I bought this book years ago, and only recently stumbled across it on Amazon - and I was a bit surprised at the pummeling it seems to be taking. I've always had a soft spot for this novel. So what if it's 'just a quest novel' (whatever that means)? It's pacy, and fun. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it can ruin stuff too; looking back, I recognize that the plot meanders, and the ending has a whiff of a deus ex machina about it, but at the time I really didn't notice. And the reason I didn't notice that the journey meandered was this: I was too busy looking out the window. I was drinking in the view of the book's real star: Mars like you've never seen it, where the human spirit stirs against the combined forces of a bitter struggle for survival, the corrupt vestiges of Chinese communism, and the smothering statism imposed by humanity's children. Don't get me wrong - there are novels where the backdrop is everything, and the characters and plot waft in the breeze, so flimsy are they. But this is not that novel. This is more like a Hollywood blockbuster - the characters are a bit over the top, the plot is kinda crazy, but you can really see where they blew the budget.