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The Mars House
From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a queer sci-fi novel about an Earth refugee and a Mars politician who fake marry to save their reputations—and their planet.
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee on Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. In Tharsis, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger—a person whose body is not adjusted to Mars’s lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation options are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to be surgically naturalized, a process that can be anything from disabling to deadly.
When Gale chooses January for an on-the-spot press junket interview that goes horribly awry, January’s life is thrown into chaos, but Gale’s political fortunes are damaged, too. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five-year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January’s financial future without naturalization and ensure Gale’s political future. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. And worse, soon, January finds himself entangled in political and personal events well beyond his imagining. Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay—and January may be the only person standing in the way.
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee on Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. In Tharsis, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger—a person whose body is not adjusted to Mars’s lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation options are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to be surgically naturalized, a process that can be anything from disabling to deadly.
When Gale chooses January for an on-the-spot press junket interview that goes horribly awry, January’s life is thrown into chaos, but Gale’s political fortunes are damaged, too. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five-year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January’s financial future without naturalization and ensure Gale’s political future. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. And worse, soon, January finds himself entangled in political and personal events well beyond his imagining. Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay—and January may be the only person standing in the way.
469 pages, Hardcover
First published March 19, 2024
About the author
Natasha Pulley
10 books2,693 followersNatasha Pulley is a British author, best known for her debut novel,
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
, which won a Betty Trask Award.
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January 8, 2024
On my blog.
Rep: achillean mc, agender li, agender society
Galley provided by publisher
In the months between reading The Half Life of Valery K and The Mars House, I made a promise with myself: if Natasha Pulley’s next book didn’t do away with the misogyny that has characterised her previous five books to varying degrees (as I mentioned in my Valery K review), then I would give up on her future books. Well, I have good news on that front, because there was no misogyny in this one!
If only because there were no women* whatsoever.
Now, this really isn’t my primary issue with the book, except that I think it ties in with a general misunderstanding of gender which undercuts anything this book might be trying to say about the topic (this is, to be perfectly honest, my most generous take on it. That it’s trying to say anything at all, notwithstanding the question of whether it’s capable of doing so). No, this is merely a single issue within a sea of them, which, lucky you!, I will be enumerating in this review. Stop reading now if you want to a. avoid spoilers, or b. simply desire the feeling of wanting to read this book. For those of you who read further, well. Godspeed.
There are very few reviews which I can’t just write from my notes, but my notes are so long and cumbersome for this one that I have actually needed to sit down and get them in order before even attempting a review. In trying to group together all of my problems here, I think most of it comes down to failures in worldbuilding. A second, smaller but not more minor, set of issues relates to the characters. A final set — and this one I can call more minor — regards Pulley’s writing itself, which I never thought I’d say, having loved it in at least four of her previous five. Oh and then, one big glaring, what the fuck bit.
So, let’s take them one by one.
— The worldbuilding.
1. Gender.
We’re starting with one of the two big issues straight up and that’s Pulley’s treatment of gender. Or, to be more exact, the way she has created a society without gender. Firstly, I have to say, reading this at the same time as Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch, a sci-fi series that thinks about gender in an interesting way, was a mistake. All it did was show up how badly it was done here.
Pulley’s concept of gender is solely based on pronoun use. It took me a little while to figure it out (mostly because I couldn’t believe the justification would be this inane), but the reason everyone on Mars uses they pronouns is twofold: one, they all speak Mandarin and, because in spoken Mandarin ‘he’ and ‘she’ sound the same, they decided instead to just make it a ‘they’ pronoun and apply it to everyone. Thus, we have a distinction between the “civilised” Martians (who are a few generations removed from having travelled from Earth to Mars) who only use ‘they’, and the “uncivilised” refugees who still insist on using ‘he’ and ‘she’. And secondly, while choosing to use ‘they’ — which I also want to note was, it sounds, just an arbitrary decision — they also eliminated “extreme gender traits” in DNA. Whatever that means!
All of this, I think, just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of our own concept of gender in the 21st century, let alone what a concept of gender a few decades down the line might look like. But what we can safely say is that, if it’s not based on pronouns now, it’s hardly going to suddenly convert to being based on pronouns in the future, is it? Not to mention the whole pronouns thing is actually being translated from Mandarin to make this happen. The characters are speaking Mandarin as the book happens, albeit a Mandarin which has had a few generations to develop from Mandarin as we know it now (enough, it seems, for Mars to exact genetic alterations on humans too, while not being that far removed into the future. And here I was thinking these things moved slowly…). I could buy that there’s a ‘they’ pronoun developed in this futuristic Mandarin. I cannot buy that they basically said “well, these two words sound the same so let’s merge them together”. That is. Not how language works! Not to mention that these words in written Mandarin are still different. You can’t just smush them together and translate them as ‘they’ because they sound the same. Are you going to do that in English for ‘sun’ and ‘son’? No! And, even in spoken Mandarin, there’ll often be context to tell you which pronoun the speaker means, so I would imagine it’s rarely hugely ambiguous. Mandarin speakers are not considering themselves to be going around calling everyone ‘they’ because the words sound the same. (Plus, I feel it’s somewhat disrespectful to nonbinary Mandarin speakers who, you know, might want their own pronouns?) (P.S. for a more accurate take from a Mandarin speaker, see the first point of this review. My analysis was primarily based on Pulley's claims within the book.)
Moving on from the pronouns, let’s come to this whole thing of eliminating extreme gender traits from DNA, thus effectively making everyone agender. It’s hard to put into words just how much this whole idea wants to poke my eyes out. It plays exactly into TERF rhetoric that gender equals biology. By removing the “biology” (questionable to say the least?), you remove the “gender”. So our agender society has TERF-y logic underpinning it. Combine this with the part I mentioned at the start where using ‘they’ makes you “civilised” and ‘he’ or ‘she’ “uncivilised” and you get some really weird shit. There are “pro-gender” terrorists in this and I cannot for the life of me tell if it’s some TERF allegory, or in which direction it’s meant to be. Are the Martians TERFs because of their biological understanding of gender? Are the Earth diaspora TERFs because of their insistence on clinging to Earth ideas of gender (which, by the way, does not appear to include nonbinary or trans people in itself)? Is everyone a TERF???
One piece more of information can inform us here: in creating an agender society, Natasha Pulley has, barring the minorest of minor characters, entirely eradicated women from her novel. Maybe no one’s a TERF then. Don’t need feminism if you don’t have women!
(That’s sarcastic, btw.)
2. In-world racism.
Second of the major issues with worldbuilding regards the in-world concepts of racism, and how exactly characters are racist. This is a book about anti-immigrant politics, about a politician whose entire platform rests on xenophobic and racist rhetoric. Basically, what we have here is a book that essentially translates as “far right politician forced to fake-date political opposite and they fall in love”. And yes, I should absolutely have read that blurb and stayed the fuck away. Alas, I do not appear to possess basic survival instincts, but, since I did read this, I can detail exactly what’s awful about it!
Let me just say, overall this felt like a very strange take from a British author in the midst of such an anti-immigration Tory government. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Pulley’s personal politics, but uh. Yeah. You’ll see why.
Once again, Pulley demonstrates a fundamental lack of knowledge about how racism works, and falls straight into that SFF trap that has authors try to justify racism (see this article for explanation if you don’t already know this part). It turns out that humans coming to Mars from Earth are, due to the differences in gravity, automatically bigger and stronger than Martians who’ve spent years there and who are frail and fragile in comparison. So much that an Earther might easily kill a Martian with just a tap and are thus forced to remain in literal cages as they go about their day. The reason our love interest in particular is xenophobic is because they were attacked by an Earther and injured a little while before the events of the book take place. Thus, they choose to call for all Earthers to be surgically altered so they’re less strong and pose no threat to Martians (a surgery which drastically ruins Earther quality of life, by the by).
Now, January — January is the most frustrating protagonist in this respect. Instead of challenging Gale on their bigotry, he tries to accommodate them. He’s repeatedly saying he disagrees with the idea that Earthers are dangerous, only to turn around and say “well, we are dangerous, we might accidentally kill a Martian”, like he’s justifying it. He wears his cage almost permanently around Gale, and even hands them the key to it, so he can’t take it off until Gale decides they’re not scared of him any longer (a decision which has a negative impact on his own health). He spends a lot of the time advocating for his own oppression. A common conversation between January and Gale will go like so:
GALE, A BIGOT: Earthstrongers must be all surgically altered so they’re not dangerous to native Martians.
JANUARY, A WET DRIP: You’re a bigot! But actually, you’re right because we are soooo much stronger and sooooo dangerous to you guys :( Yes, we should all be kept in cages :(
I don’t even think you can make the effective argument that January’s been indoctrinated by Martian bigotry because he’s not even been there a year! He fails to conform to the pronouns thing, but he’s perfectly happy considering himself dangerous and a potential killer all the time? Uh, okay. It takes a good half of the book for January to stand up to Gale’s xenophobia in any way, at which point it suddenly becomes justified for another reason. Great!
