Niall Harrison Reviews The Mars House by Natasha Pulley – Locus Online

The Mars Home, Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury US 978-1639732333, 480pp, $29.99, hc). March 2024.

If, a century from now, there are sufficient readers and sufficient educational presses to warrant reprint­ing early Twenty first-century Anglophone science fiction, editors in the hunt for candidates may do worse than contemplating Natasha Pulley’s The Mars Home for his or her checklist. In its fashion, its mental pursuits, and the strengths and weaknesses of its execution, Pulley’s sixth novel is nothing if not consultant.

So: The novel opens in a medium-distance fu­ture London, which is now a drowned metropolis (test) and a geopolitical backwater (test); financial and cultural energy have moved to international locations corresponding to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. After a very dangerous flood, and with no good choices on Earth, simple honourable working-class ballet dancer January Stirling is inspired to hunt asylum within the city-state of Tharsis, a Chinese language (test) colony on Mars. On arrival, he finds a world that has been partially terraformed by the primary settlers, who’ve tailored themselves each physiologically and politically to their new planet; however Tharsis is a segregated society (test) heading for a tense election, with the genderless (test) and vaguely elven ‘‘Naturals’’ more and more cautious of ‘‘Earthstrong’’ immigrants. January, inevitably, finds himself on the centre of occasions, by way of a romance trope (test), specifically a wedding of necessity to Aubrey Gale, a fantastic and complicated nationalist who states that – owing to the physi­cal menace they pose to the much less bodily strong Naturals – all Earthstrongers needs to be required to ‘‘naturalise,’’ present process painful and debilitat­ing medical procedures to scale back the bodily menace they pose to Naturals. When a mud storm results in a lockdown (test) and threatens to close off the photo voltaic fields, owned by Gale, that present Tharsis with energy, a tense state of affairs turns into a full-blown political disaster (test).

It’s a mixture that brings to thoughts not simply the work of authors corresponding to Becky Chambers, Aliette de Bodard, and Mary Robinette Kowal, however, occa­sionally, such further-flung reference factors as David Mitchell (by way of a metatextual reference that ties this novel to the timeline of Pulley’s earlier steampunk sequence) and Andy Weir (the photo voltaic disaster is fastened by way of some totally argued engineering; I didn’t test the mathematics). Which is to say that The Mars Home is narratively compelling, emotion­ally clear, ethically reassuring, scientifi­cally handy (math however, Pulley’s Mars general doesn’t really feel significantly realist), and stylistically welcoming, with a wit that tends in direction of whimsy. The latter is most outstanding within the occasional footnotes, which embody such digressive observations as the truth that ‘‘Rugby is historically used as a approach for small international locations to remind everybody else why they’d remorse it in the event that they invaded,’’ and that the Communist Social gathering manifesto is ‘‘An inoffensive doc through which a drained German units out his grand dream of an inexpensive nationalised rail service.’’

A light-weight contact with political commentary, nonetheless, doesn’t at all times imply a positive contact. As when you couldn’t guess from the setup, Gale is a greater individual than they initially look like, however the central political battle – Tharsis Naturals vs Earthstrong immigrants – is considerably tougher to course of. Early on, it appears very clear that January’s state of affairs is meant to parallel the UK’s present immigration debate and, particularly, learn how to handle asylum-seekers crossing the channel in ‘‘small boats’’; on this studying Tharsis is the UK, and Gale’s rhetoric echoes that of right-wing politicians. January is hyperaware of how Pure residents view him and different Earthstrongers, and when laws is proposed that will result in obligatory naturalisation, a ‘‘sluggish, chilly feeling’’ lingers with him that’s absolutely meant to evoke the expertise of those that had been allowed into the UK, solely to be confronted with a ‘‘hostile surroundings’’ coverage. The fairly substantial drawback with this studying, nonetheless, is that Earthstrongers liter­ally do pose a bodily menace to Naturals simply by current in the identical area as them, in a approach that’s not true of immigrants on Earth, and so part-way by the novel the metaphor is switched: Earthstrongers are like males and Naturals are like ladies, and the naturalisation course of – which, it’s claimed, is a giant purpose why gender-based violence is sort of unparalleled on Tharsis, and has a near-100% conviction charge when it does happen – is an acceptable response to physiologi­cal dimorphism. Besides this doesn’t maintain water both, because it totally denies the power of the extra highly effective group to control their behav­iour, and so we transfer on to a 3rd metaphor, through which Tharsis is extra like Hong Kong than the UK, and the issue with Earthstrongers isn’t their particular person energy per se, however the truth that Earth vastly outnumbers Tharsis, and that if mass asylum is granted, Tharsis will grow to be an exten­sion of an Earth state (particularly China), and its cultural distinctiveness might be misplaced.

Finished proper, invoking a number of metaphors and holding them in superposition can reinforce the particular actuality of an imagined setting; however executed unsuitable, which might occur when they’re deployed sequentially, the metaphors generally tend to go rogue, and wreak interpretative havoc all through a textual content. To place it mildly, if the textual content permits an equivalence between Hong Kong’s relationship to China and the UK’s relationship to asylum seekers, one thing has undoubtedly gone awry. And all of that is superstructure constructed on an already shaky basis: January, though a member of the oppressed on this imagined set­ting, is demographically moderately privileged in our current, and whether or not this kind of flip expands empathy or truncates it is vitally a lot an space the place opinions differ. None of which is to say I didn’t take pleasure in truly studying The Mars Home. After I wasn’t being distracted by untoward implications, the pages zipped by. However I loved it most when imagining myself as that future editor, delighted to have discovered a kind specimen that so clearly reveals the preoccupations of its contemporaneous world.

This overview and extra prefer it within the March 2024 problem of Locus.

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