Tuesday is Book Meme Day

I've seen this book meme (with slight variations) floating around for quite some time and always wanted to try it. Since it seems it's a "no blog idea" day, today is as good a time as any to give it a go. Please feel free to join in.

I'm always curious to find out what others are reading, so if you want to add a few words (as I am) about the book, please do.

And also because I'm nosy, I'd like to tag:

Wenda at Daring to Write
Joy at Joys News
Donny at Rambleville
Junebugg at Wasted Days Wasted Nights

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
   
2. Open the book to page 123.
   
3. Find the fourth sentence.
   
4. Post the next three sentences along with these instructions.
   
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
   
6. State the book title and author.

So, here's mine:

Support for such a "minimal state" came from a variety of viewpoints that otherwise made strange bedfellows: anarchists, libertarians, neotraditional capitalists, certain greens, and so on. To the most extreme of these antistatists, writing up any government at all was a kind of defeat, and they conceived of their role in the congress as making the new government as small as possible.

Sax heard about this argument in one of the nightly calls from Nadia and Art, and he was as willing to think about it seriously as he was anything else.

- from Blue Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson

This is a book I finished reading a few weeks ago. It was still lying on my desk unshelved (have I mentioned I'm a terrible housekeeper?). It's the third book of Robinson's "Mars Trilogy".

The Mars Trilogy is a science fiction epic that I began reading several years ago. I liked the first two books, Red Mars and Green Mars, but for some reason didn't get around to the final one until now.

Robinson writes what is classified as "hard" science fiction. Not hard meaning difficult - though some might think so – but meaning book details are based on facts and real science as much as possible; as opposed to soft science fiction where almost anything goes, the only limit being the author's imagination.

As you can tell from the sentences I quoted, it's not all about science. Because it deals with terraforming and the settlement of colonies on Mars, there is a good deal of sociological discussion. I found this as intriguing as the science aspects of the book. Also because it covers quite a long time period, the characters are quite well-fleshed and I found myself increasingly invested in some of them. It's not for everyone, but nerdy-gal that I am, I found it both fascinating and fun.

For anyone interested, I found this link to a review on War of the Worlds: Mars Trilogy Review