Beautiful prose descriptions but not enough soul

This book is intriguing in its premise and certainly adds to the sci-fi interest in life on Mars (unfortunately I’ve never understood choosing mars for alternative settlement so it continues to lose my interest). While the writing is lovely, the book starts very impersonally with the ship (and frankly far too many sentences with “the ship” as the subject). It continues into what reviewers refer to (with dread) as an info dump. It is a personal preference of mine that the books I read be character-centric so I found it difficult to feel excited about this excerpt, let alone the book itself. So much of this excerpt and introduction was description and I felt that left a lot to be desired. There was also a strange amount of odd or incorrect punctuation. While I’d love to say, pick this book up as the next sci-fi classic, it just did not appeal to me. The writing, however, was rather beautiful in its elegant simplicity—it simply does not compensate for the rest of it.