Extremely evocative painting of life and reality on Mars; one would almost believe the author has been there himself. Extremely atmospheric descriptions of great machinery, large rock formations and vivid landscapes. 

However, a significant chunk of suspense is taken out by the first chapter spoiling a protagonist's later death, only to spend significant time in building that character's place in the story and then the hole that's left is not really made palable. Generally, the most interesting characters are not awarded enough pages.

In general, there are some unfortunate racist and exist undertones to the descriptions of some groups and characters, that shone through the author's attempt to "realistically" depict the conflicts of today being carried over to the future. But the lines between the characters' prejudice and the author's are blurry. 

Hilariously, there are copious amounts of descriptions reserved to geological rock formations and barely any that would help paint the humans more individually - but maybe, that actually adds too a theme.

The author's marxist-esque conception of history and politics and economics is omnipresent and quite nuanced in the broad strokes he's painting martian colonisation in. He shares some prejudices with early soviet sci-fi authors like Bogdanov (who is credited in the name of one protagonist) in that he overestimates the role of technocratic engineers and underestimates the position of workers and labour struggle. Nonetheless, his is a refreshing improvement from mainstream sci-fi imagined histories.