Genre: Sci-fi
Synopsis: It is the future, and Earth's Government has decided to populate Mars. In an effort to keep Corporations out of Mars, the first settlers must be small business people. Enter our main character, David Gill. He owns a small food farm in New Zealand, but he got into business with a shady character, Robbie, who does a lot of get-rich-quick business. One of these deals landed his main board in serious trouble with the main food corporation of Earth, Foodbund. Now David finds himself being forced into going to Mars or losing his business (among lots of other nasty things.) On a plus note, David is pretty entrepreneurial and has a way of turning something bad into gold! Bad side, his slimy business partner will be with him every step of the way... and making trouble as he goes.
Review: Red Gold is a very complex sci-fi story. As is quite common with these types of stories, the author did massive amounts of research and world building. Unfortunately, there were times when the tech speak was too much for me. I couldn't picture what the author was describing (or quite frankly, didn't care!) But you can't skip over these long details, because most of them become relevant to the plot later. (Which made it even more confusing to me. I found myself having to go back and re-read the descriptions that had boggled me early, trying to make sense of what was happening.) I can't say that this is necessarily bad, as a lot of sci-fi books (Honor Harrington series is the first that comes to my mind.) do this. But there are so many that do it more seamlessly. I kind of prefer those. On a plus note, in between all the technical jargon and complex information is a very exciting story! The world constructs that the author comes up with are quite plausible to me. The shady business dealings, the murder, espionage, and intrigue make the novel feel like a sci-fi Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
I liked David. He is what I think most of us strive to be. Honest, straightforward, hard-working, and forward thinking.You find yourself rooting for him, and despising his business partner deeply. And yet, the dichotomy is not Good vs. Evil, it is more complex than that. Really, Robbie's character is a fairly typical businessman. He is a money manager, shifting funds around from business to business, trying to make more money and often losing it instead. Yeah, he starts up some immoral businesses on Mars: prostitution, gambling, and entertainment ventures; but his motivations are to make money. Towards the end he becomes so consumed with his greed that he does stuff that is pretty evil, but he doesn't start out that guy. It is a fascinating descent and moral lesson to observe how this character's choices determined his fate. At any point, even up to the very end, Robbie could have changed his choices and thereby changed his outcome. The same could have been said for David. Very good stuff!
About the Author: (taken directly from Amazon Author's page)
Ian J Miller was born in 1942 at Hokitika (New Zealand) and received degrees (BSc Hons1, PhD) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He became Head of Applied Chemistry at Chemistry Division, DSIR (NZ) before leaving to set up his own chemical research company. His involvement in ventures to make pyromellitates (for heat resistant plastics) and seaweeds led to his becoming a Director of two ICI joint venture companies. He has also self-published two sets of ebooks, together with 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His scientific work has involved seaweed polysaccharides, liquefaction of biomass, photochemistry, as well as theory. His work on scientific theory has led to two ebooks entitled "Elements of Theory", which show how to form scientific theories by using the methodology known as induction. The author is now semi-retired, he lives in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, and is mainly working on completing a series of science fiction/thriller novels involving a futuristic history.
The author's experience with negotiations with politicians, business leaders and financiers has been used to give authenticity to those aspects of the plots, while his experience during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, including the smuggling of a petition out of the Iron Curtain, has helped with the thriller aspect. He has also had a life-long fascination with theories in the physical sciences, and his work on planetary science has been used to provide realistic backgrounds, particularly for the novels involving Mars, and to provide illustrations of how science works. Following the 1980s financial crisis, he began to write a sequence of futuristic science fiction novels that are intended to offer something for those who wish to think. The series starts with the premise that exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely on a finite planet, and eventually there will be resource constraints. Everyone could share the pain, everyone could work together to provide a better future, but the underlying concept is that there will be sufficient greed that this will not happen. He also writes two blogs, a scientific one at the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a more general one relating to his experiences and his writing at Wordpress.
(And now I see why my review is totally legit!)
Review: *** 3.5 out of 5 stars.
