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... infused with pure SF elements. |
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But circumstances and life on Earth appear likely to foreclose any further investigations. Back on the homeworld, Jamie is fighting for the sheer survival of the Mars project. The U.S. government, under pressure from the fundamentalists known as the New Morality, has eliminated funding. Millionaire Dex Trumball, always sympathetic, has reached the bottom of his wallet. And now the Vatican wants to send a scientist-priest, Monsignor DiNardo, to Mars to vet the whole affair for spiritual value.
Eventually, many of the Earth-based protagonists end up on Mars (Jamie and his wife Vijay make a stop on the moon first, to solicit aid from the feistily independent Selene community), where a last-ditch scenario to save humanity's bold frontier venture is thrashed out.
Any realistic fiction set on our crimson sister planet has to labor in the broad, powerful shadow of Kim Stanley Robinson's landmark trilogy, and, to a lesser degree, under the gaze of Ray Bradbury's work as well. Bova nods respectfully in both directions. As hard-nosed and realistic as Robinson, he nonetheless does not go into as much minute concrete verisimiltude and extrapolation as that author. And while we get a tincture of Bradbury's trademark romanticism—especially when the glyphs of the Martians eventually deliver some meaning—Bova is never sentimental or soppy.
What he delivers—in Mars Life and the whole series—is rather a kind of hybrid of the big mainstream panoramic drama—the kind of best-seller an Arthur Hailey or an Irving Wallace once wrote—infused with pure SF elements. His shifting cast of lightly sketched characters from all walks of life (embedded here in short, punchy chapters with alternating points of view) waltz through plots that are heavier on journalistic elements than on melodrama. For instance, there are no real villains in this novel, just people with opposing honestly held worldviews. A Martian meteor strike happens with little fanfare or consequence. And a riff like the Monsignor DiNardo one is never fully exploited for any explosive drama, certainly failing to reach the Blishian potential of its premise. The entire tone of this novel is one of level-headed, sober-sided speculative reportage, lightly en-narrated.
I suppose this authorial tone and angle of attack in Mars Life make for a certain ideological and programmatic sense, in that Bova seems intent on teaching us how the future should and must become, if humanity is to prosper. But along with the fact that he's jumped all around his future history unsequentially, giving to what should be some of his surprises an already-happened feel, this narrative strategy makes for a read whose foundation is big and solid, but whose superstructure is more mundane and pedestrian.
You'll probably come away from Mars Life saying, "Yes, I can see this happening someday exactly as Bova outlines." But you won't say, "That was a truly enrapturing adventure."
This novel is the 20th in the Grand Tour sequence. Can anyone adduce another seriously intentioned, near-future SF series with so many installments? And I will not accept Perry Rhodan as an answer! —
-Paul