There are another couple of questionable aspects to mention before we move on (okay, questionable might be too weak a word). Firstly, there’s an undercurrent of suspicion that the immigrants are coming over to subsume the Martian colony back into Earth China, which isn’t that challenged. I mean, it’s revealed that the end that the non-fascist politician is actually working to do this, so it’s almost like… fascist good??? Secondly, the plot ends with
3. Other wishy-washy worldbuilding aspects.
In general, I think Natasha Pulley’s writing lends itself better to real world fiction, or rather, fiction based in a setting she doesn’t have to make up so much. Where there’s some grounding in what we (and she) already know(s). A lot of the worldbuilding in this one felt somewhat flimsy, included because why not!, rather than because it made sense or added to the narrative.
Case in point:
(It also felt like Pulley wrote the mechanical octopus into The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and has been trying to recapture that kind of effortless whimsy in her books ever since. Alas, talking mammoths are anything but effortless.)
— The characters.
Everything I have to say from here will get progressively shorter, I’m sure you’re glad to know. In fact, my comments on the characters will probably be the shortest of all. Really, what I want to say here is solely that Pulley’s characters are starting to feel incredibly samey, in particular the last three protagonists she’s written. Thaniel and Merrick are probably her most distinct of characters, followed by Joe (simply because he’s the first of the next three). Yes, they all share similarities (perhaps more than you might want for an author), but not so much as Joe, Valery and January do.
This is, likely, a disservice to Joe and The Kingdoms (which is my favourite of Pulley’s books, although I fear testing it by rereading it after this!). He is, after all, the prototype. And maybe my view of Valery and January as very similar to him is borne of the fact that The Half Life of Valery K and The Mars House are easily my least favourite Pulley books. But the fact remains that I don’t think any of the three are meaningfully distinct. Their POVs sound exactly the same — a fact which could be put down to writing style, yes — but they also feel like the same character cast in three different plots.
There’s also a pattern appearing where Pulley’s couples are made up of a big, brutish-seeming-but-actually-a-gentle-giant character, along with a smaller, frailer character (often also more womanish?? But that could be retrospective analysis from me), and a fair amount is made of their difference in size and power. Admittedly, that last part is greater here simply because the whole thing about physical power is plot-relevant (or rather, bigotry-relevant). Your mileage may vary on how much you can stand the whole size difference schtick, but with six books of couples forming this pattern, I at least am starting to feel a bit like. Ooooh-kaaaay.
— The writing.
Pulley’s writing is, as ever, lovely, and probably one of the only positive things I have to mention about this book, but even that comes with a caveat. All of Pulley’s books have this quiet kind of gentleness to them, which worked for the first four books and even with the brutality of The Kingdoms, where it felt like the contrast between that gentleness and the non-gentleness of events highlighted the latter. It has not worked well here, much like it didn’t in The Half Life of Valery K. In the latter case, it served more to feel like it was downplaying the horrors of the gulag. This was probably because Pulley was more inclined to fully describe the brutality of The Kingdoms and more likely to brush over it in The Half Life of Valery K (possibly because the romance was between a prisoner and a guard?). In The Mars House, that gentleness becomes tonally quite odd. There’s all this anti-immigrant rhetoric and discussion of disabling surgery and eugenics, and it’s all packaged up in this writing that feels like it obscures those horrors. Like I said, odd.
Of course, though, if you had full access to those horrors, if it didn’t feel like there was a blanket being placed over it all to muffle the noise, there would be no way in hell that you could root for Gale as January’s love interest.
— The what the fuck bit.
Last but not least, and really quite pertinent given that, as I’m writing this, Israeli occupation forces are in the midst of committing genocide in Gaza and every day brings with it more and more horrific war crimes by their soldiers, this book, set in the future, is doing its bit to bring that reality nearer. There are two mentions of Israel in this and, firstly, that’s two too many. One is the mention of an AI having a “wonderful, homely Israeli accent”. Which, yuck, and also you could have chosen any country in the world to make this comment, so why an illegal apartheid state, huh? (Also January is from Britain: why would he consider Israel to be “homely”??) But to make it even more egregious, with the next mention, Pulley erases Palestine in its entirety.
I stress that this book is set in the future for this very reason. In Pulley’s future, it seems that Israel has succeeded in its aim of murdering every Palestinian and wiping out their state, culture, and entire existence. There is, in here, a scene set during Christmas, in which a young Martian child reading an Earther book, asks what Bethlehem is. January has no response, so Gale cuts in to say that it’s a town in Israel.
A quick google search would tell you that Bethlehem is a town in the West Bank, a.k.a. in Occupied Palestine. Not Israel! In fact, being in the West Bank, in an area where (technically) Israelis are not permitted. So not only has Pulley chosen to normalise the existence of an illegal settler-colonial state in her future-set book, she has also chosen to entirely wipe out the land’s indigenous population. Just giving the IOF a helping hand!
So, with this comes to a close possibly the longest review I have ever written, and definitely the longest essay-type thing I have since finishing my dissertation a few years ago. If you’ve stuck with me this far, congrats! I hope I’ve not killed your enthusiasm over this one too much. If you’re skipping to the end, I offer you this TL;DR: in conclusion, fascism solved because the fascist marries someone oppressed 🫶🏻.
*This is not quite true because, reading through my notes, I found the following: chapter 20: OH MY GOD IT’S A WOMAN. She lasted for one single chapter though, so I think it barely counts.
Rep: achillean mc, agender li, agender society
Galley provided by publisher
In the months between reading The Half Life of Valery K and The Mars House, I made a promise with myself: if Natasha Pulley’s next book didn’t do away with the misogyny that has characterised her previous five books to varying degrees (as I mentioned in my Valery K review), then I would give up on her future books. Well, I have good news on that front, because there was no misogyny in this one!
If only because there were no women* whatsoever.
Now, this really isn’t my primary issue with the book, except that I think it ties in with a general misunderstanding of gender which undercuts anything this book might be trying to say about the topic (this is, to be perfectly honest, my most generous take on it. That it’s trying to say anything at all, notwithstanding the question of whether it’s capable of doing so). No, this is merely a single issue within a sea of them, which, lucky you!, I will be enumerating in this review. Stop reading now if you want to a. avoid spoilers, or b. simply desire the feeling of wanting to read this book. For those of you who read further, well. Godspeed.
There are very few reviews which I can’t just write from my notes, but my notes are so long and cumbersome for this one that I have actually needed to sit down and get them in order before even attempting a review. In trying to group together all of my problems here, I think most of it comes down to failures in worldbuilding. A second, smaller but not more minor, set of issues relates to the characters. A final set — and this one I can call more minor — regards Pulley’s writing itself, which I never thought I’d say, having loved it in at least four of her previous five. Oh and then, one big glaring, what the fuck bit.
So, let’s take them one by one.
— The worldbuilding.
1. Gender.
We’re starting with one of the two big issues straight up and that’s Pulley’s treatment of gender. Or, to be more exact, the way she has created a society without gender. Firstly, I have to say, reading this at the same time as Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch, a sci-fi series that thinks about gender in an interesting way, was a mistake. All it did was show up how badly it was done here.
Pulley’s concept of gender is solely based on pronoun use. It took me a little while to figure it out (mostly because I couldn’t believe the justification would be this inane), but the reason everyone on Mars uses they pronouns is twofold: one, they all speak Mandarin and, because in spoken Mandarin ‘he’ and ‘she’ sound the same, they decided instead to just make it a ‘they’ pronoun and apply it to everyone. Thus, we have a distinction between the “civilised” Martians (who are a few generations removed from having travelled from Earth to Mars) who only use ‘they’, and the “uncivilised” refugees who still insist on using ‘he’ and ‘she’. And secondly, while choosing to use ‘they’ — which I also want to note was, it sounds, just an arbitrary decision — they also eliminated “extreme gender traits” in DNA. Whatever that means!
All of this, I think, just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of our own concept of gender in the 21st century, let alone what a concept of gender a few decades down the line might look like. But what we can safely say is that, if it’s not based on pronouns now, it’s hardly going to suddenly convert to being based on pronouns in the future, is it? Not to mention the whole pronouns thing is actually being translated from Mandarin to make this happen. The characters are speaking Mandarin as the book happens, albeit a Mandarin which has had a few generations to develop from Mandarin as we know it now (enough, it seems, for Mars to exact genetic alterations on humans too, while not being that far removed into the future. And here I was thinking these things moved slowly…). I could buy that there’s a ‘they’ pronoun developed in this futuristic Mandarin. I cannot buy that they basically said “well, these two words sound the same so let’s merge them together”. That is. Not how language works! Not to mention that these words in written Mandarin are still different. You can’t just smush them together and translate them as ‘they’ because they sound the same. Are you going to do that in English for ‘sun’ and ‘son’? No! And, even in spoken Mandarin, there’ll often be context to tell you which pronoun the speaker means, so I would imagine it’s rarely hugely ambiguous. Mandarin speakers are not considering themselves to be going around calling everyone ‘they’ because the words sound the same. (Plus, I feel it’s somewhat disrespectful to nonbinary Mandarin speakers who, you know, might want their own pronouns?) (P.S. for a more accurate take from a Mandarin speaker, see the first point of this review. My analysis was primarily based on Pulley's claims within the book.)
