January Stirling is a ballet dancer, one of the principal dancers of London’s Royal Ballet living in a future (three hundred years or so) semi-flooded London. Unemployed, he is encouraged to go to Tharsis on Mars for work. Although it is basically grunt-work, January reasons that it is better than no work at all.
This future Mars is being partly terraformed, and so we have ‘naturals’, those born on Mars who are tall but fragile, and ‘Earthstrong’, those like January who have been born on Earth but who are a danger to the naturals as they don’t know their own strength in Mars’s 1/3 gravity. A few have invertedly killed or injured the natural Martians, and so the Earthstrongers when amongst natural Martians are made to wear a frame that limits their strength.
One option for Earthstrongers is that they can be operated upon to reduce their strength. This ‘naturalisation’ is a painful process, and there is no chance of then returning to Earth. Nevertheless to avoid discrimination and to get a job, January is considering the process.
At this point, the characters are engaging, and initially the plot manages to look at current issues such as climate change, refugees and migrants. Pulley does well to show that her future Mars is socially and politically divided, and the consequences of such discrimination.
Before he takes the step to naturalisation, however, January is given an opportunity for a five-year marriage of convenience to Aubrey Gale, a right-wing nationalist (think Trump or Nigel Farage) determined to become the next Martian Consul in the upcoming elections. This is not a meeting of people with similar minds – January realises that should Gale become the next Martian Consul, he will then limit immigrants like Stirling to an already overcrowded, overloaded Mars, rather like the current situation between Europe/UK and the English Channel.
However, the speed at which January takes up the marriage proposal is joltingly fast. I found that the arrangement takes some believing – after all, it is akin to Trump taking on Biden as a marriage partner – and I suspect that your enjoyment of the book may be affected by this. Having said that, I am also aware that whilst it seems to be very unlikely, it must be said that in the past such relationships were often used to legitimise and maintain power. (See also Frank Herbert’s Dune).
Despite his reservations, Stirling takes on the marriage to much social media acclaim, and showered with wealth by Gale a blossoming romance begins. As the two characters settle into their new roles, a terrorist attack by rival factions leads to the creation of an extreme dust storm, which threatens the solar power energy of Tharsis, something which Gale’s family have made enormous wealth by being in charge of maintaining. This creates a settlement in crisis and an element of danger to the story, which leads to a power coup. There is also the impending arrival of a mass of new migrants about to arrive on Mars, which may further alter the political power-balance.
Such a brief synopsis suggests an adventure novel, an updating of the sort of stories Heinlein was writing, but for a contemporary audience. To some extent The Mars House does this, for at times it is a social commentary, a romance, a planetary romance, and at times even a comedy of errors, something which has elements of Bradbury, Heinlein and even Kim Stanley Robinson in its make-up, and akin to say Greg Bear’s Moving Mars.
However, despite such ambitious and laudable aims, the author’s plot many conveniences and contrivances tended to bring me back to reality with a jump, just as I was starting to enjoy it. I’ll give some examples at the end should you wish to read them – there are others.*
Most of all, much of the book seems to be thrown away in the last quarter of the book, where there is a clangingly awful plot twist and where many of the issues brought to light at the beginning of the book are ignored or thrown away in favour of a happy ending.
In summary, then, The Mars House seems to be a book with good intentions, some valid social points and some good ideas, but whose plot points need reining-in to maintain some degree of believability – and I say that knowing that I am reviewing a science fiction novel. The author seems to throw away many good ideas for the sake of convenience in the plot and a quickly concluded happy ending. The fact that I finished it is testament to the fact that Pulley writes well, despite all the times I found myself annoyed with the plot. Others, of course, may be less picky.
*To give some examples: SPOILERS! (You may want to skip this bit):
- Genetically modified mammoths set loose on the planet have a language that can be understood through a piece of technological flim-flam, a head-gizmo. This becomes important to the plot when, just by coincidence, the only people who can communicate with the mammoths are our hero and his companion, because his companion just so happens to have written a Mammoth’s Language Encyclopaedia. The coincidence is crushingly convenient.
- Would people in three-hundred years time still use the word ‘mansplaining’ in conversation, because they do here?
- We even have, towards the end, one of my ‘favourite’ plot-hates, the ‘Child-in-Peril’, plucked out of a pile of refugees for seemingly little other purpose than to try and develop a sense of peril and greater jeopardy for our main characters. [END OF SPOILERS]
THE MARS HOUSE by Natasha Pulley
Published by Gollancz, March 2024
ISBN: 978 139 9618 533
480 pages
Review by Mark Yon
