As a huge fan of Greg Bear, I was surprised and dismayed by how much I really did not dig this book. There's no shortage of interesting ideas about Mars and physics and human society in the next couple of centuries, and Bear hangs them on a plot and a character that stand a chance of being involving, but the effect for me nearly all the way through is dry, airless— it's framed as a memoir by someone late in life, but it reads like the kind of memoir that's ghostwritten by someone without much interest in the subject. It's not as if Bear can't write a good female character, or make super-high-tech cultures feel lived-in; he's done both before. And there was a similarly distanced first-person narration that worked much better at shorter length in Bear's related novella Heads (which I loved), where the passivity of the narrator was well suited to what was in effect an "I alone am left to tell thee" horror story. Actually, maybe that's my problem with Moving Mars: there's almost no horror, nor any happier flavor of the sublime. Bear's writing really comes alive to me when he's writing in one way or another about the sublime— inconceivably amazing changes, fates worse than death, personal epiphanies— and it's not just that I like those things in general; I think they bring out his best. But this book seems as if he made an effort to avoid any such thing and to just write about more-or-less-plausible life on Mars and small-scale politics and interesting technology and troubled relationships, until all at once he finally dropped in the Big Crazy Idea (which is derived from the crazy idea in Heads, whose hand-waviness again worked better in a briefer, creepier setting), dropped it in so plot-wrenchingly that it made all those other things the book had been about seem irrelevant, and yet didn't really make the characters face the sublime/horrible qualities of it until near the end. ( )

The same Geo-politacal background as the others in the series, but a bit more intense. The first part is a love story--that bored me, but is important for the rest of the story. The heroine goes to Earth and is christened in the crucible of cutthroat-backstabbing politics as she learns that Earth wants the rest of humanity to join it in political unity--or else! Then we learn of the first love's accomplishments in quantum physics and the balance of power changes. And then the action really picks up as the balance of power shifts again. I can forgive Bear's occasional weaknesses on the power of his strengths. It was well worth the read. ( )

Loses one star because there's a narrative slowdown in the middle - but right when it picks back up, it's a page-turner. I really appreciate Greg Bear's strong women characters and good dialog, while keeping the SF very thinky. It's a great ride, told in retrospect, and extremely entertaining.

I read it when it first came out in the '90's, and read it again this year, feeling quite validated that I'd hung onto my now-battered copy. Is there anything better than reading a battered old paperback that contains a rip-roaring tale? Why, no. No, there is not. ( )

Wonderful account of a woman’s life looking back on the events that led to a cataclysmic conflict between civilization on Twenty-Second Century Mars and mother Earth. Local author Greg Bear does an excellent job of mixing hard SF and sociological SF with a dash of cyber punk all while keeping the female narrator believable and sympathetic. I never knew what was going to happen next (despite the leading title). ( )

Abandoned at 7% into it. Maybe another time, but I lost interest.