Teaser

Mars is a settled world, an equal partner to Earth and the Moon, but all is not well. Resentment of the old order is growing, and over the course of a single lifetime, everything is about to change . . .

Review

Welcome back to another instalment in a recurring series I am calling ‘Alex falls into reading another Greg Bear book and is frustrated by the experience.’ If it ends up happening to me again, I’ll probably workshop a more succinct title, but the current one, I feel, gets the message across rather well. Greg Bear is one of the titans of late twentieth-century American SF. He’s up there with Ben Bova, David Brin, Gregory Benford, and many others who have names not beginning with the letter B. Bear’s work is spread across numerous small series and standalones, so there’s plenty of ways to access his work for the first time. I’ve now read his Halo tie-in trilogy, the first book in two other series, an authorised Foundation prequel, and a short story collection. Moving Mars is the first fully standalone novel of his I’ve come across, and my reaction, as it has been to so much of his output, is a sigh and a shrug.

It’s not that Moving Mars is a bad book. It’s more that the book and I don’t get on. I love the fact that it takes place over multiple years, and makes clear use of that time-frame. I like the fact that it deals with the complexity of politics without covering everyone in sweeping strokes of black and white paint. I think there are some really good ideas in here about how artificial intelligence and different cultural norms might be put to use during interplanetary colonisation efforts. what I like considerably less is the execution of all these elements. Time and again, Bear chooses to focus on the least interesting aspects of the world he has created.

To start with, this is a very dense book. Not quite on the level of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, but it’s a lot to chew on all at once. Parts of this book were a real slog to wade through. Ostensibly it’s told as the memoir of a woman who lived through these pivotal events, but the narrator never feels like a woman interesting enough to have written a memoir. It’s dull and plotting, and her every interaction (especially her romances) are flat and lifeless. We meet a lot of people as the novel progresses, but few of them are memorable. Not always a problem if the plot is good, but Moving Mars desperately wants to be a character-driven novel, so it ends up being quite a large problem indeed.

Then there’s the science in this science fiction. Or rather, the lack of it. Much of how Mars has been rendered liveable is skipped over, with Bear more interested in the social side of things. Again, not necessarily an issue. Except that his Mars is run by banks and powerful families, so there’s little there that we haven’t seen on Earth a thousand times over. The science through which the book gains its slightly spoilery title is by far the weakest part of the novel. Apparently we can use massively powerful computers to ‘tweak’ the nature of reality. Tweak being Bear’s word, not mine. Considering Bear’s reputation in hard SF circles, I expected a lot more details than the mere handwaving we get here. Tweaking works, just deal with it. Except I can’t deal with it. Not when a book hinging on its use refuses to put any thought into the matter.

There is so much potential in this book, and the overall idea generally works, but all the details are flawed. I don’t really see how this book won the Nebula Award, or was nominated for a Hugo. It’s far from terrible, but there are much better books out there covering the same road topic.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• First Published in 1993
• 452 Pages