One of Marsbound's first images is its
most striking: Carmen Dula and her family are moving to Mars, and in order to
leave Earth, they have to travel in the Space Elevator, a metal cage that
travels up 50,000 miles of cable through the atmosphere and into the void. Most
of the passengers take the experience for granted; with the exercise room and
the magazines behind every seat, it's a mixture of the mundane and the
miraculous that would've made Stanley Kubrick proud. But the tenuous connection
the elevator represents belies the illusion. As Carmen soon learns, the human
race's expanding presence in the universe is stretched nearly as thin as that
cable—and it may be just as easily severed.
Like Joe Haldeman's
best-known book, The Forever War—a science-fiction take on soldiering in the
age of faster-than-light travel—Marsbound also deals with the
rigors of distance. The narrator, Carmen, is a young woman unnerved by the
journey she's taking, but determined to get the most out of it. After a
multi-stage trip made up of romance and tedium, Carmen arrives on the red
planet already at odds with the colony's female head. She does her best to fit
in, but after a misguided prank brings the hammer down, she makes an
ill-advised trip to the planet's surface for some alone time. One misstep
later, she's in serious danger, with no way to call home—but a strange
figure comes to her rescue. Maybe humans aren't the only presence in the
neighborhood.
Structurally, Marsbound is an odd duck; the first
third follows Carmen's flight with surprising thoroughness, and the main plot
doesn't even kick in until the halfway mark. The attention to detail grounds
the story's more outlandish aspects, but also gives the book a lopsided feel,
especially with the amount of plot crammed into the final section. Carmen is a
generic but likeable heroine; her matter-of-fact relation of her adventures
makes a nice contrast, although her interactions with the book's human villain
are painfully clichéd. The strange pacing makes Marsbound more an expanded short
story than a novel, but it gets a lot of mileage out of the emptiness that surrounds
any exploration, and the unknown dangers between the stars.