Moving on from the pronouns, let’s come to this whole thing of eliminating extreme gender traits from DNA, thus effectively making everyone agender. It’s hard to put into words just how much this whole idea wants to poke my eyes out. It plays exactly into TERF rhetoric that gender equals biology. By removing the “biology” (questionable to say the least?), you remove the “gender”. So our agender society has TERF-y logic underpinning it. Combine this with the part I mentioned at the start where using ‘they’ makes you “civilised” and ‘he’ or ‘she’ “uncivilised” and you get some really weird shit. There are “pro-gender” terrorists in this and I cannot for the life of me tell if it’s some TERF allegory, or in which direction it’s meant to be. Are the Martians TERFs because of their biological understanding of gender? Are the Earth diaspora TERFs because of their insistence on clinging to Earth ideas of gender (which, by the way, does not appear to include nonbinary or trans people in itself)? Is everyone a TERF???
One piece more of information can inform us here: in creating an agender society, Natasha Pulley has, barring the minorest of minor characters, entirely eradicated women from her novel. Maybe no one’s a TERF then. Don’t need feminism if you don’t have women!
(That’s sarcastic, btw.)
2. In-world racism.
Second of the major issues with worldbuilding regards the in-world concepts of racism, and how exactly characters are racist. This is a book about anti-immigrant politics, about a politician whose entire platform rests on xenophobic and racist rhetoric. Basically, what we have here is a book that essentially translates as “far right politician forced to fake-date political opposite and they fall in love”. And yes, I should absolutely have read that blurb and stayed the fuck away. Alas, I do not appear to possess basic survival instincts, but, since I did read this, I can detail exactly what’s awful about it!
Let me just say, overall this felt like a very strange take from a British author in the midst of such an anti-immigration Tory government. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Pulley’s personal politics, but uh. Yeah. You’ll see why.
Once again, Pulley demonstrates a fundamental lack of knowledge about how racism works, and falls straight into that SFF trap that has authors try to justify racism (see this article for explanation if you don’t already know this part). It turns out that humans coming to Mars from Earth are, due to the differences in gravity, automatically bigger and stronger than Martians who’ve spent years there and who are frail and fragile in comparison. So much that an Earther might easily kill a Martian with just a tap and are thus forced to remain in literal cages as they go about their day. The reason our love interest in particular is xenophobic is because they were attacked by an Earther and injured a little while before the events of the book take place. Thus, they choose to call for all Earthers to be surgically altered so they’re less strong and pose no threat to Martians (a surgery which drastically ruins Earther quality of life, by the by).
Now, January — January is the most frustrating protagonist in this respect. Instead of challenging Gale on their bigotry, he tries to accommodate them. He’s repeatedly saying he disagrees with the idea that Earthers are dangerous, only to turn around and say “well, we are dangerous, we might accidentally kill a Martian”, like he’s justifying it. He wears his cage almost permanently around Gale, and even hands them the key to it, so he can’t take it off until Gale decides they’re not scared of him any longer (a decision which has a negative impact on his own health). He spends a lot of the time advocating for his own oppression. A common conversation between January and Gale will go like so:
GALE, A BIGOT: Earthstrongers must be all surgically altered so they’re not dangerous to native Martians.
JANUARY, A WET DRIP: You’re a bigot! But actually, you’re right because we are soooo much stronger and sooooo dangerous to you guys :( Yes, we should all be kept in cages :(
I don’t even think you can make the effective argument that January’s been indoctrinated by Martian bigotry because he’s not even been there a year! He fails to conform to the pronouns thing, but he’s perfectly happy considering himself dangerous and a potential killer all the time? Uh, okay. It takes a good half of the book for January to stand up to Gale’s xenophobia in any way, at which point it suddenly becomes justified for another reason. Great!
There are another couple of questionable aspects to mention before we move on (okay, questionable might be too weak a word). Firstly, there’s an undercurrent of suspicion that the immigrants are coming over to subsume the Martian colony back into Earth China, which isn’t that challenged. I mean, it’s revealed that the end that the non-fascist politician is actually working to do this, so it’s almost like… fascist good??? Secondly, the plot ends with
3. Other wishy-washy worldbuilding aspects.
In general, I think Natasha Pulley’s writing lends itself better to real world fiction, or rather, fiction based in a setting she doesn’t have to make up so much. Where there’s some grounding in what we (and she) already know(s). A lot of the worldbuilding in this one felt somewhat flimsy, included because why not!, rather than because it made sense or added to the narrative.
Case in point:
(It also felt like Pulley wrote the mechanical octopus into The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and has been trying to recapture that kind of effortless whimsy in her books ever since. Alas, talking mammoths are anything but effortless.)
— The characters.
Everything I have to say from here will get progressively shorter, I’m sure you’re glad to know. In fact, my comments on the characters will probably be the shortest of all. Really, what I want to say here is solely that Pulley’s characters are starting to feel incredibly samey, in particular the last three protagonists she’s written. Thaniel and Merrick are probably her most distinct of characters, followed by Joe (simply because he’s the first of the next three). Yes, they all share similarities (perhaps more than you might want for an author), but not so much as Joe, Valery and January do.
This is, likely, a disservice to Joe and The Kingdoms (which is my favourite of Pulley’s books, although I fear testing it by rereading it after this!). He is, after all, the prototype. And maybe my view of Valery and January as very similar to him is borne of the fact that The Half Life of Valery K and The Mars House are easily my least favourite Pulley books. But the fact remains that I don’t think any of the three are meaningfully distinct. Their POVs sound exactly the same — a fact which could be put down to writing style, yes — but they also feel like the same character cast in three different plots.
There’s also a pattern appearing where Pulley’s couples are made up of a big, brutish-seeming-but-actually-a-gentle-giant character, along with a smaller, frailer character (often also more womanish?? But that could be retrospective analysis from me), and a fair amount is made of their difference in size and power. Admittedly, that last part is greater here simply because the whole thing about physical power is plot-relevant (or rather, bigotry-relevant). Your mileage may vary on how much you can stand the whole size difference schtick, but with six books of couples forming this pattern, I at least am starting to feel a bit like. Ooooh-kaaaay.
— The writing.
Pulley’s writing is, as ever, lovely, and probably one of the only positive things I have to mention about this book, but even that comes with a caveat. All of Pulley’s books have this quiet kind of gentleness to them, which worked for the first four books and even with the brutality of The Kingdoms, where it felt like the contrast between that gentleness and the non-gentleness of events highlighted the latter. It has not worked well here, much like it didn’t in The Half Life of Valery K. In the latter case, it served more to feel like it was downplaying the horrors of the gulag. This was probably because Pulley was more inclined to fully describe the brutality of The Kingdoms and more likely to brush over it in The Half Life of Valery K (possibly because the romance was between a prisoner and a guard?). In The Mars House, that gentleness becomes tonally quite odd. There’s all this anti-immigrant rhetoric and discussion of disabling surgery and eugenics, and it’s all packaged up in this writing that feels like it obscures those horrors. Like I said, odd.
Of course, though, if you had full access to those horrors, if it didn’t feel like there was a blanket being placed over it all to muffle the noise, there would be no way in hell that you could root for Gale as January’s love interest.
— The what the fuck bit.
Last but not least, and really quite pertinent given that, as I’m writing this, Israeli occupation forces are in the midst of committing genocide in Gaza and every day brings with it more and more horrific war crimes by their soldiers, this book, set in the future, is doing its bit to bring that reality nearer. There are two mentions of Israel in this and, firstly, that’s two too many. One is the mention of an AI having a “wonderful, homely Israeli accent”. Which, yuck, and also you could have chosen any country in the world to make this comment, so why an illegal apartheid state, huh? (Also January is from Britain: why would he consider Israel to be “homely”??) But to make it even more egregious, with the next mention, Pulley erases Palestine in its entirety.
I stress that this book is set in the future for this very reason. In Pulley’s future, it seems that Israel has succeeded in its aim of murdering every Palestinian and wiping out their state, culture, and entire existence. There is, in here, a scene set during Christmas, in which a young Martian child reading an Earther book, asks what Bethlehem is. January has no response, so Gale cuts in to say that it’s a town in Israel.
