It's been ages since I had time to read any fiction and I've been starved for that escape; my imagination-muscles need a workout. This week, I'm finally reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

KSR is probably Pär's favorite author; Pär's been trying for a few years to get me to read the trilogy. I've been reluctant to take it on, because my initial peeks into the first book showed a lot of unbearably dry technical scientific description of the planet's geology.

"I don't want to read three books about rocks," I told Pär.

"It's not about rocks. It's about interesting people, trying to build societies -- sociological stuff. All the sorts of stuff you love."

"It's about rocks."

"It's not about rocks."

"Rocks."

"Not rocks!"

I opened the book to a random page and read aloud: "Farther north, around latitude fifty-four degrees, they drove into the weird-looking land of thermokarsts, hummocky terrain spotted by a great number of steep-sided oval pits, called alases. These alases were a hundred times bigger than their Terran analogues, most of them two or three kilometers across, and about sixty meters deep. A sure sign of permafrost..."

I looked up, my head wobbling around on my neck, and crossed my eyes at Pär, who had the grace to look slightly embarrassed.

"Rocks," I said.

"Not only rocks," he conceded.

Pär has a greater tolerance than I for dry scientific description, but I trust his taste in literature above all others. So I made myself forge ahead into Red Mars despite my reservations, and gradually came to realise that I was reading a profoundly good work of fiction. I'm amazed by Robinson's versatility; he is well-versed in so many areas! Not the least of which is people. Too often, a writer who's interested in science neglects the human element in his stories, but Robinson has created a wide range of distinct, unstereotypical, very believable characters. This story has the most interesting cast of characters I've encountered in ages, and while I've only just begun the second book now, it's clear that the author has long-range funky plans for their development. And it's impossible not to be impressed with the knowledge displayed in so many scientific fields -- the sheer amount of research that must have gone into these books is mind-boggling.

But he never grandstands with it; there's no wanky showing off. I admit I skim over the drier descriptive passages about the planet's terrain, but even so they don't feel extraneous to me. They just make the book feel... complete. What really gets me is the way he follows a different character in each section of the book, and his ability to show us who they each are through their subtly unreliable viewpoints. He also knows a lot about group dynamics and how groups come together and fall apart. This is a very, very smart man. And he's written the first work of science fiction I've ever read where the future he envisions seems an utterly plausible vision of how it could really happen.

Of course it's the characters who pull me in and keep me reading hungrily. I'm excited to have another full book and a half ahead of me.

Tot has his first cold, a very mild illness we diagnosed mainly by vibe: he just feels like he's got a cold. The chief symptoms are that his color is a little off and he's sleeping more than usual. He doesn't seem to be running any significant fever, he's breathing fine, his appetite is good and he seems to be having no major digestive troubles, so we're not too worried about it. We're just letting him get all the sleep he needs, feeding him well, and making extra sure to keep him warm.

Meanwhile all the adults within a radius of one hundred miles of here have been coming down with horrendous colds all month long, including Pär. I'm fighting off sickness as best I can, and so far so good, but even though Tot sleeps through the night pretty decently, I still get too few hours of sleep. It's because the night is so precious to me: a time when the baby's soundly asleep and I can get some reading or writing done in the wee hours. I'm usually in bed by 1 AM, but that still means the baby wakes me up for his usual three-to-four AM meal, and then he's up again around six-thirty or seven, when I feed him some breakfast and then Pär generally takes him out and soothes him back to sleep on the couch so I can grab a couple more hours. A lot of new parents have it worse, but it still leaves me kind of groggy, all this waking up and falling back asleep.

"I hope I don't have a cold," I said. "I don't feel feverish, but my head's all in a muddle."

Pär was sleepy too. "Your head's in a bottle?"

"No, in a muddle."

"Ah. What time did you go to bed last night?"

"I was asleep by one! But then," I gestured tiredly at the baby, unable to remember his name, "Thing woke up."

"'Thing'?"

"You know who I mean."

He turned to Jeremiah. "We should get you a t-shirt that says 'Thing' on it."

"Yeah, yeah, okay."

"Your mommy calls you 'Thing'! How do you feel about that?"

"Oh sure, when my father said he was the greatest thing to happen to the human race, you were all happy about it then...."