I’m trying something a little different today. Sometimes I come across a book where I don’t have a whole lot to say. Historically, I’ve put together a review anyway. This time I’m combining two such reviews into one article. The reasons why will quickly become apparent.

Back in the 1990s, Everyone was going Mars crazy. Yes, Mars had been a significant part of science fiction for a long time. You need only look at H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom trilogy for proof of that. But in the 90s, NASA launched its Pathfinder probe to the red planet. Surrounding that success, an increasingly scientifically literate public eagerly looked for more Mars-related stories.

Alongside the probe launches, science fiction writers hopped on the Martian bandwagon. Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy (1992, 1993, 1996) is perhaps the most famous example, but he was far from alone. Ben Bova’s Mars (1992) is a personal favourite of mine, along with its sequel Return to Mars (1999). Two entries in this new Martian canon that you may not have heard of are Paul J. McAuley’s Red Dust (1993) and Kevin J. Anderson’s Climbing Olympus.

Best known for his space opera, Kevin J. Anderson too a sideways step into harder SF with Climbing Olympus. Expanded from an earlier short story, the novel sees genetically engineered humans building a colony on Mars, only to learn that they will soon be swept aside in favour of baseline humanity. Owing a clear debt to Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus (1976), the story is more about the social effects of genetic engineering than it is colonisation. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the colonisation efforts are led not by NASA or any other trained astronauts, but by men and women of eastern European extraction, who are essentially conscripted and cajoled into the cause.

McAuley’s Red Dust takes place more than five hundred years in the future, and also sees a non-American future for the red planet. This time it is the Chinese who have conquered Mars. Said conquerors have also relapsed into a feudal structure. Indeed, despite being said far in the future, the novel feels like a throwback to the pulp era more than cutting edge science fiction. Much of it reads as a fantasy novel, with nanites substituted for magic, but otherwise keeping to the traditional tropes of a lone farmhand squaring off against a tyrannical leader. At times it cannot help but feel inauthentic, relying on an outsider’s perspective of Chinese culture, however well researched that may be.

Which brings me to the most interesting connection between these books. Both are written by Anglophone writers. Anderson is an American. McAuley is British. Yet neither one chose to place their own cultures as the dominant one on Mars. The Russian space programme (Roscosmos) was fully developed at the time of writing, and may well have been an influence on Anderson. The Chinese space programme, however, was not, though it has made major leaps in the thirty years since Red Dust‘s publication. Does this mean that McAuley is the more prescient of the two authors? I would argue not. I would merely point out that Bova’s Mars, released a year beforehand, featured not a typical all-American hero, but a Native American. If this triumvirate of books shows us anything, it’s that the 1990s were an awakening to the idea that space was, as an old plaque has it, for all mankind.

Neither Red Dust nor Climbing Olympus are books that I particularly enjoyed. Anderson is a far superior author when he tackles space opera, and McAuley blends together so many genres the book left over is too damaged to hold together. Yet they do stand as testament to an interesting period of science fiction. Other than the Apollo missions, few spaceflight endeavours gained such widespread acknowledgement at the Mars probes. Even now, new launches make headline news. With the novels of the 1990s, we see science fiction keeping pace with science fact, engaged in a new form of space race. Not one between nations, but between imagination and reality. Even if the books themselves are not always memorable, the ideas behind them very much are.