A quick google search would tell you that Bethlehem is a town in the West Bank, a.k.a. in Occupied Palestine. Not Israel! In fact, being in the West Bank, in an area where (technically) Israelis are not permitted. So not only has Pulley chosen to normalise the existence of an illegal settler-colonial state in her future-set book, she has also chosen to entirely wipe out the land’s indigenous population. Just giving the IOF a helping hand!
So, with this comes to a close possibly the longest review I have ever written, and definitely the longest essay-type thing I have since finishing my dissertation a few years ago. If you’ve stuck with me this far, congrats! I hope I’ve not killed your enthusiasm over this one too much. If you’re skipping to the end, I offer you this TL;DR: in conclusion, fascism solved because the fascist marries someone oppressed 🫶🏻.
*This is not quite true because, reading through my notes, I found the following: chapter 20: OH MY GOD IT’S A WOMAN. She lasted for one single chapter though, so I think it barely counts.
April 17, 2024
While I loved the unrepentant joy given towards Mandarin, unfortunately this book was impressively sinophobic and xenophobic, and randomly fucking zionist. Furthermore this author lacks imagination, a sufficient understanding of science, and as well as knowledge of Chinese culture despite having lived there and speaking the language.
So… let’s go through it I guess? God I don’t want to.
(Also as a note, I speak Mandarin and studying math-astro. My knowledge concerning the following topics comes from personal experience and knowledge.)
0. On gender and pronouns
I saw another reviewer comment on the language and I wanted to reply here. In Mandarin while we have gendered pronouns, that’s also a lie. In the early 1900s feminists advocated for a women’s pronoun, leading to the invention of 她. However this didn’t catch on in spoken Mandarin, thus we pronounce all pronouns the same, and write them differently. It’s also why people default to 他 over 她 when they don’t know someone’s gender, or when referring to a crowd of people, even if all of them are women.
However, in most Chinese languages, especially older ones with their own character like Cantonese or Teochew (shout out to my gaginang), people never made that switch. So in Teochew & Shainghaiese we have 伊 and Cantonese has 佢. You may notice that 他 has a similar symbol to 佢 and 伊 on the left hand side, this symbol is called a radical, and is the radical form of 人, which translates to human in English. It has no gendered connotation. In fact, the word for man in written Chinese is 男人, while the word for woman is 女人. You may notice that 女 appears in the feminine pronoun, thus denoting it refers to the feminine, but 男 makes no appearance in the ‘masculine’ pronoun. It’s because of this that, to this day, many non-binary folks use 他 because the pronoun implies they/them, others use TA which is the spoken pronunciation of all mandarin pronouns, and others yet use X也. There have also been somewhat recent pushes to go back to solely 他 by some because of the perceived westernness of binary gender pronouns.
Because of all of this, it’s insane to imply that a culture using gender neutral pronouns would lead to an agender society, especially within the context of Chinese culture and history. In Chinese labels don’t imply the gender of a person except in the case of familial relations, instead they tend to be based on one’s position. So while your sister is feminine, “Empress” Wu Zetian isn’t an empress but an emperor. 皇帝 is the title given to the ruler of China, it just means imperial supreme ruler, it has no strict gender associations. However despite literal millennium of speaking such a language, Chinese culture is not an agender culture, or even much of a gender equal one. Chinese culture is incredibly patriarchal, I’m not going to try and fool you. It’s not as bad as people like to pretend, but it certainly exists. While yes, in another 100 or so years we may revert back to the gender neutrality of a single pronoun in Mandarin, that’s not going to suddenly make society more gender equitable. That’s not how it worked in the past, that will not be how it works in the future. And to think that all the issues of the patriarchy would be solved by a bit of a change in language which we previously had, is sloppy Sapir-Worfism that is just historically untrue.
1. Sinophobia
While the book takes place in an ostensibly culturally Chinese Mars, it’s nevertheless astonishing sinophobic in the way white westerners who ‘support Taiwan’ often are. AKA they blame all the worlds misfortunes upon China and wish to support their limited perceptions of democracy and freedom against the big bad evil guy China! And throughout this book that opinion seems to shine through. Even though the author ironically worked with Chinese scholars on the Mandarin language for this book.
The Mars House treats China as horrifying military power who may ‘come back to reclaim their colony,Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau Mars!’ This entire plotline however just reads like red scare propaganda against Chinese people. And I say this as a member of the Chinese diaspora who supports a free HK. But this book crosses the line from the idea of self-determination into repeating tired old red scare propaganda about dangerous Chinese spies who are in your communities out to take away your family’s private business and nationalise it! Especially because on Mars all the colonies are run by giant conglomerate families, and have ‘just become successful and independent of China.’ So it’s a genuine worry a MC faces in the book. Furthermore, it’s implied throughout the book that the Earth governments are the same as in the early 21st century despite this book being set nearly 200 years in the future. So we’ve got to protect their financial freedoms and the rich families abilities from the dangerous commies yeah? Yeah absolutely.
All of that to say, this is just a return to tried, true, and classic, sinophobia that ultimately harms all Chinese people, even the ones white people love to claim to support us. Because this book was just a treatise on white westerners belief that China is oh so big and scary with a military that’s always threatening to invade their colonies, even if they’re 140,000,000 miles away on average. Which makes me so tired. This doesn’t help anyone, this just hurts Chinese people, and my family left China a 100 years ago, why am I still catching shit for this?
2. Xenophobia
The Mars House also greatly suffers from incredibly xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. While Pulley tries to draw back on in the final few pages of the books, she spends the rest of it having a MC espouse it, all the while trying to portray them as loveable and quirky. Throughout the book that MC argues that the colony’s must be protected, because otherwise the immigrants who come in from Earth will destroy the culture and endanger all the people living there by accidentally killing them. These immigrants “just can’t control themselves and are brutes who don’t know their own strength.” Which is just your standard anti-immigrant drivel, and as the book goes on even the MC, January, begins to agree with them. So even as the author reneges a little, they also whisper softly in your head ‘but actually I’m right.’
A different, wiser reviewer pointed out much of this as TERF-laden ideology. Something I can’t help but agree with them on, especially as this book tries to argue something about ‘gender extremism’ which is, mind you, bullshit. You need hormones to not die, and not have bad bones. They’re very helpful, and honestly this is piss poor science.
Now the author, I will say, is clever in her violently xenophobic rhetoric, as she makes all the refugees white Europeans (Remember, this book is set 200 years in the future and yet Europe is apparently still mostly white) to try and distract you. But I’m going to be honest with you, it’s still xenophobia. Furthermore, pitting it as ‘those evil tall alien looking Asian folks from Mars who are being xenophobic to the white Europeans refugees from Earth’ is fucking ballsy, and I’m pretty sure sinophobic and racist as well.
3. The Zionism
I don’t even know why this one was necessary to be honest. The others weren’t either, but they were at the very least vaguely related to the plot of the story. This one wasn’t. Because the book is set about 200 years in the future on a culturally Chinese mars, where most of the non-natives are from Europe. But for some unknown reason we’re told Bethlehem, a Palestinian village, in Palestine, is in Israel in a Christmas scene. Implying that Palestine doesn’t exist anymore. And considering the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the recent canceling of Christmas in Bethlehem by Palestinian Christians it feels like the authors attempt to be quippy.
We’re also given a character who we’re explicitly told have an Israeli accent, despite them being an AI, and it’s described as homely. Does the AI come from Israel? No, not at all. Do they do anything for the plot? Nope. Why is this needed? Why is this necessary?
Perhaps there’s something to be said about this authors clear hard on for the idea of ‘western style democracies opposing the big bad evil POC’ both in East Asia and the Middle East. But what do I know? I study physics. But oh boy howdy, did this shit make me fucking uncomfortable.
4. The science
This one’s for my sanity. Exactly 0 of the technological innovations in this book made any sense. It’s set 150-200 years in the future yet solar panels have only improved to 50% absorption rates. High powered lightbulbs are 10W now instead of 25-40W as well. Never mind the fact that we already manufacture and use 10W lightbulbs. I don’t know if you realise this, but that’s a remarkably slow innovation rate for technology. Considering we double our technological advancement every 2 or so years, we should further along. The energy consumption rate makes no sense.
Things breaking down also often felt like it was for plot convince rather than genuine understanding of science and technology. Not even to mention the water production plant, or the lack of nuclear energy plant as any mars colony would employ as a back up power generator. Which has been a point of discussion for years. Furthermore, even if we were to forgo a nuclear generator, colonies would likely employ wind turbines at the poles at backup generators. We wouldn’t have a single generator. On top of which, why even create all your own water when you could take water from the ice caps at the poles? I suspect this is to justify the use of the solar power, because driving can be a major task, but regularly shipments of water from the poles to the equator at regular intervals would work just as well.
