Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova

Published by Baen Books on November 15, 2013

Mars, Inc. is a book about an aging man written by an aging man. It has the feel of 1950s science fiction. Sometimes that's a good thing. I like the "sense of wonder" that pervades a lot of 1950s sf and Bova captures a little of that here. But in style and content, Mars, Inc. seems like a novel written by a science fiction writer who is stuck in the past.

A billionaire named Art Thrasher persuades other billionaires to invest in a manned mission to Mars because ... it's the right thing to do? Bova's optimistic view of capitalism, and of the willingness of billionaires to spend billions on a project that is unlikely to return their investment, seems naïve, but that's the premise. Thrasher spends half his time complaining that politicians have devoted their lives to spending his wealth and the other half complaining that politicians aren't giving more funding to NASA. He doesn't have much insight into his own hypocrisy but most people don't, so in that sense Thrasher is a realistic character. The fact that he's an old horndog is the most interesting aspect of his personality. In most other respects, Thrasher is a pretty boring guy, despite Bova's effort to give him the feistiness of a Ross Perot.

Bova generally skips over the details of rocket design and manufacture, focusing instead (in a fairly simplistic way) on politics and finance. He does give us a tour of the spacecraft, a conventional vehicle that has been described by sf writers hundreds of times. Eventually the plot incorporates a mystery theme as Thrasher suspects the Mars project is being sabotaged and that someone is trying to take over his company. Bova invites the reader to select from the several suspects he puts on display. The method of detection that uncovers the culprit has more to do with wishful thinking than forensic science, and the reveal is less than surprising.

While sex gives Thrasher something to do in his free time (and something to think about the rest of the time), a subplot of romance that emerges in the novel's second half would be at home in an old, black-and-white television sitcom. It contributes to the story's dated feel. Apart from being stale, the story as a whole just isn't as interesting as science fiction should be.

Mars, Inc. certainly isn't an awful novel. It moves quickly and it's easy reading. Bova is a capable writer who knows how to keep readers turning the pages. The story lends itself to a sequel and I might even read it. This time out, however, Bova didn't write anything that hasn't been written before, and long ago.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss

Published by Delacorte Press/Random House on November 26, 2013

A bursting blood vessel in Howard Morgan's head and his wife's fall from a ladder set the stage in Our Picnics in the Sun, Morag Joss' story of an aging couple in South West England. The action resumes three years later. Point of view shifts between Howard, who struggles with speech and mobility, and Deborah, who is neglecting their sheep and barely tending to Stoneyridge, their decaying bed-and-breakfast. We also see Howard and Deborah from the point of view of Adam, their 28-year-old son working abroad, who is determined to avoid them as much as he can. An unexpected guest named Theo seeks accommodation at Stoneyridge on Adam's birthday and eventually insinuates himself into the Morgan family drama, sparking changes in the attitudes and interactions of the Morgan clan while forcing Deborah (and, indirectly, Howard) to confront the feelings they have kept hidden from each other, and possibly from themselves, since Adam's birth.

Our Picnics in the Sun is about the essential role that kind treatment of our children and parents and spouses plays in a healthy existence. But the novel also helps us understand why kindness so easily disappears, why we sometimes struggle to bestow it upon the people we love. Neither Howard nor Deborah are ideal parents or spouses, and Adam is less than an ideal son, but it is easy to feel sympathy for all of them. Howard, a controlling twit who has devoted much of his self-absorbed spiritualistic life to bearing a well-deserved sense of guilt, is now a mind trapped in a dysfunctional body, incapable of articulating his thoughts, often experiencing inexpressible hunger and cold, regretting all the years that he refused to notice Deborah "fading and slipping away from him." While it is tempting to judge Deborah for the uncaring care she gives (or withholds from) Howard, she has limitations of her own -- she can only "breathe freely" when she's away from Howard -- and it isn't her fault that her anger and frustration is not alleviated by Howard's helplessness. Adam, impoverished and home-schooled to the point of ignorance as a child, deprived of everything he wanted (including a feeling of normalcy), can't abide a return to the source of so many unwelcome memories. Deborah lives in denial of Adam's detachment from the family, convincing herself each year that Adam will appear for his birthday picnic on the moor, a ritual he dreaded as a boy.

