You’d think that in the middle of a world pandemic, you’d want to avoid apocalyptic television!  But this was so good that despite its grim subject, I kept going to the end.
There were two things that struck me about that made it so very good:  the first occurred in the second episode, after the attack on Earth.  A main character started a journey across London on foot.  The camera tracked back and you saw all the bodies lying scattered everywhere, cars (no longer working) parked at odd angles, the world come to a dead stop.
It was a devastating scene.  Watching it just days after the lockdown came into force made it so much more terrifying.  It foreshadowed exactly those first few days of the lockdown when the streets were suddenly empty of traffic and you tried frantically to avoid anyone out for a walk in case they breathed on you.
What made it so brilliant was the unearthly silence.  And this is the second thing that struck me about this series:  the quiet.  The silence.  The muted scenes.  Unlike your usual end-of-world movie, there was no screaming, no crashing sounds of destruction, no weapons fire, no overwhelming Hans Zimmer-style soundtrack.  This alien invasion was a horrible, silent, creeping thing and this is what made this version of a very well-known tale stand way above any other production.
And there have been a few!  Wasn’t it just the other day I was watching a BBC production set when it was actually supposed to be set:  in the Edwardian era.  It seemed quite promising at first.  The female lead was set up as a strong character and the production looked good.  But it seemed to go awry somehow and I got very tired of that dusty red future we kept cutting to, particularly as there seemed to be no story.  And suddenly our heroine was almost superfluous.  The plot kind of ran out of steam and whatever it was trying to say was rather lost.
The Fox TV series has fewer pretensions.  Set in the current day in France (with subtitles!) and England (I kept trying to work out where in London they were but it was actually filmed in Bristol!), it was a world instantly recognisable, one in which the viewer could quite easily identify with and ask:  what would I do if this invasion happened to me.  There are no heroes.  The main characters are not always likeable.  The story seems to both crawl and race at the same time, and sometimes there seems to be very little story.  Tension levels are either high or very high, with no breathing space ever.  Events played out in crap hotel rooms or empty streets, or a French observatory.  The aliens look kind of stupid, to be honest, and they are actually stupid, resembling metallic dog-things that creak ominously when they walk.  And yet they proved to be really scary, particularly as they never seem to miss when they shoot.
 
It doesn’t sound all that promising when I tell you the characters spend quite a lot of time walking, but this is Walking While Very Tense.  The unravelling of character’s individual storylines was made more interesting by the lack of soap-style drama, into which this never descended.  Most captivating of all was the overriding mystery:  a blind girl hears a weird noise, can see again, has some kind of connection with the aliens and you know that tattoo she gets right at the beginning of the series?  HAH!
 
I found myself screeching and tearing my hair out when the end credits came up at the end of the last episode.  Was this the END??  But, no, there is a second series coming.  I can’t wait.  

Finishing the Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is a mark of honour, rather like being able to say you’ve read War and Peace or all seven volumes of Proust.  With ten years between each volume, I can’t say this series has set me alight.  This doesn’t mean it isn’t brilliant.  It is.  The descriptions of Mars;  the understanding of colonising or terraforming a difficult plant;  the politics, economics and emotions involved:  all are a work of genius.  Yet it remains dull reading.
​
It’s so long ago (over twenty years) since I read Red Mars that I don’t remember much of it, aside from some woman having a lot of babies.  Green Mars was marginally more interesting but Blue considerably less so.  It also feels MUCH longer.  While the science is fascinating, the story isn’t.  This is no doubt because there is hardly any story, or, at least, the one that unfolds is in such broad strokes that it leaves you utterly uninvolved.  There isn’t a single character that is likeable.  Some of them are truly awful.  Mostly it doesn’t matter what you think because you can hardly tell the characters apart anyway, and even if you do manage to remember a character from one novel to the next, it doesn’t matter either because there is absolutely zero plot.
Quite a lot of the writing isn’t about Mars at all but extremely lengthy digressions into subjects like quantum mechanics, memory retrieval, the super-elderly, a planet-wide flood on Earth, and the extremes of overpopulation as a result of the never-gonna-let-you-die treatment, as well as excursions to other planets that feel like doorstop fillers.  While all these subjects are interesting by themselves, they aren’t part of any plot.  Oh, wait, haven’t I already said?  There is no plot.
Some people go to Mars.  Stuff happens.  Most of them live.  Some more arrive.  They live too.  Or die.  Whatever.  Blue Mars indicates water and while the thought of oceans of Mars is just wonderful, this delight doesn’t come off the page at all.  Robinson’s writing is flatter than flat.
I really wish I could say I had enjoyed this trio of books.  They are, after all, highly regarded and have won all sorts of awards.  While the trilogy is truly visionary, it’s also too impersonal to achieve greatness.  I found myself skimming many pages and not actually missing anything.  I did the same with War and Peace (there are some very long, dull tracts in it) BUT the difference is that you have an emotional investment in the characters.  You love them.  You want to know what happens.  You care who they marry and how many children they have.  I didn’t care about any of Robinson’s characters.  As a result, I didn’t care about Mars or any of the other planets, moons and asteroids being terraformed.  I would say that this is probably not how you want your reader to feel.
If this was an endurance test, then by finishing the series, at least I can say I have passed.