Another question is why are there animals? In a vegan society while pets may make sense for the ultra rich, other animals, such as, oh I don’t know, wild birds and MAMMOTHS have no reason to be there. We wouldn’t import useless animals to a mars colony. This is also not to speak of the fact that being an entirely vegan society would be itself somewhat useless on Mars, as raising a cow and eating that has a far lesser water and energy requirement than eating tofu.
Furthermore, deleting more “extreme gender traits” as this book discusses, seemingly getting rid of too much testosterone, progesterone, oestrogen, and androgen, is incredibly dangerous to the human body. Despite what people may like to believe, we do need hormones, and too little of any of them leads to massive osteoporosis, depression, mood swings, as well as lower appetite. Getting rid of these to lead to more sedate humans is medically dangerous and would do nothing to fix gender inequality. Which the book does acknowledge, but only vaguely in an ‘oh that’s maybe interesting possibly’ way. And then never actually address. But bad behaviour isn’t an issue of hormone deregulation, bad behaviour is an issue of bad fucking behaviour. I’m not going to blame this author’s horrible book on her having oestrogen, that would be insane.
(This part was corrected by a commenter, ty commenter!) While the book does make a mention of terraforming, the terraforming makes genuinely no sense. While the temperatures have been made more suitable for humans, and presumably they’ve generated an atmosphere and increased gravity, the temperatures given are inconsistent with what they would be on Mars with terraforming, and increasing gravity on Mars isn’t less of a possibility and more of a farfetched idea due to its small size. Within the book the author states the Mars is -50C, if Mars was fully terraformed, then that wouldn’t really be a thing. As it stands, Mars currently lacks a consistent magnetosphere due to its size, and thus lacks an thick atmosphere made of up CO2, nitrogen, and oxygen. This lack of CO2 leads to temperatures incredibly dependent on the sun, and little to no regulation of heat on the planet. Roughly the more CO2 trapped by the atmosphere, the hotter the planet. Likewise, because it lacks CO2, it lacks the other necessary elements to have a breathable atmosphere, such as N and O2. You cannot have a planet with breathable air for humans without having Earth-like temperature regulation. And there is no way that within 7 generations humans would have adapted to breath Mar’s atmosphere, or to withstand it’s cold temperatures. You would have to have terraformed it by creating a magnetosphere to ensure that solar winds don’t strip its atmosphere. While yes, we could plant things in Martian soil by introducing the correct nutrients as this book suggests, no plants would survive due to the lack of sufficient CO2. The state of Mars and human evolution presented in this book are pure impossible science fiction that could not exist within the real world. Yet this book presents the state of Mars as if its sound when it’s not. 7 generations in below 50C weather with 1% of the oxygen on Earth will not lead to people adapting to -50C weather and a lack of oxygen, it will lead to many very cold, very dead by implosion, people.
And on a small other note, apparently in the bit where they mention the terraforming, they also say that this is the worst dust storm since pre-terraforming. Let’s be clear, martian dust storms very likely only work the way they do because of the lack of an atmosphere. Mars is similar to Earth, if it had Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere it probably wouldn’t suffer from dust storms of that size. this is an article which discusses that specifically.
TLDR; this book was bad that it became outrageously bad. I’ve never seen someone fuck up sapir-worfism that badly the science was inaccurate, and it was sinophobic, racist, xenophobic, and zionist drivel. I’m so happy I didn’t pay for this shit because I still feel like I’m owed a refund.
So… let’s go through it I guess? God I don’t want to.
(Also as a note, I speak Mandarin and studying math-astro. My knowledge concerning the following topics comes from personal experience and knowledge.)
0. On gender and pronouns
I saw another reviewer comment on the language and I wanted to reply here. In Mandarin while we have gendered pronouns, that’s also a lie. In the early 1900s feminists advocated for a women’s pronoun, leading to the invention of 她. However this didn’t catch on in spoken Mandarin, thus we pronounce all pronouns the same, and write them differently. It’s also why people default to 他 over 她 when they don’t know someone’s gender, or when referring to a crowd of people, even if all of them are women.
However, in most Chinese languages, especially older ones with their own character like Cantonese or Teochew (shout out to my gaginang), people never made that switch. So in Teochew & Shainghaiese we have 伊 and Cantonese has 佢. You may notice that 他 has a similar symbol to 佢 and 伊 on the left hand side, this symbol is called a radical, and is the radical form of 人, which translates to human in English. It has no gendered connotation. In fact, the word for man in written Chinese is 男人, while the word for woman is 女人. You may notice that 女 appears in the feminine pronoun, thus denoting it refers to the feminine, but 男 makes no appearance in the ‘masculine’ pronoun. It’s because of this that, to this day, many non-binary folks use 他 because the pronoun implies they/them, others use TA which is the spoken pronunciation of all mandarin pronouns, and others yet use X也. There have also been somewhat recent pushes to go back to solely 他 by some because of the perceived westernness of binary gender pronouns.
Because of all of this, it’s insane to imply that a culture using gender neutral pronouns would lead to an agender society, especially within the context of Chinese culture and history. In Chinese labels don’t imply the gender of a person except in the case of familial relations, instead they tend to be based on one’s position. So while your sister is feminine, “Empress” Wu Zetian isn’t an empress but an emperor. 皇帝 is the title given to the ruler of China, it just means imperial supreme ruler, it has no strict gender associations. However despite literal millennium of speaking such a language, Chinese culture is not an agender culture, or even much of a gender equal one. Chinese culture is incredibly patriarchal, I’m not going to try and fool you. It’s not as bad as people like to pretend, but it certainly exists. While yes, in another 100 or so years we may revert back to the gender neutrality of a single pronoun in Mandarin, that’s not going to suddenly make society more gender equitable. That’s not how it worked in the past, that will not be how it works in the future. And to think that all the issues of the patriarchy would be solved by a bit of a change in language which we previously had, is sloppy Sapir-Worfism that is just historically untrue.
1. Sinophobia
While the book takes place in an ostensibly culturally Chinese Mars, it’s nevertheless astonishing sinophobic in the way white westerners who ‘support Taiwan’ often are. AKA they blame all the worlds misfortunes upon China and wish to support their limited perceptions of democracy and freedom against the big bad evil guy China! And throughout this book that opinion seems to shine through. Even though the author ironically worked with Chinese scholars on the Mandarin language for this book.
The Mars House treats China as horrifying military power who may ‘come back to reclaim their colony,
All of that to say, this is just a return to tried, true, and classic, sinophobia that ultimately harms all Chinese people, even the ones white people love to claim to support us. Because this book was just a treatise on white westerners belief that China is oh so big and scary with a military that’s always threatening to invade their colonies, even if they’re 140,000,000 miles away on average. Which makes me so tired. This doesn’t help anyone, this just hurts Chinese people, and my family left China a 100 years ago, why am I still catching shit for this?
2. Xenophobia
The Mars House also greatly suffers from incredibly xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. While Pulley tries to draw back on in the final few pages of the books, she spends the rest of it having a MC espouse it, all the while trying to portray them as loveable and quirky. Throughout the book that MC argues that the colony’s must be protected, because otherwise the immigrants who come in from Earth will destroy the culture and endanger all the people living there by accidentally killing them. These immigrants “just can’t control themselves and are brutes who don’t know their own strength.” Which is just your standard anti-immigrant drivel, and as the book goes on even the MC, January, begins to agree with them. So even as the author reneges a little, they also whisper softly in your head ‘but actually I’m right.’
A different, wiser reviewer pointed out much of this as TERF-laden ideology. Something I can’t help but agree with them on, especially as this book tries to argue something about ‘gender extremism’ which is, mind you, bullshit. You need hormones to not die, and not have bad bones. They’re very helpful, and honestly this is piss poor science.
Now the author, I will say, is clever in her violently xenophobic rhetoric, as she makes all the refugees white Europeans (Remember, this book is set 200 years in the future and yet Europe is apparently still mostly white) to try and distract you. But I’m going to be honest with you, it’s still xenophobia. Furthermore, pitting it as ‘those evil tall alien looking Asian folks from Mars who are being xenophobic to the white Europeans refugees from Earth’ is fucking ballsy, and I’m pretty sure sinophobic and racist as well.
3. The Zionism
I don’t even know why this one was necessary to be honest. The others weren’t either, but they were at the very least vaguely related to the plot of the story. This one wasn’t. Because the book is set about 200 years in the future on a culturally Chinese mars, where most of the non-natives are from Europe. But for some unknown reason we’re told Bethlehem, a Palestinian village, in Palestine, is in Israel in a Christmas scene. Implying that Palestine doesn’t exist anymore. And considering the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the recent canceling of Christmas in Bethlehem by Palestinian Christians it feels like the authors attempt to be quippy.
We’re also given a character who we’re explicitly told have an Israeli accent, despite them being an AI, and it’s described as homely. Does the AI come from Israel? No, not at all. Do they do anything for the plot? Nope. Why is this needed? Why is this necessary?
