exact premise of this book. Luckily it seems my ability to discern and enjoy fiction is still intact, and this slowly deliberate crawl through a future Mars society was rather entertaining.

Ailia is a war journalist suffering with PTSD, which makes her job kind of hard. She is offered an assignment to go and do a deep dive into the current status of the Mars project, about thirty years into existence, with several bases across the planet run by different national and corporate claims but slowly grasping towards something like its own independence. And so Ailia goes to Mars, and reports to her client (who use her reports to their own political ends), meets various managers, and has quite long, quite dry conversations about politics, ethics, and the science of building on Mars. There is a slow-burning plot of a terrorist - the Slow Bomber - who is trying to complicate things on Mars and seems to strike around her, but the pleasure here is in these long, almost Socratic, conversations about governance and post-human ethics (AI is free to be sentient on Mars in a way it is not allowed on Earth).

I rarely got the sense that there were different voices here, even the robot AI characters all seemed to talk in the same tone, but since the value here was in the content of those conversations, it didn't really bother me. Klyford's glib use of science fiction references too riled me - asides about Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a gag of 'by your command' being said by a robot took me out of the novel, and as mentioned above there wasn't much urgency in the plot or in Ailia's assimilation and finding her people on Mars. Even the sequences when she slowly and awkwardly falls in love is more awkward due to the writing than the content. Nevertheless there is a lot of smart material here, and in particular this did pick up nicely on some of the issues the Weineersmith's bemoan is always left out, namely the kind of governance and legal system you would need on a frontier planet. Come for the ideas, come for the low peril adventure, and suffer the odd clunk in the writing.