Red Mars

Well, shucks. There were parts of this I really liked. The scientific and poetic descriptions of Mars; working out some of the practical problems of space colonization, terra-forming; debating ideologies when it comes to preserving/studying a new, pristine environment vs. the pragmatic necessities of considering how to harvest resources/transform land in order to sustain human settlement; how to build a better society, how to share across specialties, priorities, cultures, belief structures. And then the heavy intrusion of the popular theme ‘the Earth is fucked'! which when it comes up in sci-fi, I always hope is acting as a preventative caution instead of a cynical statement. 
HOWEVER:
I get that politics, and interpersonal drama are also realistic aspects of any human endeavour, particularly a Mars colony, and expansion of such, but it was a bit too much of the text. That alone wasn't the problem. Secondly, if it weren't for Nadia, I wouldn't have had a single POV I actually enjoyed reading from. And then there's the inevitable ‘it's gotta get worse before it gets better' cliffhanger situation built into so many first books in a series. Knowing the likely percentages of drama vs description and discussion, I'm just not willing to invest a significant amount of time into reading the next two books. 🤷🏼‍♂️
⚠️ Heads up for prospective readers, this book suffers from being published in the 90s. There's definitely stereotypes all over the place produced by unexamined sexism, racism and xenophobia, and some fairly overt Islamophobia. It was difficult for me to discern how much was one odiously intolerant character's point of view, and how much was the author not really thinking too hard about how he was presenting certain characters/arguments.