Cory has a great review of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Because now I’ve finally read Red Mars, and I am agog at what may be the finest SF novel I’ve ever read. Red Mars has all the hard-SF window-dressing that many of us imagine when we think of sf…But the hard science is just the skin, and the meat of this book is the “soft” science. Robinson doesn’t just shine here: he glows. There is this hard question at the core of every story of violent social upheaval, which is, how does collective action materialize? How is it steered? How does it go off the rails? How, in short, does stuff get done? Can a speech change the world? Can a bomb? Who gets to construct the consensus reality, and how do you disrupt it?

I see no reason to place Red Mars in the ghetto of SF, I think it is one of the finest novels I’ve ever read, and Robinson with his polyphonic, century spanning epics deserves to be ensconced among the highest echelons of the literary canon.