Moving Mars

I gave up trying to listen to the MP3 edition of this after about 20 minutes. If the narrator is a genuine human, then I'm sorry, but the voice does sound more than borderline computer generated. The pacing is significantly too fast - delivered as fast food eaten whilst running for a bus, not a leisurely meal meant to be enjoyed. There are also almost no natural pauses, the information is just poured out in a deluge.I have enjoyed many Greg Bear books but Moving Mars in MP3 format will not be one of them. If you're buying this, stick to the paperback.

Perhaps one of the functions of fiction, and of sci-fi in particular, is to open a reader’s imagination to new possibilities. Moving Mars certainly manages that. Without giving too much away about the final scenes, I think it is safe to say that when people go to the stars they won’t be doing so in long metal tubes with flames coming out of the back. There will be a whole different reality. We are already seeing this in plans to send tiny probes to the nearest stars, pushed on their way by Earth based laser. Moving Mars scales up alternative ideas about space exploration in a dramatic and thought provoking way.Moving Mars is an excellent book, exciting, thoughtful, and despite the incredible nature of events, grounded in science we can extrapolate back to where we are.

Master science fiction writer Greg Bear knows his business. This novel is not as dazzling as Eon and Eternity (in my view among the best science fiction ever written), and it is quite slow in built up, but it leads to an exciting story. Written from a woman's point of view (maybe he should have chosen to write it from a man's point of view – I at least would not have dared to do so) I wonder how credible women will experience this. The science is dazzling, true enough. It is the kind of story that makes you wonder what would happen if human kind ever were able to discover such physical principles and invent such a technology. Would it lead to the end of mankind?

I NOW PLAN ON MOVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE

72% of the way through I reached the end of the book, end notes and all, and was then presented with the remaining 28% to read. One would think that the first thing that publishers would check when compiling ebooks is that the end of the book is actually at the end, not three quarters of the way through! As there are no page numbers it's impossible to find out where the the 28% you're left with at the end should actually fit in to the story. Well done Gateway, you've discovered the perfect way to ruin an otherwise excellent book by an excellent author.