Perhaps there’s something to be said about this authors clear hard on for the idea of ‘western style democracies opposing the big bad evil POC’ both in East Asia and the Middle East. But what do I know? I study physics. But oh boy howdy, did this shit make me fucking uncomfortable.
4. The science
This one’s for my sanity. Exactly 0 of the technological innovations in this book made any sense. It’s set 150-200 years in the future yet solar panels have only improved to 50% absorption rates. High powered lightbulbs are 10W now instead of 25-40W as well. Never mind the fact that we already manufacture and use 10W lightbulbs. I don’t know if you realise this, but that’s a remarkably slow innovation rate for technology. Considering we double our technological advancement every 2 or so years, we should further along. The energy consumption rate makes no sense.
Things breaking down also often felt like it was for plot convince rather than genuine understanding of science and technology. Not even to mention the water production plant, or the lack of nuclear energy plant as any mars colony would employ as a back up power generator. Which has been a point of discussion for years. Furthermore, even if we were to forgo a nuclear generator, colonies would likely employ wind turbines at the poles at backup generators. We wouldn’t have a single generator. On top of which, why even create all your own water when you could take water from the ice caps at the poles? I suspect this is to justify the use of the solar power, because driving can be a major task, but regularly shipments of water from the poles to the equator at regular intervals would work just as well.
Another question is why are there animals? In a vegan society while pets may make sense for the ultra rich, other animals, such as, oh I don’t know, wild birds and MAMMOTHS have no reason to be there. We wouldn’t import useless animals to a mars colony. This is also not to speak of the fact that being an entirely vegan society would be itself somewhat useless on Mars, as raising a cow and eating that has a far lesser water and energy requirement than eating tofu.
Furthermore, deleting more “extreme gender traits” as this book discusses, seemingly getting rid of too much testosterone, progesterone, oestrogen, and androgen, is incredibly dangerous to the human body. Despite what people may like to believe, we do need hormones, and too little of any of them leads to massive osteoporosis, depression, mood swings, as well as lower appetite. Getting rid of these to lead to more sedate humans is medically dangerous and would do nothing to fix gender inequality. Which the book does acknowledge, but only vaguely in an ‘oh that’s maybe interesting possibly’ way. And then never actually address. But bad behaviour isn’t an issue of hormone deregulation, bad behaviour is an issue of bad fucking behaviour. I’m not going to blame this author’s horrible book on her having oestrogen, that would be insane.
(This part was corrected by a commenter, ty commenter!) While the book does make a mention of terraforming, the terraforming makes genuinely no sense. While the temperatures have been made more suitable for humans, and presumably they’ve generated an atmosphere and increased gravity, the temperatures given are inconsistent with what they would be on Mars with terraforming, and increasing gravity on Mars isn’t less of a possibility and more of a farfetched idea due to its small size. Within the book the author states the Mars is -50C, if Mars was fully terraformed, then that wouldn’t really be a thing. As it stands, Mars currently lacks a consistent magnetosphere due to its size, and thus lacks an thick atmosphere made of up CO2, nitrogen, and oxygen. This lack of CO2 leads to temperatures incredibly dependent on the sun, and little to no regulation of heat on the planet. Roughly the more CO2 trapped by the atmosphere, the hotter the planet. Likewise, because it lacks CO2, it lacks the other necessary elements to have a breathable atmosphere, such as N and O2. You cannot have a planet with breathable air for humans without having Earth-like temperature regulation. And there is no way that within 7 generations humans would have adapted to breath Mar’s atmosphere, or to withstand it’s cold temperatures. You would have to have terraformed it by creating a magnetosphere to ensure that solar winds don’t strip its atmosphere. While yes, we could plant things in Martian soil by introducing the correct nutrients as this book suggests, no plants would survive due to the lack of sufficient CO2. The state of Mars and human evolution presented in this book are pure impossible science fiction that could not exist within the real world. Yet this book presents the state of Mars as if its sound when it’s not. 7 generations in below 50C weather with 1% of the oxygen on Earth will not lead to people adapting to -50C weather and a lack of oxygen, it will lead to many very cold, very dead by implosion, people.
And on a small other note, apparently in the bit where they mention the terraforming, they also say that this is the worst dust storm since pre-terraforming. Let’s be clear, martian dust storms very likely only work the way they do because of the lack of an atmosphere. Mars is similar to Earth, if it had Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere it probably wouldn’t suffer from dust storms of that size. this is an article which discusses that specifically.
TLDR; this book was bad that it became outrageously bad. I’ve never seen someone fuck up sapir-worfism that badly the science was inaccurate, and it was sinophobic, racist, xenophobic, and zionist drivel. I’m so happy I didn’t pay for this shit because I still feel like I’m owed a refund.
March 19, 2024
Fanfic writing and literary teamed up for The Mars House where the politics and fake marriage from Winter’s Orbit meet the warning about our current world from To Paradise.
Imagine. A flooded London. The Chinese saving the British. Saudi Arabia turning back refugee boats from the UK. A Chinese colony on Mars. Special train carriages, special houses, special entrances, and so on for so-called Earthstrongers (people from Earth). Forcing people to change because of how they’re born. Gender Abolition. Imagine. And think.
Natasha Pulley’s writing is always elusive. Not much seems to be happening, and still, you feel the uneasiness below the surface in every word and every sentence. You’re waiting to peel off layer by layer, to find snippets of information to help you lose that turmoil in your body, but instead, your radar starts whirling, and you might think you’re going mad. As a reader, it makes you extremely frantic because what if you’re missing something essential? So, The Mars House started in slow motion, with numerous footnotes, and it made me read even more slowly. And at the same time, the story gripped me because I instantly felt the social importance of this book. It’s an apparent reference to the world we’re living in right now, with climate change and populism and excluding others.
There’s always a slow-slow-slow-burn love story in Natasha’s novels between two traumatized people. The fake marriage between January and Gale is no different. Starting as magnets with their repelling poles pointed at each other—January hates everything Gale thinks, and Gale hates everything January is—eventually, they start teasing and grinning and suddenly having rather normal conversations. Everything seems to be fine (except for Gale’s political positions), and even I, a huge Natasha Pulley fan, started to wonder if this book would be anything like her other books. But my heart opened up for Gale and January, oh sweet January, and warmth slid inside my body, and small smiles tilted up my lips while, at other times, chills started to creep up my arms, and I was reading faster and faster, and ... About halfway through the novel, I had an inkling and … sorry, I’m saying no more. Only … mammoths (movie-like!)… and know my inkling was correct!
If you haven’t read anything by Natasha Pulley yet, I’m not sure if you should start with this one. On the other hand, none of them might seem to be the best to begin with. They all give you doubt and confusion and furrowed brows. The most important thing is to just surrender to her storytelling and not quit when you feel bored or utterly confused. The pacing in her books is slow, especially in the first part, but eventually, the story will unfold itself, and suddenly you understand why so many readers are Natasha Pulley stans!
And now I want that sequel to Valery K Natasha was talking about on Twitter! Publishers, do you hear me? US READERS NEED THAT SEQUEL DESPERATELY!!
Actual rating 4.5 stars rounded up to five.
I received an ARC from Orion Publishing House and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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Imagine. A flooded London. The Chinese saving the British. Saudi Arabia turning back refugee boats from the UK. A Chinese colony on Mars. Special train carriages, special houses, special entrances, and so on for so-called Earthstrongers (people from Earth). Forcing people to change because of how they’re born. Gender Abolition. Imagine. And think.
Natasha Pulley’s writing is always elusive. Not much seems to be happening, and still, you feel the uneasiness below the surface in every word and every sentence. You’re waiting to peel off layer by layer, to find snippets of information to help you lose that turmoil in your body, but instead, your radar starts whirling, and you might think you’re going mad. As a reader, it makes you extremely frantic because what if you’re missing something essential? So, The Mars House started in slow motion, with numerous footnotes, and it made me read even more slowly. And at the same time, the story gripped me because I instantly felt the social importance of this book. It’s an apparent reference to the world we’re living in right now, with climate change and populism and excluding others.
There’s always a slow-slow-slow-burn love story in Natasha’s novels between two traumatized people. The fake marriage between January and Gale is no different. Starting as magnets with their repelling poles pointed at each other—January hates everything Gale thinks, and Gale hates everything January is—eventually, they start teasing and grinning and suddenly having rather normal conversations. Everything seems to be fine (except for Gale’s political positions), and even I, a huge Natasha Pulley fan, started to wonder if this book would be anything like her other books. But my heart opened up for Gale and January, oh sweet January, and warmth slid inside my body, and small smiles tilted up my lips while, at other times, chills started to creep up my arms, and I was reading faster and faster, and ... About halfway through the novel, I had an inkling and … sorry, I’m saying no more. Only … mammoths (movie-like!)… and know my inkling was correct!
