Girlfriend on Mars asks questions about ourselves more than the science of blasting far into space
I can often be a sucker for novels about terraforming on Mars. I’m certainly not alone in my overly hopeful imagining that our wacky world can actually successfully one day get to a place beyond the Moon, let alone colonize it.
But you can’t blame me for imagining. Despite humanity’s countless deficits, it does appear we are going to try to get a human to Mars in the relatively near future. That mere possibility adds to the effectiveness of 2023’s Girlfriend on Mars by Canadian author Deborah Willis. So many Mars books I’ve read lean heavily into the science-fiction elements of explaining (one could say over-explaining) the science of it all. That can serve a time and a place, but Willis’s read is so good because it dispels with most of that and just, for crying out loud, gets one of her protagonists to Mars! Capiche. No hemming and hawing about it. Or at least not much.
The story is laid out in a little bit of a soap-opera style. But it works. Her primary device is to switch every few pages from the point of view of Kevin, the boyfriend being left behind in Vancouver, Earth, and the girlfriend Amber, who is competing on a reality show for the chance to be one of the first two humans on Mars. Of course, the tension in the relationship is that, if she wins, they pretty much have to breakup.
Kevin and Amber are drug dealers. How in the world could she be picked for a role with such serious stakes? Well, she has a background in environmental science but had also been an aspiring Olympic gymnast until she tore her rotator cuff. Kevin, an aspiring and underachieving screenwriter, had thought they were “committed to going nowhere together.” She doesn’t want to have kids because of the environmental impact, and that seems to be ok with him.
The story is deeper than it sounds. There are frequent detours into exploring the many ways we’re destroying this planet and may need another as a backup in the approaching future, how our childhood-family dynamics and religion can screw us up, and the thoughts we go through in navigating sexual relationships throughout our lifetimes.
The idea of getting to Mars—spearheaded in the novel by the MarsNow corporation—is a definite storyline, but it’s secondary to the other fun and often deep stuff. MarsNow plans to terraform the fourth planet from the Sun so it can grow to be warm enough for many people to live there in a few hundred years or so, or maybe a thousand.
To kick off the whole process of launching life on Mars is a monumental task … can a stoner from western Canda get it done? Will she even win the competition, and if she does, can she get to Mars and survive there? Can she even wiggle out of her long-time relationships back on Earth? I found these questions—and many more—worth reading about.
4 out of 5 stars