Girlfriend on Mars (SF) - Deborah Willis ****

This was a science fiction novel that was crying out to be written, inspired by the failed attempted by the now collapsed Mars One to combine reality TV with a mission to Mars. In Deborah Willis's novel, the company becomes MarsNow, but the concept is exactly the same: two 'marsonauts' chosen in reality TV knockout style are going to be sent on a one-way trip to Mars.

The two central characters, Amber (the would-be space traveller) and her boyfriend Kevin seem designed to reflect the opening line of the Larkin poem This Be The Verse - they both are seriously damaged by their parents (as is Amber's other love interest and reality show competitor, Adam). The book is divided into alternating chapters, swapping between a first person account from Kevin and a third person account of what Amber is doing.

This approach broadly works well as their lives diverge, with Kevin left behind in Vancouver and Amber taking part in rounds of the reality show that are located across the world. Kevin, arguably, is the book's weak point as he has no redeeming features. His life primarily consists of sitting on his couch and smoking weed. You can see why Amber got together with him initially as they both escaped their parental homes - but it's hard to believe she would have stayed with him so long. Even before entering the show, Amber was bringing in the money while Kevin did... nothing much.

What the book does really well is explore the dark side of social media and reality TV as they distort the truth and manipulate their audiences. It also throw in a dubious tech billionaire behind MarsNow, whose big picture posturing is shown to simply a cover for making more and more money.

On the whole, Willis is also good at presenting the scientific reality of the difficulty of getting to Mars and surviving there. The only big error is that she thinks that constellations would be different on Mars - the distance from Earth is so much smaller than the distance to the stars that there would be no visible difference.

As we see Amber's relationship with Adam changing during the rounds of the reality show, it's hard not to see a bit of an Adam and Eve theme going on, especially given Amber's evangelical upbringing.

As a high concept novel and as far as the Amber segments go, this is a solidly five star book - but Kevin spends far too much time sitting on the couch, stoned, indulging in dull introspection, which makes the middle of the book sag a little. Nonetheless it's one of the high points of 2023.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog