Sign me up for Texan Mars!
Red State Mars is the best new science fiction book I’ve read since Project Hail Mary, and not for lack of trying. I’ve searched desperately for years, driven from the industrial slurry extruded by Tor, Daw, and Ace. Yes, I have found a few indie gems, such as Corcoran’s Aristillus books, which describe how a single breakthrough technology can threaten even the most entrenched of powers. They were good books, but now Corcoran has an editor. There’s a publisher in town, traditional in the good sense of the word. This, Ark Press’s first book, is a beautifully polished gem.
Red State Mars follows the formation of the first Martian state, founded by a coalition of five Texan clans, which themselves coalesced in the anarchic aftermath of World War III. Now, after three generations of peace, they find themselves in another violent Turning, as it was foretold by Strauss and Howe. In response to the ever-escalating demands of the technocratic eugenicists of the Unitary Sovereign State of China, the Martian clans must put their differences aside and fight together.
Corcoran shows us the war through the eyes of three men: Will, a teenage boy with a dog who goes on Heinleinian adventures as he becomes a soldier; his nerdy uncle Brian, who wins the love of a good woman through feats of engineering; and his father, Jim, who is so used to leadership he’s gone soft, and is forced to admit that even he is not done growing up. Corcoran has been paying attention to many Thanksgiving table arguments.
In the afterword, the author says he planned Red State Mars as a family saga, but that isn’t how it turned out. Under the guidance of editor Tony Daniel, the older generation’s stories were moved to a separate novella, resulting in a tighter, quicker launching book. I actually think they could have gone further in this direction and brought more out of Will, Brian, and Jim, but that’s a quibble.
Here’s another: there were some dropped threads. What happened to the young Mormon guy with the wire-rimmed glasses? Why did they use the tainted feedstock? Maybe I missed the answers, but I got the impression that Corcoran had too many balls in the air, and dropped some.
Anyway, the battle scenes were exciting, suspenseful, and technical in the best tradition of Cussler. Satellites, molten salt cooling systems, and missiles all get their chance in the point of view spotlight. LLMs are, after all, ubiquitous in the 22nd century, and every valve has a voice. It makes sense for that voice to be close third person.
As with the Aristillus books, Corcoran is conscientious with his future technology. There’s been incremental advance in AI, 3D printing, and genetic engineering, but there’s just one black swan: the force field generator. There were chapters of Red State Mars where I alternated between reading about space-explosions and furiously imagining force field tactics. Can you batter through a force field? Yes. Can you reshape it at will? Yes. Can you thrust or see through it? No. But of course you can flick it on and off rapidly in sync with your cameras or engines. Of course, if you do that, weapons can sneak in. Beautiful stuff. And don’t get me started on what impermeable, immaterial walls mean for nuclear fusion. Leave that up to Corcoran.
There’s quite a lot of town-hall politicking, which was gripping even compared to the coming-of-age-through-microgravity-combat scenes. I was never more emotional a reader than during those debates. Stop interrupting each other!
This is a book about people’s love and loyalty to a place and each other. It gives us what a good story should: a perspective on ourselves, and a view of where we might go from here.
I am delighted, inspired, and even hopeful having read this book. It seized me, it pushed me, it scintillates with the possibilities of the future. It’s exactly the sort of book I couldn’t find for a bleak, censorious decade. And it’s only Ark Press’s first. May there be many, many more.