If you haven’t read anything by Natasha Pulley yet, I’m not sure if you should start with this one. On the other hand, none of them might seem to be the best to begin with. They all give you doubt and confusion and furrowed brows. The most important thing is to just surrender to her storytelling and not quit when you feel bored or utterly confused. The pacing in her books is slow, especially in the first part, but eventually, the story will unfold itself, and suddenly you understand why so many readers are Natasha Pulley stans!
And now I want that sequel to Valery K Natasha was talking about on Twitter! Publishers, do you hear me? US READERS NEED THAT SEQUEL DESPERATELY!!
Actual rating 4.5 stars rounded up to five.
I received an ARC from Orion Publishing House and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Follow me on Instagram
March 15, 2024
I would like to thank Edelweiss and Bloomsbury Publishing for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.
This was some of the most excruciatingly lovely, wild, eccentric, and wholly unique spec fic I have read to date! I must have highlighted 75% of this book. January's plight broke my heart into a thousand pieces. And Gale was just the most fascinating, stunning character. I could not take my eyes off them! The narrative was equal parts phantasmagoria and a moving commentary on the trials and tribulations of immigration.
I felt like I was reading my story, even though English is my first and only language, and that I wasn't alone when I first came to Toronto. So allow me to personally touch on January's fears throughout this splendidly weird and inescapably charming book.
It's important to remember that you do not have to BE a literal refugee to feel all the disconsolate ways being an immigrant affects your entire being... your perceptions, and how you are perceived. January's story was like witnessing all the ways you can feel trapped in the margins by being "other", and used as a political pawn in an overarching national story that fashions a life that isn't even one you have access to. It was utterly wretched to read at times, hard hitting in emotional spaces where I didn't think i was still feeling vulnerable. And humbling, in that I now realize that that learned fear never goes away.
It's why, for me, compassion is not an option. Vitriol is. Patience and peace is not something to devalue because you're exercising your right to be an asshole. Life is fucking hard for a lot of people who aren't you, and being kind to humans (and animals/megafauna iykyk) should statistically kill you less, if what you can't abide by the most is death by bleeding heart.
So, for me, this book was like the most propulsive rollercoaster ride, dipping and zipping through a swirling and intriguing narrative landscape that I could not get enough of. This was my first Natasha Pulley and will most definitely NOT be my last!
This was clever and discomforting and completely enrapturing! As an aside, because I've no head for mystery, I've been patting myself on the back for having my spidey-sense suspicions earlier in the narrative confirmed later on! Everything happening was just so wild and surprising, achy and unrelenting...whimsy cloaking January's sad and stormy story.
Threads of which were seemingly always poised on a precipice, only to be dashed downwards before gaining flat or flight again. Delight and callous cold, rolled into one.
His being held upright despite being held down, by a thread of dignity and hope, in a convoluted dance of belonging and "other". Where all roads lead to systems of surviving gloom and identity doom.
Sweet, solid January, just holding on to his beautiful life like he could, at the very least, love himself to death even if no one else he admires ever will.
This review reads Jan heavy, because feelings lol, but Gale was an astounding complex partner and pillar, foe and friend and foil. I loved them both, but it was January's journey I related to the most!
So YES I loved this fascinating book, because it resonated with ME through the LENS of MY life experience. YES I cannot wait to reread this sometime in the future, because I've not stopped smiling since I finished. YES to this extraordinary weirdness I thought I would try on a lark and beyond happy all of THIS ended up working for ME!
This was marvelous and brilliant, and I am so very excited to read everything Natasha Pulley has ever written since the beginning of time, and OFC looking forward to every single sentence she has in store for us in the future!
This was some of the most excruciatingly lovely, wild, eccentric, and wholly unique spec fic I have read to date! I must have highlighted 75% of this book. January's plight broke my heart into a thousand pieces. And Gale was just the most fascinating, stunning character. I could not take my eyes off them! The narrative was equal parts phantasmagoria and a moving commentary on the trials and tribulations of immigration.
I felt like I was reading my story, even though English is my first and only language, and that I wasn't alone when I first came to Toronto. So allow me to personally touch on January's fears throughout this splendidly weird and inescapably charming book.
It's important to remember that you do not have to BE a literal refugee to feel all the disconsolate ways being an immigrant affects your entire being... your perceptions, and how you are perceived. January's story was like witnessing all the ways you can feel trapped in the margins by being "other", and used as a political pawn in an overarching national story that fashions a life that isn't even one you have access to. It was utterly wretched to read at times, hard hitting in emotional spaces where I didn't think i was still feeling vulnerable. And humbling, in that I now realize that that learned fear never goes away.
It's why, for me, compassion is not an option. Vitriol is. Patience and peace is not something to devalue because you're exercising your right to be an asshole. Life is fucking hard for a lot of people who aren't you, and being kind to humans (and animals/megafauna iykyk) should statistically kill you less, if what you can't abide by the most is death by bleeding heart.
So, for me, this book was like the most propulsive rollercoaster ride, dipping and zipping through a swirling and intriguing narrative landscape that I could not get enough of. This was my first Natasha Pulley and will most definitely NOT be my last!
This was clever and discomforting and completely enrapturing! As an aside, because I've no head for mystery, I've been patting myself on the back for having my spidey-sense suspicions earlier in the narrative confirmed later on! Everything happening was just so wild and surprising, achy and unrelenting...whimsy cloaking January's sad and stormy story.
Threads of which were seemingly always poised on a precipice, only to be dashed downwards before gaining flat or flight again. Delight and callous cold, rolled into one.
His being held upright despite being held down, by a thread of dignity and hope, in a convoluted dance of belonging and "other". Where all roads lead to systems of surviving gloom and identity doom.
Sweet, solid January, just holding on to his beautiful life like he could, at the very least, love himself to death even if no one else he admires ever will.
This review reads Jan heavy, because feelings lol, but Gale was an astounding complex partner and pillar, foe and friend and foil. I loved them both, but it was January's journey I related to the most!
So YES I loved this fascinating book, because it resonated with ME through the LENS of MY life experience. YES I cannot wait to reread this sometime in the future, because I've not stopped smiling since I finished. YES to this extraordinary weirdness I thought I would try on a lark and beyond happy all of THIS ended up working for ME!
This was marvelous and brilliant, and I am so very excited to read everything Natasha Pulley has ever written since the beginning of time, and OFC looking forward to every single sentence she has in store for us in the future!
March 26, 2024
I've read and written reviews for plenty of books I hated, but don't think I've ever been this furious and frustrated with one. I don't think I ever wrote a review with a hot lump in my throat.
I must have lost twenty years of my life reading the book, and another twenty years writing all this out, and I’m pretty sure when I depart this earth a ghostly mammoth will appear and tell me how much I’m in the wrong for the rating. But hey, unlike our dear Aubrey Gale, I’m not a pachyderm translator, so I think I’ll be sticking with the single star.
And even then, I’m being far, far too generous.
Hey Siri? Play Taylor Swift’s You’re Losing Me.
~~
The Mars House is Natasha Pulley’s sixth novel and her first real foray into the scifi genre. It’s also a book where Natasha Pulley has learned nothing from her previous mistakes and continues to shallowly represent and exotify the Asian race, turn a blind eye to her past treatment of female characters, and then politely smile and say, “My work here is done.”
But Kathy, it’s queer! The writing is pretty! There are polar bear cafes! And it’s got that classic Pulley relationship between a brittle main character and his flawed foil of a love interest and they both lay a hand on each other’s edges to smooth them down—
No.
I am tired and I am done excusing and apologizing for white authors and their shortcomings. No amount of good will fix the bad that has piled up across six books—six damn books—and toppled in a landslide by the end of this one. Enough really is enough.
>>China? Don't Know Her<<
The book calls Tharsis, our Mars setting, a Chinese colony. The book wouldn’t know what a Chinese colony looks like if it walked up to them and stuck a chopstick in each of its eyes.
What Pulley describes is a British world cosplaying as an East Asian one. One that wears the culture while refusing to live it. There is absolutely nothing in the worldbuilding to shape Tharsis’ unique position as an Asian-diaspora in an era of interstellar travel and colonization. Instead, there are a lot of very accurate descriptions of linguistics—the differences between Mandarin, English and Russian—and a few scatterings of Chinese history; the people have Chinese names and wear Chinese-style clothes, and there are the occasional mentions of foliage native to East Asia. But they all add up to cardboard set dressings for a play. Lifeless, cheap, and sparse. No smells, no colour or texture that would be relevant to an East Asian-dominant setting, let alone a Chinese one (where are the street vendors yelling everywhere? Kids tripping over each other? Spices and sizzling meat overwhelming the senses?) No exploration of how anything from Earth’s China has evolved on Tharsis. And the traditional food? The cornerstone of any Asian culture, one that shapes human interactions, levels kingdoms, acts as windows to diplomacy and treachery? Barely even mentioned.
