These novels absolutely blew me away. They focus on the human colonization of Mars and terraforming to make it habitable. Sound vague, grandiose, and boring? Think again. The books are so focused on a select group of characters that you get engrossed in the way they think, and intrigued by their motives. The story spans about 200 years and yet has the same characters throughout (they discovered a longevity treatment.) The main characters are the "First Hundred," or the first hundred settlers sent to Mars--all scientists or extremely skilled architects, mechanics, etc. The intricate politics and careful attention to details that develop were just mindblowing--perhaps because the thoughts the characters were having were often thoughts that I had found myself recently thinking. Perhaps because you would read an assertion, think about it, and say "yeah, why doesn't the world work like that?"
Like most hard science fiction--that is scifi which is based around concrete scientific principles--this series can wander off into its own world of equations, theories, and the like. However, the stories are told from a third-person limited, free indirect discourse sort of way which essentially tells different pieces from the point of view of various characters. So when things go off into technical-land, it's usually because you're in a particular brain.
I just can't explain to you how much I love these books. The characters are all well developed and incredibly real. They are so well fleshed out that I felt every position that they personally held was being backed by a separate entity rather than just the one author. And if you didn't like any given character, it was because you had some other opinion of them--and how some of my opinions changed over the three books! One of my most hated in the first book became one of my favorites by the last. The world is so vibrant and everyone who peoples it so engaging that I literally was reading these books whenever I had a snatch of free time. And when I finally did put them down to go to class or do homework I had to stop for a minute and think "Wait... I'm not on Mars. Nobody has even been to Mars. Where am I again?"
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