The Mars House

Our hero, with the unlikely name of January, is transported semi-willingly from his role of principal in the Royal Ballet (a drowned London) to a partially terraformed Mars, where, after seven generations, native-born Martians are taller and much flimsier than their Earth-born cousins.

To be honest, the actual setup isn’t really convincing – seven generations doesn’t seem enough to expect the changes as described, and the giant flora and fauna of Mars seem to come from Edgar Rice Burroughs. The terraforming isn’t really explained and the side effects of it seem to serve the plot rather than being plausible (mists in the solar collector fields – why? how? Because something needs to happen out of sight of security drones…)

But in reality none of this really matters; the author isn’t trying to write hard science fiction in the Kim Stanley Robinson mould but a social commentary. What happens when two cultures with vastly different physical abilities are forced together? What are the impacts of ubiquitous augmented reality? (Shades of William Gibson’s The Peripheral there.) And what loyalty does a “colony” like Mars have to its “Mother” country?

These themes are all explored well and there is a clever AR plot device. Characters are well drawn, there is some clever banter and the story did hold my attention once I had sufficiently suspended my technical disbelief.

Worth a read; this does extend the boundaries of SF into interesting social commentary.