Red Planet Blues

I also learned about the three geologic ages of Mars: The trilobite-like fossils in the novel are from the Noachian era.

It’s noir fiction on the red planet, but it loses its orbit

The novel is chock full of references based on science fiction stories and old movies, and I am sure I did not catch all of them. One interesting difference in this novel over others is that the first 86 pages is the complete and very excellent Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated novella Identity Theft. That in itself is worth the price of the book. The rest of the novel then picks up the action two months later. Be warned, however, that some parts are a bit violent, as even android transfers can be tortured to extract information. Also, detective Lomax would be a candidate for every sexual harassment lawsuit on Earth, if he was here, as he has no qualms on commenting about the assets of every female biological and transfer he meets.

It does come to a satisfying conclusion, and all the mysteries are solved. I found Red Planet Blues a great merger of science fiction with the old style detective genre, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It helps NSS and does not cost you a cent! They can be repaired quickly and moved to another body should one become too worn or damaged. Many have attempted a wild west enthused science fiction and almost all have resulted in a horrible mess.

Red Planet Blues manages to avoid this completely - it really does feel incredibly inviting and natural.

Red Planet Blues

Partly this is due to the fact that the author doesn't try and make the book a futurist western. Instead we have a style that feels much like firefly, all dusty and earthy and realistic. The idea of the transfers adds a great deal to the charm and integrates well with the plot.

Not only that but it changes the whole dynamic of the book and elevates the feeling of the gumshoe detective story. I've read a few Sawyer books and while all have been good Red Planet Blues is on a different level entirely.

Unfortunately for the reader, he's also the book's narrator, which means the book is smug and sexist, too. The book's incessant references to old movies make it clear that Sawyer knows and loves the era. But what in the first half of the 20th century read as swagger projected to obscure masculine anxiety today feels glib and off-putting.

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The complicated gender and power dynamics of classic hard-boiled detective fiction have also been simplified on the trip to Mars: At its best, Sawyer's fiction is a fascinating blend of intellectually compelling big ideas and humane, enduring characters. He is capable of great empathy and insight, which is what makes Red Planet Blues so disappointing. It's further undone by its genre-bending ambition.

In theory, setting a detective story in a science-fiction landscape could yield good results — and many good sci-fi novels have had mystery elements at their core.

But here the genres divide and conquer themselves, giving us neither a compelling, propulsive detective plot nor a satisfyingly realized future. Instead, we're left with limp signifiers of both genres: Sawyer's greatest strength is his imagination, and he doubly restrains it here, forcing half his book into the set patterns of the hard-boiled ethos while curtailing his sci-fi extrapolations in order to make room for the baggy mystery plot. But in this case it's literally true — Red Planet Blues incorporates Sawyer's celebrated novella Identity Theft , which makes up the novel's taut, self-contained and energetic first act.

Dedication

In these opening pages, Sawyer sends up noir and sci-fi tropes with glee, and the result is a tight and often funny mini-mystery. It's when that action draws to a close and Sawyer is faced with the problem of expanding an elegant, compact bit of genre parody fun into a full-length novel that the trail turns cold. Like any gold rush — or fossil hunt, for that matter — things just can't end as promisingly as they begin.

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