Lords of Mars

I feel a little bit less lost as to what's the plot than in book one. I still don't quite understand some stuff, but I understand enough stuff that it doesn't feel like just pleasant babble in the background. Mechanicus characters though have the problem that they're pretty impossible to write. Either they'd be impossible to relate to by human readers, or they are pretty human characters with caveats like "he wasn't feeling as human an emotion as rage, he just calculated that he had been done wrong" which sound kind of disingenuous. (Example completely made up by me and more clumsy than anything actually in the book.) I can see why the W40k world overall gets so many fans though. It's pretty cool.