Mars

 Mars
© 1992 Ben Bova
560 pages

Mankind has finally arrived on Mars, via a joint venture between the United States, Russia, Europe, and Japan. An expedition slated to last several months on the planet itself plans to explore part of the Valley of the Mariners as well as a volcano. While each member of the international expedition has his or own private ambitions to realize on the planet --   honoring Yuri Gagarin, or living up to a celebrity-scientist-father –  at least a couple of members are seriously hoping to find signs of life, living or extinct.   Although the mission is  carefully planned and equipped with redundancies, the crew still trip over one another’s personalities, and must fight against technological failures, the easy hostility of the Red Planet, and (worst of all) politicians back home.  Ben Mova’s Mars  is a tale of scientific enterprise and adventure, slightly dated in parts but timeless in its descriptions of Mars' eerie beauty.

I'd never heard of this author until the library displayed a few of his books,  and his lead character here -- a half Navajo  geologist who is fascinated by the similarities between Mars and northern New Mexico's landscapes --  caught my eye.   The story has two parts: as the geologist and his colleagues settle into life on Mars and begin their research in earnest, overcoming obstacles like dust storms and each other,  Bova occasionally flashes back to the months that led up to the expedition. (It's very similar in structure to Stephen Baxter's Voyage, another "go" for Mars story.)  There are other elements, too: the lead character's sort-of girlfriend is a news reporter eager to use her connection to him to scoop everyone else, and the expedition as a whole is at the mercy of the vice president, a blonde-haired bully who is planning a presidential run and is paranoid that everyone is out to get her.  Bova is at his strongest when taking readers through the scientific puzzles and descriptions of the Martian landscape, evoking the astronauts' wonder.  I found the frequent description of the Navajo as an "Injun" by the international expedition a little odd. While American media is pervasive, including westerns which are oddly popular in eastern Europe,  would Russians and Japanese scientists really  regard him as some uber-foreign creature?   Of course, the main character does promote cariacturization of himself, deliberately using phrases like "White man speaks with forked tongue" when his commanding officer promises something and then has to contradict it.

Bova has a series of SF books about the future of human spaceflight, and I look forward to exploring him more.  He ends this book with a terrific hook.....the possible discovery of life beyond Earth.

Related:
Voyage, Stephen Baxter
The Martian, Andy Weir

Voyage

Voyage: A Novel of What Might have Been
© 1996 Stephen Baxter
511 pages

            On November 22^nd, 1963, John F. Kennedy narrowly escaped assassination while touring Dallas, Texas. A gunman’s assault left his wife Jacqueline dead and the president hospitalized, but he lived to see the fulfillment of the mission he set before the American nation in early 1961:  land a man on the moon and return him safely home before decade’s end. During the famed ‘phone call to the moon’,  JFK issued another challenge:  Mars.  Voyage is an alternate history of the American space program in novel form,  the story of man’s successful journey to Mars.   Voyage impresses, not only with its technical detail, but that combined with its even-handed reflection on what a Mars program might have meant in the 1980s.  

Baxter writes Voyage in two paths that rendezvous in the 1980s: after opening with the Mars-bound flight’s liftoff and following its initial  burns and maneuvers to go for Mars orbit,  he switches to 1969, to the beginning of another more arduous journey, when America steeled itself   for a greater challenge and tried to find a way to make it happen.  Going to Mars isn’t easier than the moon shot, and even the momentum gained by  triumph at the Sea of Tranquility evaporates away as the program is stymied by physical requirements. The crew that goes to Mars will need to be self-supporting for over a year, not just a week;  and though they will be far from rescue they can’t afford to take on too many supplies or incorporate too many  backup systems.  When escaping Earth’s gravity well, every gram counts. Politics and economics complicate matters further;  as the Vietnam War escalates and recession worsens, the government is anxious to cut costs. The war and other government programs might cost far more, but NASA’s expenses are as obvious as their rockets climbing into the sky.  The program carries on through sheer grit, urged on lightly by the aging JFK and pushed by the aerospace industry, wholly dependent on the manned program.

And therein lies the rub, for though Baxter makes clear in his afterword that he regrets the lack of an historic push for Mars,  the timeline of Voyage doesn’t shy away from the fact that such an effort would have been a mixed bag.  The will required to make Mars saps energy for everything else; not only are many of the later Apollo landings scrapped, but the exploration of the solar system by probe is missed altogether, and the Space Shuttle is shelved.  The aerospace industry, rather than diversifying to meet the different challenges needed for advanced probes, the shuttles, and the like, is fixated on one line of technology. It’s not a recipe for a healthy industry, either in business  terms or for personnel:  at least one character is hospitalized as a result of the stress.  The turmoil caused by the constant overwork, in addition to all of the challenges of the seventies, makes the weary United States in Voyage a tired, ailed nation indeed;  will those footsteps on Mars be worth it?

In addition to the story of the United States as a nation, meeting this challenge and coping with the consequences good and bad,   Voyage is a personal encounter, one driven by the ambitions and stubbornness of the astronauts who will make the journey. While some characters are historical (Chuck Jones,  who here stays in NASA instead of joining Sealab), most are invented, including  Joe Muldoon, who relegates poor Buzz Aldrin to nonexistence. The crew that lands is entirely fictional, including the book’s chief viewpoint character Natalie York, who is NASA’s first science-astronaut who sees space, since Harrison Schmitt never flew. Natalie is also the first female, and she's somewhat sensitive about the fact that she's breaking into a career dominated by fighter jocks. Part of her own voyage is learning to deal with NASA on its own terms:  the space program isn't going to stick an unspaced rookie onto the Mars team without her finding a way to be indispensable.         

Space junkies will be most pleased with Voyage; I've read at least a half-dozen astronaut memoirs, and the technical detail incorporated into the storyline is on part with the astronauts' actual accounts. This is definitely on the 'hard' side of science fiction, based on real  science, including the NERVA rocket. There are many references to the history-that-might-have-been, from  the head of the Mars program quoting Deke Slayton ("The first men to step on Mars are sitting in this room") to another hanging a lemon in the window of the Mars lander to indicate that he isn't pleased,  echoing Gus Grissom and Apollo.  The modules produced for the Mars programs take familiar names, names like Endeavor and Discovery --  names that the Shuttle fleet used.  Like the Apollo program, there are tragedies, some grievous; but while the Challenger of our timeline proved a source of sorrow,  Baxter's Challenger marks humanity's greatest accomplishment. It -- the ship and the book --  are a fitting salute to the men and women of the space program, and a solid read.

Related:
The Martian, Andy Weir.   Voyage wouldn't have caught my eye were it not for reading this a week or so ago, the story of a man stranded on Mars in the near future.
Contact, Carl Sagan. Natalie York may have been a redhead, but I imagined and heard her as Ellie Arroway.
Mission to Mars, Buzz Aldrin.

The Martian

The Martian
© 2013 Andy Weir
369 pages

I was elated!  This was the best plan ever! Not only was I clearing out the hydrogen, I was making more water! 

Everything went great right up to the explosion. 

p. 43

Mark Watney never thought his Mars mission would make history. He was the eighteenth man on the planet, a member of the third  mission there; who remembers the third man to set foot on the Moon, let alone the fifteenth?  But when a dust storm threw a communications setup into his chest and his colleagues were forced to quit the planet before recovering his body lest their ride home be destroyed,  Mark woke up to find himself the only man on the planet – the only man around, in fact, for millions of miles. Robinson Crusoe, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Fortunately for Mark, not only did the aborted mission leave him with his five crewmates’ supplies, but he’s a botanist and a mechanical engineer.  Mark’s own mind – his scientific experience and creativity,, along with a   if-this-doesn’t-work-I’m-dead-anyway intrepidity -- is his best resource, though. Not even rationing his rations will see him through the four years that will pass before the next Ares mission lands. And so Mark tries to find a way to survive, to turn his limited equipment and Mars' land and air into life.  The result is The Martian, a captivating and absolutely hilarious memoir of survival that sees him battling physics with ingenuity and despair with laughter 'til the very end.

The Martian is easily the most entertaining science fiction novel I've read, a story of  relentless problem-solving and dogged humor.  It's not Mark's story alone -- Weir  occasionally zooms back to Earth as NASA tries to cope, and  he occasionally shifts to a third-person narrative when something colossally bad is about to happen to our stubborn survivor -- but most of The Martian is told, journal-form, recording Mark's reactions, plans, and thoughts on life so far from humanity. He is never free from worry; no sooner has he found to solve a problem by physics, chemistry, botany, or setting something on fire, than does something else go wrong. Sometimes solutions create their own problems, because his resources are limited and not even an engineer-botanist can think of everything. Add to that the fact that Mars is an environment hostile to human life, a severe place that punishes mistakes with death (freezing, exploding,  starving, take your pick), and there's no end to his troubles. But he never stops trying, and he never becomes dispirited permanently. There's no one on the planet to have  a pity party with, and nothing to do but try to put the pieces back together again and move on.  Eventually the story widens; Mark can't communicate with Earth, but they do have satellites, and the only bit of life on the entire planet can't avoid being noticed forever. If he can only find a way to endure!  Despite the seriousness of his situation, the narrative is easy-going, almost light-hearted. Mark is keeping logs to keep track of his progress and maintain his sanity, not give an audience a respectable tale of man vs. the elements. He records in detail his thinking about wrangling technical problems, but he's also constantly joking or complaining or chattering.. ("I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for.")  Part of the appeal of The Martian is the fact that, though this is science-fiction, it's not far removed from contemporary technology; the people in this novel  don't need any background, because they're us. This is an immensely personable science-adventure story, abounding in puzzles and smart remarks.  It's quite impressive considering it's Andy Weir's first work, and I would definitely recommend  it, especially to those with any interest at all in space flight.

"[The laptop] died instantly. The screen went black before I was out of the outlock. Turns out the 'L' in 'LCD' stands for 'Liquid'. I guess it either froze or boiled off. Maybe I'll have to post a consumer review: 'Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10'."

Related: 
"Founding Father", Isaac Asimov. Also about astronauts trying to survive in a hostile world after things go badly.