Ugh, those books are excruciating. The protagonists are unbelievable superheroes (curing cancer and inventing a fair economic system that everyone agrees on in an afternoon, oh while colonizing another planet, and partying lots). It's not hard sci-fi because it has no basis in any reality.

The books present the development of the Martian economic system as a long struggle culminating in a year-long constitutional convention and followed by all-but-civil-war and subsequent political hostility between opposing parties, with lots of trade-offs, compromises, betrayals, deal-breaking, backstabbing, etc.

And the nice thing is that the trilogy gives you a view into the lives of multiple successive generations of space colonists. Those books were beautiful.

Yeah, the description of "Martian natives" was interesting.