Gerald M. Kilby

Colony Mars Series (Books 1 to 5)

If you like Sci Fi that is not just Cowboys and Indians in space (I’m looking at you Halo) then you may like these books.

Be Warned:
There’s nothing hi-brow here, no Matrix or 2001 or Snow Crash, there’s no 3 Body Problem to baffle you to death. No, just relax and stop looking intelligent.

Here be plain old sci-fi overcoming extra terrestrial problems using ingenuity and guts.

The basic idea is the evolution of a colony on Mars that was established then show more almost immediately disappears under strange circumstances then re-appears.

But stretching that to 5 Volumes also takes ingenuity and guts. To do that the focus has to shift to different characters over time. From the first settlers to finally a hard-boiled female criminal detective.

Yes, the story morphs from settlers to weird viruses to robots to murders to evil corporations and finally to a satisfying ending.

All up it’s a fast paced story that rattles along nicely. The sci-fi is credible-ish with none of that weird shit from The Hitchhikers guide.

Great read for long distance travel, confinements, unemployment, retirement, etc.

I really enjoyed it show less

I got enough from this series to finish it, but I won't read the next one. The plot was too formulaic, and the characters were so naive that they occasionally made me laugh out loud. The villains were cartoonish at best, and there were too many logic errors. I love good, hard sci-fi, but this is not good.

The main character in these three books is Dr. Jann Malbec who is sent to Mars to discover what happened to the original colonizers (the colony went off line in the midst of chaos a few years earlier). In the first book she discovers what happened and makes contact with a sole survivor. In the second book Dr. Jann is left alone on the planet - or is she? More revelations of the genetic experimenting happening on Mars are revealed. The third installment sees Mars the target of earth based show more corporations who want the secrets of long life - and will go to war to get them. Dr. Jann is a likable character who thinks on her feet. The depictions of life on Mars are interesting. show less

I do not recall how this book came to my attention. When it became available on Libby I decided to give it a try.

It's not as engaging as The Martian by Andy Weir. And Weir was probably truer to the science, but hey, this is fiction.

There are some really dumb choices made by the characters in this book, but people can be dumb in real life too.

If you enjoy science fiction and stories about currently theoretical space travel, it's worth the listen.