Mars One – Charlotte Robinson
It is 2031, four years since the Mayflower, Alyssa Wright capsule communicator for the first expedition to Mars in her place at Mission Control when disaster struck, all but one of the crew killed immediately, staying on the line with Sam Rutherford until the last moment when the oxygen in his spacesuit finally ran out, lessons learned but not necessarily heeded.
Now having left NASA and in place as commander of Mars One, it is a private enterprise tied to sponsorship deals, Lars Anders the Finnish billionaire who has masterminded the project but all decisions approved by executive producer George Abbey, focused on publicity rather than procedure and believing that provoking his crew rather than listening to them is a compromise worth the ratings boost driven by drama.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Li Jia’s brother has gone missing, a computer nerd who has done nothing with his life while she tries to juggle her university obligations and caring for their ailing mother, lost in a haze of dementia, her plea to the police only triggering alarms as it becomes apparent Kai’s coding skills were being used by an underground organisation who do not wish to be subjected to scrutiny.
The debut novel of television writer and producer Charlotte Robinson, Mars One is a science fiction thriller set in the incompatible worlds of pioneering space travel, dependent on careful and diligent testing and application of theory and technology by dedicated individuals, and reality television, beholden to trends and whims and catering to short attention spans, eager only for the big moments of revelation – or disaster – over the preparation and planning which allow them.
Alyssa removed after suffering an injury during a ratings stunt gone wrong and a Russian supermodel parachuted to make up the numbers, Anastasia Petrova automatically becomes a target for suspicion when shipboard anomalies occur, intentional and malicious though not actually dangerous, yet with so obvious a target no one questions whether she is too blatant, a fall guy framed by the true bad actor on board.
With style guidelines taking precedence over safety protocols, Robinson mocks the situation she has created yet panders to the lowest common denominator, clogging pages with every observation and emotion micromanaged yet her characters, Jia in particular, never feeling as though they are real people, momentum and precise goals paramount in space travel yet Mars One feeling sluggish, the recounting of Men in Black requiring a single paragraph rather than a whole chapter.
Rubio Lindroos the only astronaut given a narrative voice, in a professional setting he would never have passed the first assessment, yet compromised from the moment he was sealed into his launch suit his failure to report what is in his pocket only compounds his complicity, the reasoning of his tormentor perhaps more interesting woven through the novel as anonymous thoughts rather than final chapter revelations of a suddenly-added point of view character whose motivations reveal astonishing naivety.
The premise of television funded space travel nothing new, Virtuality having done it well and Ascension painfully worse, what is strangest is the colossal elephant ignored in the middle of Baikonur, standard disclaimers saying any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental but nobody acknowledging entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp whose Martian colonisation efforts, until they were abandoned in 2019, were to be financed by investment, public subscription and television broadcasts under the oddly familiar banner of Mars One, parallels too undeniable to simply be ignored.
Mars One is available now from Bantam
