[ad_1]
There’s a scene very early in Andy Weir’s The Martian where a storm threatens the astronauts’ rocket, kicking off the rest of the plot. Well and good. But Weir—in a novel praised for its science to the exclusion of any other literary aspect—also included the wind speed, and it is, spoiler, not remotely strong enough to fulfill its role in the plot. It left me pondering the importance of science in science fiction, or more broadly of speculative elements in speculative fiction: how strong does a story need them to be, how thorough, how able to stay standing if a reader, metaphorically, pokes at them a bit? Natasha Pulley’s latest novel, The Mars House, is also a Martian story. Far more focused on its political and romantic plots, on its mysteries and characters, the novel likewise leans heavily on its speculative foundations—and they’re not up to the load.
Set some centuries in the future, the novel follows January Stirling, a ballet dancer who flees a flooding, burning Earth to Tharsis, the only city on Mars. There, his terrestrial strength and refugee status make him an outsider. After a chance encounter with a Martian politician, Aubrey Gale, lands January in hot water, Gale proposes an unexpected solution: an arranged and highly public five-year marriage, to help recuperate the senator’s reputation before a pivotal election. Still figuring each other out, and arguing about the proper policies for other “Earthstrong” refugees, the couple suddenly find themselves facing imminent danger when a massive storm—and old secrets and mysteries—threaten Tharsis and its people.
Pulley clearly put a lot of thought into Tharsis, its languages and culture, and has, in January, a fairly charming main character—insecure but contemplative, resolute in his convictions, though perhaps too quick to prioritize niceness over ethics. However, the entire world of the novel, and many of its dramatic turns, rely on distractingly bad science. One gets the unpleasant sense that, based on the fact that Martian gravity is roughly a third of Earth’s, Pulley simply multiplied or divided by three for many of the “Martian” effects. (Well, except for the 80-foot tall talking mammoths that wander this terraformed Mars, significantly larger than the original King Kong—the less said, the better.) The novel constantly evinces an incredibly poor understanding of how gravity, force, and human muscles work. While some hand-wavy or flat-out wrong physics are hardly an unusual feature of science fiction, Pulley has crammed this book full of scenes and plot points that hinge on flawed mechanics, and puts too much weight on a few mysteries that an attentive reader will clock far too quickly.
This is the rare book where less detail would have made its fantasy setting more believable. If, when January and other Earthstrong people had escaped Martian military forces by simply “jumping off a building,” with the neat detail that you can survive higher falls on Mars, that would be a cool scene! Unfortunately, we get multiple pages of description of the jump off a 500 foot building, which, even on Mars, would require mops for the clean-up. Likewise, the engineered dust-storms that prompt the novel’s central crisis rely on a staggering misunderstanding of how weather works, and it’s a flabbergasting choice to use sequoia forests as a biome on a Mars that, we are constantly reminded, is a frigid desert. Even more distracting, in a way, are the smaller details. Earthstrong immigrants have special weighted cutlery and tableware, for example, as they can’t help but fling Martian-weight utensils across the room. In my kitchen, I happen to have a coffee scale, a metal fork, and a plastic fork, and I’m petty enough to check—despite the plastic fork weighing a whopping eleven times less than the metal fork, I somehow managed to pick it up without pulverizing it in my grip or launching it it into the air.
This misconception of how human strength works is core to a much knottier, less superficial aspect of The Mars House. Nitpicky physics details are likely to derail relatively few readers, but one cannot miss the ethical dimensions of the novel—the central dilemma in the book is that of the refugees’ strength and what to do about it. Because the Earth-born population is so much stronger than the Naturalized Tharsis residents, we are told that they present a constant and lethal danger—“the leading cause of death”, we’re told, is accidental homicide. The solution to this threat, and to the health problems that the refugees face in lower gravity, is to provide “cages”—a kind of exoskeleton that January and others can wear, providing resistance to simulate higher gravity. It’s illegal for the Earthstrong to be cageless outside certain designated areas, and going cageless for extended periods of time causes them to “naturalize,” losing their strength and incurring extreme negative effects such as nerve damage and significantly shortened lives.
There are certainly many people who are three or more times stronger than me, and I’m certainly at least three times as strong as many toddlers or elderly folks, but I’ve yet to actually murder or be murdered by anyone by bumping into them at the grocery store or what have you. It’s a deeply ridiculous premise, but let’s take it as read for a moment. What’s it doing here? Quite blatantly, the Earthstrong are an allegory—for male strength and violence towards women, but also for the ongoing refugee crises that have been met with increasing fascism in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Quite blatantly, we’re told that Senator Gale’s proposed policies of full segregation and mandatory naturalization are nationalist and genocidal. (Gale, I remind you, is the love interest.) It’s an impressively tangled metaphor, a spine-wrenching ethical rollercoaster to think through. Legislation to prevent frequent accidental deaths seems good, but mandatory “cages” for an apartheid population seems bad; but removing them is also genocidal, so they must be good? It’s a quandary founded on such strange premises that it’s hard to think of a clear resolution, and Pulley’s—that the Earthstrong voluntarily hand over the keys to their cages to Natural Martians, to be released on their recognizance—is an off-putting mix of quasi-chivalry and cultural submission.
One might think all this talk of keys and cages, dominance and submission would play into the romance angle. Reader, it does not. The Mars House is a remarkably tame romance, even a prudish one. There’s so little sexual tension that the arranged marriage is weirdly easy to forget about for hundreds of pages at a stretch, rather downplaying the “billionaire royalty” romance tropes it’s obviously engaging with to some degree—perhaps for the best, given January and Gale’s power imbalances. Indeed, an interesting reading of the book is as a romance on the asexual spectrum—neither seem to have had any previous relationships, and have little discernible physical desire in this one, though they do have big feelings about each other. I would have loved to hear more about how they navigate that, and more about the Martian society’s views on sexuality. There’s such a blanket tolerance throughout the book—minus a few terfy-sounding radicals that the novel has no patience for, and kudos there—that we don’t learn much about anyone’s specific, individual experience. Tharsis “abolished gender” early on, using genetic engineering to make everyone appear androgynous (one does wonder what China, of which Tharsis is a colony, thought of this). Natural residents employ only nonbinary terms for each other, and reproduce using artificial wombs almost exclusively. Coupled with the fact that we don’t see any other romantic pairings (excluding flash-backs to another arranged and loveless marriage), it hints, if lightly and perhaps accidentally, towards a society with an intriguingly different structure.
Despite my complaints about the science throughout—and its bizarre allegorical muddles—The Mars House is not without its charms. Pulley’s narration will likely appeal to fans of Matt Haig or Robin Sloan: a bit twee, always humane, and with a fondness for humor of the footnoted variety. Many chapters feature a cartoonish animal of some kind, and, despite the murder mysteries, genocide debates, and occasional action scenes, the novel fosters a steadfastly cosy atmosphere (metaphorically; January struggles with Tharsis’s literal chill). The Mars House gestures at fascinating questions—but I fear its premises are too muddled to lead anywhere interesting.
FICTION
The Mars House
By Natasha Pulley
Bloomsbury Publishing
Published March 19, 2024
[ad_2]
Source link