It was the first time that January really understood that normal life was over.
I’m a little behind on this one, but only because I always start reading a new Natasha Pulley novel when on a big family vacation, so I had to wait a bit to get the perfect timing for our trip to Gatlinburg.
Pulley’s previous novels have all been historical fantasy, or alternate-history fantasy, or whatever genre you want to put her Soviet-era historical novel into. For her latest book she’s ditched the history and jumped hundreds of years into the future, to a fantastical version of Mars with an apartheid society, political intrigue, a possible murder mystery, and an arranged marriage between a refugee dancer and the senator who ruined his life.
We start the book with Earth’s apocalypse already in-progress. January has made a comfortable life for himself as the principal dancer in London’s Royal Ballet, but all of that comes to an end when London floods even worse than it already had. In a world-spanning environmental collapse his options are pretty limited, but by a stroke of luck he’s offered something better than drowning in a refugee boat off the coast of Saudia Arabia: asylum on the Chinese colony on Mars, in the thriving city of Tharsis.
The problem is that Tharsis has been around long enough for generations of its citizens to adapt to life on low-gravity Mars, growing taller, more resistant to the cold, and very, very breakable. And the “Naturals” are terrified of “Earthstrongers”. Newcomers to Mars are required by law to wear “cages”, basically slender exoskeletons that limit speed and strength. Forgetting to wear your cage is pretty much a declaration that you’re okay with accidentally murdering your neighbors.
IF YOU’RE EARTHSTRONG, YOU MUST WEAR A RESISTANCE CAGE IN ALL PUBLIC SPACES! LET’S STOP ACCIDENTS TOGETHER!
Earthstrongers also have to live in their own sections of the city, they have to keep a set amount of distance between themselves and anyone they could crush with a careless gesture (instantly dropping to one’s knees is the proper way to indicate “I PROMISE I’M NOT GOING TO HURT YOU”), and they have to endure all of the political rhetoric about the best methods to protect “normal” citizens from these “invaders”. And one of these methods is naturalization surgery, which destroys parts of the nervous system, reduces life expectancy, and in some regrettable instances kills the subject.
If all of this “IMMIGRANTS BAD” sounds an awful lot like the current horrible political discourse, I suspect that’s not an accident. And like a lot of asylum-seekers/refugees/perfectly normal immigrants, January and everyone like him are held to much higher standards of behavior. Keep your head down, be grateful for any job you can get, don’t complain, don’t make any movements that could be seen as a threat, and certainly don’t lose your temper and say something sarcastic to a senator on live TV that could get you arrested for hate speech. Which unfortunately is exactly what January does and boom, his life is over. Jailed for a couple of weeks and frozen out of any job that would pay him enough to keep from literally freezing, his only options are deportation or taking the risk of naturalization surgery.
What keeps all of this from being too bleak is that everyone thinks that January’s been given a raw deal, including Senator Gale who’s pretty much solidified their reputation as a xenophobe and a bully. (I loved one person’s description of the Senator as a “flinching precious Noble Victim fuckwit”, and the debate between Gale and their political opponent is surprisingly satisfying.) There is a possible way to use January’s growing fame as a charming but downtrodden Earthstronger to help Gale’s career, and for Gale’s political power to rescue January from his pariah status: an arranged marriage. Totally political, standard five years. January helps convince the public that Gale isn’t totally toxic for the Earthstronger population, and in return January gets enough money to never have to consider going to a naturalization clinic.
This book has a lot about how vulnerable populations get litigated into submission and then driven to survival methods that drop them deep into the cracks of society and make them even more vulnerable. And there’s also quite a few very obvious digs at capitalism in general – and corporations in particular – and how the wealthiest and most powerful members of society can be utterly clueless about what the people they demonize are going through, and how baffled they are when the black-and-white solutions they’re offering don’t actually work. But none of that is ever feels dry or like you’re being lectured to, because it’s all taking place on Mars, where everything has shaped itself to the environment of another planet, from the politics and the industry and the living spaces, all the way down to what weeds look like in low gravity.
