This unofficial series follows human progression into the solar system. Starting from putting a base on the moon and going all the way to discovering ancient alien ruins outside our solar system.
I think it’s pretty neat how optimistic and diverse it is. There’s a prominent Native American character. Fantastic!
Caveat, some women get thrown in fridges pretty suddenly and for seemingly no narrative reason. Not all women though, so kind of weird.
I read a bunch of it decades ago. I think some of the outer planets stuff hadn’t been published yet. At the time, I considered it almost a good standard in exploration/colonization fiction. Then I read KSR’s Mars Trilogy, and I started to re-evaluate. And the Grand Tour suddenly felt shallow. Like Ben Bova was a Heinlein fan fiction writer (a good one).
What’s your favourite book in the series and why? What book has the best sci fi idea?
Hey, neat! I read Red Mars, Green Mars, and a tiny bit of Blue Mars before getting into Grand Tour. I do not like them as much though. I wanted rugged colonialism, but they just solve everything with magic technology. Need a big hole? No worries, we have autonomous diggers. Need more diggers? Hah, already have autonomous autonomous digger factories. There were no challenges other than interpersonal ones caused by their own horrible personalities. I started to lose interest when the main characters just sat in a cave for 40 years, and having to read Maya’s POV killed the rest. How I hate her.
I approached The Grand Tour differently. It’s only a loose series, and it didn’t bill itself as strictly a Mars colonization project, so I might be more lenient. It still has not-so-great interpersonal conflicts as the main plot every now and then, but there’s more of the “how do we solve this technical problem” that I do desperately crave.
So far my favorite has to be “Return to Mars”. As a person of Native American descent, it’s super cool to get some representation without any tropes. Jamie Waterman isn’t a drunk nor a gambler! There’s some interpersonal issues, but they get solved in a rational way by realistic adults. Also it turns out space archeology really floats my boat. So it has a lot of what I want in a sci-fi.
Fave sci-fi idea, though, is probably from “The Precipice”. They build the first fusion powered spaceship, and it feels like an intro to The Expanse. Harvesting asteroids will never not be cool.
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