Flashbacks to Adam's significant birthdays furnish the links that allow the reader to see the chain of the Morgan family history, including the oddly obsessive birthday picnics. Late in the novel we learn some things that force a reinterpretation of Howard and Deborah and that shed light upon the annual pilgrimages to the moor. A jolt in the last pages helps make new sense of much of what came before.

Is it too late for the Morgans to recapture the sense of kindness that has been missing from their lives for so long? The answer is moving and surprising and insightful. This is a deft piece of storytelling by a writer with a compassionate understanding of human nature who is in firm control of her compelling characters.

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The River and Enoch O'Reilly by Peter Murphy

Published by Mariner Books on September 10, 2013

Every voice that ever made a sound still lingers, waiting to be heard if only you know how to listen. The patterns of flowing river waters make a sound that can unlock the mysteries of the universe. These, at least, are the insights and beliefs of certain characters in The River and Enoch O'Reilly, characters who may be gifted with special insights or cursed with mental illness. The blurry distinctions between truth and myth and madness are central to Peter Murphy's remarkable novel.

Murphy tells us that "a man is not defined by his death. Every man has his story, and his life is in the telling." This is the story of Enoch O'Reilly, and while it is also the story of other boys and men and women and the torments of life in southeastern Ireland, it is more fundamentally the story of Ireland's myths.

Over a period of two weeks in November 1984, with no logical explanation, nine people drown as the Rua overflows its banks, apparent victims of suicide although nobody will speak the word. The night before the flooding starts, Enoch O'Reilly fits the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. The novel then resets, beginning Enoch's story at the beginning, as a boy who is shaped by Elvis Presley and Holy Ghost Radio, each imparting a lifelong sense of existential peril. He later attends a Christian Brothers school where he learns this: "Ambition does not always know its end, but its beginnings are palpably manifest in the guts of those who nurture it, and whom it nurtures." Feeling a calling to preach, Enoch enters a seminary because he understands that "mass is the opiate of the religious," but his atheism does not go over well with the Dean. What happens to Enoch next is, like much of the novel, open to interpretation. Suffice it to say that his life continues to be informed by Elvis and the Holy Ghost.

From time to time, Murphy shifts his attention to other characters, some momentarily, a few in greater depth. Among the latter are Enoch's father Frank, who spent much of his life trying to recover words lingering in the ether, spoken by people long dead, and Professor Charles Stafford, a psychiatrist who may have mental health issues of his own. We also glimpse some of those who drowned, people ill-treated by life who were drawn to the river, who heard its call.

Language is power, Enoch learns in seminary, and power is evident in the language that Murphy wields. There is a surrealistic quality to The River and Enoch O'Reilly that makes it difficult to separate the story from its symbols. The river is a connection to the past and future, a symbol of life but also of death and madness, a place for people who are "speaking in riverish, knowing only riverality, the sound of the river the sound of thought itself, the babble of water that ... erodes the stuff of sanity." Other oddities include preaching voices emanating from a radio tuned to the dead, the unlikely interruption of a brawl by protective herons, a machine that ticks off the countdown to a flood. According to one of Murphy's characters, the Irish prefer myths and legends to philosophy -- it is the Irish way to order the universe -- and that mythical ordering is reflected in this sometimes baffling but always beautifully told story.

