Tag: the mars house

The Mars House is a literary sci-fi  queer romance novel about a Mars colony and the unlikely fake marriage between a refugee from Earth and a politician from Mars. January was a principle ballerina in London, but when London flooded he was forced to Mars, to live in the colony Tharsis. There, he’s an Earthstronger, seen as dangerous as they are stronger than those naturalised to Mars, and forced to work in a factory as his only option. When a politican named Aubrey Gale, who stands for forcing Earthstrongers to be surgically naturalised to protect those natural to Mars from accidents, meets January at the factory, a press junket blows up in their faces, and a plan is proposed: a five year marriage to protect January’s future and secure Gale’s political chances. There’s politics, environmental fears, and Gale’s mysterious past to contend with as the pair learn what it is like to be each other.

I don’t usually enjoy sci-fi books, but I was intrigued but the premise of this one (I’ve never seen a political sci-fi book that uses the romance ‘fake marriage’ trope before) and I’d heard of the author, though only read one of Pulley’s books before. What I found was a book packed with ideas, from the abolishment of gender to the primacy of Mandarin as a language (and its morphing into a new Mars dialect), and not bogged down by some of the things I don’t enjoy about sci-fi, like too much dry explanation and terminology. The writing felt playful, maybe because Pulley has moved from historical fiction to sci-fi so the genre was less solid, and the slow burn elements, particularly romance, meant that even though it was long, it was also gripping, creating plenty of tension around what would happen to the characters.

The plot itself was pretty straightforward, with the main twist being very easily guessable because it is quite heavily foreshadowed (and it was the kind of plot line that does frustrate me, without wanting to go into any spoilers), but there’s still a lot going on, and a focus on characters and particularly January’s experiences. Most of the book is focused on January, occasionally showing things from the perspective of someone else, and this gives it a particular slant, guiding the reader through things on Mars from the point of view of an outsider. This is a notable choice because a lot of the book is about perspective and morality, and the difficulty of making both big and small decisions when there are so many consequences and potential for people to be hurt. I liked how much the book engaged with these big ideas about morality and the complexity of the two main characters in arguing about it.

The relationship element is likely to be quite love/hate for people, because on the one hand you have a classic fake marriage scenario in which the two characters hate each other, or at least fear what each other believes, and then they have to learn to understand the bigger picture, but on the other hand, one of them does believe the other should be physically harmed in a process to make them no longer different to the “citizens” of the colony, and that seems like quite a hurdle to get over. Their characterisation does make this developing relationship believable, but there’s also a lot of unanswered elements, including the fact that both of them seem to have issues around relationships and romance that never get resolved or really addressed. The book almost needs a sequel to make it believable that they have a future.

One major part of the book that made it quite stressful to read was the choice to make the naturalised-to-Mars people all agender or something similar, with gendered terms and pronouns only used for Earthstrongers and animals. As a non-binary person, it is hard not to try and read into what the author is saying about the construction of gender in the novel, which is quite messy (as gender is) and doesn’t always have the space to explore the implications of this system. Especially earlier on in the novel, there can feel like a sense that the removal of binary gender is framed as a bad thing done in an effort to remove inequality, and though there are some moments that explore the implications of this, there were things that felt like they boiled down to ‘people just need to know what body parts someone has or they won’t be comfortable’ without delving into it. One thing that would’ve been interesting to address would be the implications for someone who was trans to come to Mars and be naturalised (maybe even in one of the book’s many footnotes if not in the narrative), but the book didn’t really discuss being queer or trans on Earth at all. There was also not much really about sexuality and romance in Tharsis, despite romance being central to the plot, as far as I remember.

In short, I enjoyed reading The Mars House and I liked the two main characters and the way in which their disagreements were about big questions of morality and society rather than some random grudge, but I also felt conflicted reading it at times due to the way in which it handled some of the big questions and ideas within it, flattening interesting messiness.