Bending over the winding path, drooping under the weight of their own heads, were giant dandelions, the wind tugging their feathers loose. When one of the seeds fell just ahead of him, it glided a few yards and then landed with a thump, fully the size of his head.
This novel can be enjoyed on several different levels. On a surface level this is a far-future setting, where everything is a variation of “but what if on Mars…” The capitol building of Tharsis is made from one of the great spaceships that carried the first ten thousand human being to the planet. Earthstronger refugees are paid under the table in kilowatts, downloaded directly onto a charge card so you can decide if you feel like paying for mass transit or a few degrees of heating in your apartment. High-end hotels can have gravity generators for visiting Earth dignitaries, and little courtyards with artificial lakes, bonsai forests and hummingbirds. Pulley sprinkles all of this with moments of humor, many of which comes from the footnotes (the footnote about Christmas on Mars was one of my favorites), or from sentences that end with a wink and a wry smile, and random details that are just fun. An AI runs the weather station and tinkers with the settings on a physical body in its spare time. Pets can include genetically designed polar bears that enjoy startling the hotel staff, graffiti can get up and run around, and everyone’s connected to the internet through their brains so they can both see and feel things like stock market numbers and traffic reports.
The most beautiful images come from how the internet augments people’s vision. Having virtual reality be part of day to day life means people incorporate virtual effects into their clothes, and hairstyles, and home decor. Combine that with all the extravagant ways that the very wealthy can make their lives more comfortable and beautiful, and little things like the brocade fabric someone is wearing becomes nothing short of magical.
Very, very slowly, an angel was falling down the length of the coat, blazing dark fire.
If you want political intrigue and a (possible) murder mystery to go with the sci-fi setting, you’ve got that too. All the ways that people can use whole populations as political footballs. All the underhanded means to pressure someone to push this legislation instead of that one. The worsening state of Earth means the potential for a lot more Earthstronger refugees, and how do you handle the threat to Native populations without overcorrecting into human rights violations? And who does deserve to be in control on Mars, the population that’s been building everything for generations, or the planet who sent the colonists to Mars in the first place?
Things get even more complicated when a massive environmental disaster kicks off on Mars, something which could mean thousands of people freezing to death, and it happens at just the right time to really hurt Senator Gale’s election chances. Gale has a lot of enemies. Gale has done things to deserve enemies, as people are happy to tell January, as they’re informing him that Gale is also dangerous, and not to be trusted. January isn’t Gale’s first consort; the previous one vanished under mysterious circumstances, Gale is very cagey about responding to questions, and January’s growing desire to give Gale what he wants (someone to argue with him, to appeal to his better nature, to make him think) is balanced against his need to not do anything that will get him quietly murdered. Gale may have a very good reason for being scared of Earthstrongers, but January has equal reasons for being scared of anyone who has power in Tharsis.
This overwhelming fear (and people in charge using that fear) definitely echoes what’s going on with America’s current discourse about immigrants, but Pulley makes this story more nuanced than just that. Someone from any race, gender, sexual orientation, or social stratum can empathize with feeling like they’re being judged guilty of every horrible thing that’s been done by someone who looks like them. And then it goes a step further, because it also shows the importance Pulley places on reaching out to the people who are afraid. You can’t legislate people out of being scared of something, especially if they’ve suffered real harm. The idea that Gale is scared of him breaks January. Even with everything that Gale could do to January and all other Earthstrongers if he wins the election, even with Gale’s dark secrets and the fact that he might be going crazy, January still finds himself heartbroken that their connection could just be something put on for the cameras because he needs Gale to be okay.
Which turns the entire saga into a love story. It’s Natasha Pulley, so of course there’s going to be a love story between someone who’s kind of broken and someone who’s very dangerous. (I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which here.) There’s a comradery that grows between them throughout the bomb threats and betrayals, Gale turning disasters into innovations, January finding out that he has so much more value than just Being Strong, and philosophical conversations with mammoths. (Yep. Mammoths on Mars are a thing.) Like most of Pulley’s other books she avoids telling exactly how everything is going to turn out, while still leaving us with the hope that humans might eventually be able to figure out this whole Being Human thing.