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Little White Lies by Cole Riley

Published by Strebor Books on November 26, 2013

Despite its surprising publication in the "Zane Presents" series, Little White Lies is not a tawdry romance novel. It is a story about young black men: their burdens and aspirations; their varying responses to a highly sexualized culture; the hostility they encounter when confronted by police officers who view them as hoodlums because of their skin color; the unfocused rage that permeates inner city communities. Racial struggles, defined by generational differences, furnish a theme that dominates the story. Class differences and their impact on criminal prosecutions furnish another theme, as does the intersection of race and politics. As is often true in good fiction, those large themes are illuminated in a smaller, personal story. To some extent, Little White Lies reads like a modern version of, or a tribute to, Native Son (an impression that is reinforced when Richard Wright is quoted toward the novel's end), but it's missing Wright's finesse.

Melvin is a high school basketball player in Brooklyn with athletic scholarship potential. His demanding father is a self-defined hustler. His mother is wise and well-meaning but frustrated. Melvin's brother Danny suffers from depression, an anxiety disorder, and drug abuse. Melvin's male friends tend to get shot, sometimes by thugs, sometimes by the police. The females in his class intimidate him with their aggressive sexuality and his girlfriend is a manipulative, self-centered tease. Thinking with the wrong head, Melvin makes a poor decision, then follows it with another, potentially life-destroying decision by putting himself in the wrong place with the wrong people. The novel's second half deals with Melvin's unfair treatment as he's chewed up by the criminal justice system and by a politician who wants to exploit Melvin to gain points with white voters.

Little White Lies is told from Melvin's perspective in a natural voice that is free from literary pretension. The story's depiction of inner-city policing is disturbingly realistic although trial scenes are not. Some of the characters, white and black, are a bit over-the-top in their stereotyped thinking and pronouncements, but so are some real people. Still, this isn't a nuanced story. The novel works best when Melvin is playing the role of Raskolnikov, wrestling with guilt, trying to understand his actions. The events that occur in the novel's second half aren't entirely believable and that lack of credibility mars the story, but I enjoyed it notwithstanding its substitution of simplistic melodrama for convincing plot development. While the story seems true at its core, too many scenes of Melvin's trial and its aftermath are exaggerated beyond belief. The character of Melvin makes Little White Lies worth reading, but Native Son this isn't, despite the strength of its main character.

Depictions of sexual conduct (and misconduct) are quite graphic, not lurid or pornographic and certainly true to the story, but timid readers should stand warned of the novel's R-rating.

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The Unwritten by Mike Carey

Published by Vertigo on September 24, 2013

The Unwritten is an outgrowth of a comic book series of the same name. While it serves as an origin story for the comic book's protagonist, the reader need not be familiar with the comic book series to enjoy this volume as a stand-alone graphic novel.

This incarnation of The Unwritten is a story of creation or conception, of an author giving birth to a story. The story is about Tommy Taylor, the son of two powerful mages who, as a baby, floated away in a basket from the sinking ship on which his parents died. The baby is swallowed by a whale and delivered to a village where a wizard lives. The wizard names the baby Tommy and, for much of his young life, raises him in ignorance of his heritage. Tommy discovers the nature of his parents at about the time his parents’ enemy (a vampire, of course) discovers Tommy. The vampire wants whatever was on the ship. At the same time, he wants something from Tommy that Tommy doesn’t have … or does he?

Not coincidentally (or so he comes to believe), the author of Tommy’s story unexpectedly fathers a son of his own. Naturally, he names the baby Tommy, but as his wife descends into a well of depression, the author finds that he’s better at parenting a fictional child than a real one. But is there, in the end, any difference between the real and the fictional Tommy?

The Unwritten is an ambitious story that, after a slow start, grew on me until I became fully absorbed. That’s largely due to the quality of the storytelling. In addition to some swashbuckling fantasy, there are a couple of unconventional family dramas here, and a nice lesson about the possibility of being special even if you aren’t gifted. Although it’s possible to anticipate much of what happens to the fictional Tommy in the second half, the story is still satisfying, while the deeper story (involving the “real” Tommy) charts a more surprising course.

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