Harare Review of Books

304 pp. Published February 18, 2025 by Greenleaf Book Group Press. Sci-fi.

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This isn’t really the book the blurb said it was. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it does deliver a somewhat disorienting experience. A group of four astronauts—two couples—is off to Mars on a NASA mission; only, there are two competing missions happening more or less at the same time. The whole point seems to be who gets there first, and of course the NASA group wants to. Only, things go wrong—or there wouldn’t be a story—from stuff on the personal front to, well, underestimating the enemy. It’s all very… reality show-ish (allusion very much intended).

And it is all very entertaining. Expect more of a human story than actual sci-fi. I’m not enamoured of the epistolary conceit (the MC is explaining what happened in retrospect) as I don’t think it added much to the telling of the story, and the MC really is the most annoying person. But… I’ll grudgingly admit that on some level it works. My main beef really is that the chaotic happenings (expected, given what’s at the centre of this story) hide what seems like weak/chaotic plotting. And I’m not persuaded that interpersonal relations can really be resolved as simply as the book says they are.

But you won’t have picked this book up for the reasons you might watch a documentary, so none of this matters. Again: it is entertaining; that would seem reason enough to read it.

Thanks to Richmond Scott and to NetGalley for DRC access.