While Mars trilogy does have those ambitious overarching plot points, it more often reads as a collection of thousands of little thought-experiments about all the branches of science often ignored by sci-fi in favor of faster-than-light travel or whatever: geology, hydrology, materials engineering.

So my (probably too curmudgeonly) political gripes aside, I found this to be a pretty hopeful antidote to capitalist realism. Centuries-old hierarchies crumble away in ways that seems obvious in retrospect (but aren't dismissive towards of the real-world struggles against them). The sheer joy of possibility in creating a new world (in every sense of the word) suffuses both the process of negotiating a constitution for a free Mars and a character going for a hike or tending a garden. And it is all underpinned by the picaresque quality of characters flitting from one slightly-fantastical engineering project (houses in giant bamboo shoots underneath a glacier) to another (giant lens floating in space concentrating a ray of sun to melt away rocks into super long canals). Overall, I put it above Aurora but below Antarctica. Also I'm pretty sure every Robinson book I've read has had public bath house sex scenes which is kind of funny.