|
|
|
||||||||
|
Mark and Gerry's Sci-Fi Reviews Continue.....
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Mars Crossing by Geoffrey Landis
Review by Mark
On the subject of manned exploration of Mars, there are several staples of science fiction. One is that the explorers invariably find evidence of life (previous or present). Another is things always go horribly wrong; not likely to provide courage to NASA. Whether you saw the movie The Red Planet or read Ben Bova's Mars, Gregory Benford's The Martian Race, or now Geoffrey Landis' Mars Crossing, these plot devices seem standard. Only Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy provides a diversion from this well worn path, and even he has things go horribly wrong occasionally.
However; if you like Mars explorations novels, Mars Crossing is reasonably good from the science stand point and it reads fairly well. Landis is a former NASA scientist and he apparently has read the scientific literature carefully. This allows him to correctly portray Martian weather events accurately. I don't know how many novels I've read where huge dust storms are portrayed as sky blocking events. In reality, with the Martian atmosphere less than 1% as substantial as Earth's, there is insufficient momentum to raise storms as we have them on Earth, and sand is probably never raised from the surface. Instead it is only a fine talcum like dust. At one point a "big" dust storm hits the character's location appearing to the characters as more of a haze. One of the characters exclaims "This is a dust storm? Heck, I've been through worse than this on Earth." One of the science-type characters replies with a shrug "I guess they're a bit over rated in science fiction stories".
Landis also does a good job of developing interesting engineering solutions to problems the struggling explorers are faced with. Landis only allows himself one liberty being the existence of a super string that allows the explorers to do all kinds of climbing and descending thanks to its outrageous super strength. I think everything else is in the realm of what exists today, or can reasonably be expected to exist when we make a trip to Mars. Landis also has his explorers coming to Mars when there are very few resources on Earth to mount a rescue so the characters are faced with a do-or-die proposition which is perhaps different than some other novels.
Despite their circumstances, the characters in Mars Crossing are not very interesting. They are interchangeable with characters in the other novels mentioned at the top of this review. There is the staid but reliable Captain, the sexless female biologist, the slightly slutty female geologist, the brilliant but hip male engineer, and so on. The chapters average 3 pages in length, so you can put Mars Crossing down easily and not lose your place.
Should you read this book? Sure. It's far from being bad, the science in the fiction is actually good, and it's not boring. However, if you haven't read a Mars exploration novel, go with Robinson's Mars trilogy instead.
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
| page created with Easy Designer |