Fiction Reviews
A Rebel's History of Mars
(2025) Nadia Afifi, Flame Tree Press, £20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95, hrdbk, 297pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58945-2
A Rebel’s History of Mars is a fresh take on some old science fictional ideas.
The story runs along two timelines. The first involves Azad, a doctor on the planet of Nabatea in approximately the year 4612. There humans like Azad and Vitruvians live a peaceful coexistence on the whole, although there is a strict societal hierarchy and a degree of racism between the Nabateans and the Vitruvians.. Their environment seems somewhat Arabian or Saharan to me – all desert dust, sandstorms and tents. (The name Nabatea was inspired by the city of Petra in Jordan.)
The second plotline is set in 2195, 1209 years before Nabatea was settled. Kezza Sayer is an aerialist who works in the Circus in the Calypso Corporate Campus on Mars. Her agility and muscles mean that she is capable of impressive feats of display, and has developed a reputation as a skilled performer.
Unbeknown to most, Kezza hates the conditions she works in, but is fuelled by revenge and sticks with it in the hope of killing Barrett Juul, the corporate businessman who killed her parents. He is charming, erudite and popular: a civilisationist, seemingly determined to improve the Martian’s lot.
There’s a bit of timey-wimey technological magic through the use of ‘Barry’, a machine created by the archaeologists to look at observed events through time. This allows them to follow what happens to Kezza when she meets Juul, and the resultant consequences. What they discover impacts them in the future as well as rewrites some of the legends of the past.
These apparently different timelines find themselves increasingly intertwined. Azad finds himself leaving Nabatea in the company of a group of historians, determined to work out how the Nabateans got to where they are and what happened to the colonies on Mars as a result.
It is an unusual, if intriguing mix. The circus athlete element was a little unnecessary but gave us the idea that the city of Calypso is like in the science fiction of the old days, a corporate frontier town, a place where people are living basic lives, in an atmosphere with less atmosphere and a less gravity than on Earth - elements which Kezza finds useful in the plot. There are parts where the story touched upon old-school stories of planetary discovery and knowledge, whilst giving them a contemporary spin. I was in turns reminded a little of the James Bond film Octopussy, Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao, C. L. Moore’s Shambleau and Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, not to mention a few others.
If you stop to think about it, all those elements suggest that the plot shouldn’t work, that there are too many unusual elements mixed together to form a consistent story. And yet it does. Add to this two very different, yet equally likeable, characters in the form of Kezza and Azad, and these seemingly disparate elements do come together by the end.
Things take unexpected turns in the narrative, and whilst they were often unexpected, the main key notes were not. The story is focussed on character, so you do not get too many background details of Mars or Nabatea, although there are enough to give you the gist without spoiling the flow of the story. There’s a lot of plates being spun here but this debut author manages to keep all things turning nicely.
A Rebel’s History of Mars was an engaging read from a promising new author (to me, anyway – previously she wrote The sentient The Emergent and The Transcendent). I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – I try not to know too much about things before I start a review book – but I was pleasantly surprised.
Mark Yon
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]