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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 31 |
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Imagine fundamentalists
running the space program
of TheColumnists.com
The greatest science-fiction novels are those that really are speculative fiction, using an environment like the future to tell us important, maybe even crucial things about the way we're going all wrong right now.
And that's why veteran sci-fi novelist Ben Bova's "Mars Life" (Tor, $24.95) is such a strong and satisfying book, especially now that our Mars program is finding the basic building blocks of life in the frozen water found in the subsoil of the red planet.
Bova's vision takes us to the not-so-distant future. A Mars colony has been established--domed to create a breathable atmosphere for the scientists who live there--and an earnest effort is being made to discover who the Martians were, even though they obviously perished millions of years ago, after building the cliff dwellings found in the walls of a vast canyon that dwarfs the Grand Canyon on Earth.
Though the same old questions are being asked by skeptical government types, i.e. why should we continue to fund this unless we're going to get something useful out of it for folks back on Earth. For once those questions make some sense because things are terrible back on Earth. Global warming has made millions homeless and nobody wants the flood-driven refugees invading their territory. There's tremendous demand to use all possible government money to finance recovery for flood victims.
But the real bad guys are the religious fundamentalists who have seized control of Congress and are within a few years of taking over the presidency itself with their group known as The New Morality. They already have doomed scientific education in all American schools because it doesn't agree with biblical teaching. Funding to sustain the scientists on Mars is nearly gone.
Though some daring leaders back on Earth are still fighting to keep the exploration of Mars going, the main source of support seems to be coming from the people who live in the independent nation of Selene in an urban center built underground on Earth's moon. They learned how to survive by using the resources of the moon. Could they help the Mars scientists discover ways to survive doing something similar on Mars?
Bova has created a tantalizing situation that is rife with implications of what might happen if we don't change our ways on Earth as soon as we possibly can? What if the unmanned explorers we're now managing to put on Mars actually do what happens in the book--discover the remains of a Martian village and the fossilized remains of a vertebra from what once was a living creature? Would such a find jeopardize Mars funding rather than stimulate it because it might imply intelligent life existed somewhere outside religion's known dominion?
Bova's situation is much more interesting than the characters he has invented to act it out for us. Sadly, too many science fiction novels are peopled with characters who seem more cardboard than flesh. That's somewhat the case here.
Carter Carleton, the anthropologist who discovered the village under tons of Martian soil, might have been interesting if Bova had put more work into him. He has more or less wound up on Mars because he was disgraced back on Earth by a rape charge that, though never proved in court, wrecked his academic career. When he begins to zero in on the wife of one of the other leading characters it might have been a dramatic turning point. But it isn't And so on.
But Bova has gone to a lot of trouble to make "Mars Life" as scientifically accurate as possible, so the ideas that get churned around in this fast-moving novel are well worth the time it takes to digest them and start speculating about how frightening the whole scenario might be if it ever started coming true in the real world.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Tor. This column first posted Aug. 25, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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