Everything just feels nauseatingly western. I could have you flip the book to a random page and successfully convince you that the story is set in an alternate England without much confusion on the matter.
And the characters have the exact same issue, but multiplied by a hundred to just plain, infuriating disrespect.
Aubrey Gale, our love interest and resident fascist, is only Chinese in appearance. They’re really a British person wearing a Chinese mask, a British person who speaks and acts like a British person (there were moments during dialogues where I genuinely couldn’t tell them apart from January) and uses western sayings and analogies. The same goes for all the other characters, Chinese, Russian, or otherwise. And, look—I don't need an in-depth exploration of Gale’s feelings surrounding their heritage (that’s not something Pulley should be writing about, anyway). All I’m asking for is a modicum of authenticity. A single dust of evidence that Natasha Pulley went to a country, researched it inside-and-out, and was committed to writing something at least halfway believable.
Instead, we get January remarking that “Tharsis seems to frown on anyone being at all expressive. It was too loud, too big, too threatening. Good manners really meant small manners.”
Uh huh. You read that right. Tharsis, a Chinese-majority colony , is a monolith of people who carry themselves with quiet minimalism.
This strikes me as the writing of someone who fundamentally cannot distinguish the differences in mannerisms between the East Asian countries, and has chosen to lump them all into the “shy, polite, and quiet” stereotype. Either that, or Natasha Pulley has a soft-mannered-Asian fetish she has yet to shed from her teen fandom days and examine closely—because this is nothing new; she’s done this before with previous books—and I can’t decide which option is worse and boils my blood harder.
And all I can say is: how dare you?
This is not your home. What gives you the right to stroll in, make a complete mess of the place, and then simply waltz out? Language is beautiful. It’s terrifying. It informs so much of our actions. But translations alone don’t make a culture. No amount of linguistic info-dumping will make up for the fact that your world and its characters are built on a flimsy, rotting foundation of twigs that can crumble with a sigh.
And maybe Pulley feels that this isn't within her right to explore. Which: fine. So why write it that way? Why make that conscious choice? If this Mars colony being culturally Chinese has little impact on the story at large, the characters, and the overall theme—aside from the language; because that’s all that matters, right?—and serves mainly as a little decorative flower tucked into its hair, because you don't feel comfortable expanding on it, doing justice to it, then why are you writing it into existence? Why the fuck are you adding to the trope of the exotic Asian aesthetic?
I have always spoken about, and discussed at length with writer friends, the pressure of writing within your own culture. The anxiety that ever-nips at your neck because you can see the vast landscape of your heritage, and you know, fully well, there are valleys you will never reach, caverns, labyrinthine and beckoning, that will always remain hidden to you because culture is a writhing, heaving thing that shapeshifts to your personal experience, no one else’s. It’s a gift. And it’s a fist lodged in the stomach. Every detail I get wrong feels like a betrayal that runs down my roots. For every scene that skews too North American I see my grandmothers tutting and chiding me for the “twisted tongue” I now speak my native language with, the longer I remain in a land that I love but can never really be mine. That is the weight we carry with us.
What about you, Natasha?
The privilege of being a published author is immense; the privilege of being a white published author means that you’re given keys that some peers in your circle will never get to hold. Twelve years ago, Rainbow Rowell gained critical acclaim with a YA novel about a Korean boy falling for a white girl, exploring avenues of cultural identity and hatred that Rowell knew nothing about, and effectively drowning out the voices of Asian diaspora who felt betrayed by an industry that had made its point loud and clear: you don’t matter.
Twelve years.
A lot has changed since then. People speak louder. Consequences land harder. And yet, somehow, we’re still wading through the same bullshit.
The book repeatedly talks about honour. An honour code that exists within the Great Houses of Tharsis—to proffer themselves on the political stage with integrity, cleanness, and a responsibility to the people they serve. It’s another piece of east asian concept that's casually thrown in without considering the greater context of its history and is simply used as a vehicle to further the story. But still, its point resonates. Honour means duty. Honour means trust.
In your continued, careless, false portrayals of races you don’t belong to, where is your honour?
>>Love Means Forgiving all the Bad, Right?<<
The Mars House is definitely Pulley’s most socially pointed book.
There are moments of reflection that draw a circle around the issues that are at the forefront in our society today. The brutal measures leaders enact in the name of safeguarding their own; discrimination and oppression excused and shrouded by fear-mongering and the spreading of false information. It calls on the question of strength—who has it, who wields it—and a necessary, human responsibility to be aware of those who don't. A reminder that just because you can harm, doesn’t mean you will, and solutions can only be had when there’s a length of trust tied around everyone.
There’s a message here. Sometimes it’s a good one. And sometimes it gets buried under the hundredth mention of a polar bear, or some quirky one-liner from a character, or a chocolate bar peeking out from everyone’s pocket. Or, my favourite: a small pig walking through a politician’s door and saying “oink.” Literally: “oink.” I started to keep a count of all the animals that were mentioned (and had speaking lines), and for a book that is not set anywhere near a zoo or a jungle, it’s…it’s a lot. I found it cute for the first two dozen mentions. With every subsequent mention, the cuteness meter depleted. And now I’ll go to war with a frying pan with anyone who mentions the words “polar bear” and “mammoth” in my vicinity ever again.
But most of all, it gets buried under a narrative that prioritizes a character dynamic that Pulley recycles in so many of her books: bring the mc and love interest together and give them a happy ending by any means necessary.
January falls into Gale’s orbit, January despises Gale’s views and fears they might be a cold-blooded murderer, but he also thinks they’re smoldering and there’s just something about them that pulls him in (it’s the hot polygot geniuses you gotta watch out for.) Cue internal struggle that’s not much of a struggle because January always capitulates, never digging deep into all the weirdness and suspicions surrounding the Senator. It’s a familiar and exhausting pattern. January pushes back. And then he steps back. Pushes back. Steps back. And occasionally makes a big—admittedly heartfelt—speech about power and trust.
It’s a story that desperately wants to have depth but lacks the maturity and nuance to pull it off.
Like when you’re telling a bedtime story to a kid, but the story happens to be one of discrimination and violence and far-right ideologies, so you dress it up in a whimsical way with every animal the kid loves—mammoths, polar bears, dogs, llamas. And like any good fable, you even have the mammoth show up at a pivotal moment to drop lines of wisdom on the characters, making the bad person rethink their actions and step into a path into becoming a good person. And then, by the end, the two characters join hands to open up Mars to all the suffering humans on earth. A small toddler (collected somewhere along this journey, as one does) looks up at them with puppy eyes, everyone smiles at each other and talks about language, and they all live happily ever after.
…Yeah.
Nothing feels earned about this conclusion. Every strand of plot and character is twisted and heaved to fit that final shot: the ship doors opening, and beautiful, rare rain falling to the ground. In a scene straight out of some kind of satire sketch, January reassures the ambassador from China that all earthborn immigrants will be sent to a “cultural camp,” and even though it might sound like a concentration camp, it’s most definitely not, he swears. The ambassador replies, word for word, "A cultural quarantine. I like it." Never bringing up the fact that she's putting the lives of her people into the hands of a leader who, not too long ago, believed that the only solution to the immigration/refugee crisis was to round up every earthstrong and break their bodies and truncate their lifespan.
Not a single "How can I trust you?"
Not one "I'll believe it when I see it."
Because Gale is cured, you see! A lifetime of living in an echo chamber of cruel far-right think can be undone within the span of months by the perfect man who holds himself the perfect way, looks at the real you beneath all the thorns, and of course, a mammoth that strolls up and says, "Hey, you should stop being such a garbage person."
And no one. Questions. Anything.
It’s so stupidly unbelievable. And yet, not really. Because, again, it's the exact same pattern that runs through all of Pulley’s work. Laying down heavy themes while doing nothing logical and satisfying with them, fraying the narrative to a lazy, naive—and frankly, insulting—whole. It was annoying to witness in her historical fiction, but in sci-fi? The difference in her efforts versus all the incredible modern stories we have today is hilarious and blatant.
>>Stop, You're Losing Me<<
But at this point, I can’t help but feel rather stupid voicing these issues, pushing at a wall that will never budge, one that just pushes back with an inevitability that wears me out. Like glaring at the rain and shouting, “Why are you wet?” Or wondering why my local grocery store never has that one flavor of ice cream that I like in stock. Or like when you were young and had a genuine, heart-shattering question about the world and why it worked the way it did, and some adult looked down at you with papery eyes and ruffled your hair to a bird’s nest.
Why? Because, my child, that’s just how it fucking rolls.
The gods bicker. Fates weave their strings. And Natasha Pulley is the most stubborn person who can't find any kind of meaningful growth or self-awareness with her storytelling.
It’s a knot of disappointment that, over time, with each new book, has dried and splintered into hurt. And it hurts. As a female-presenting person, who has held hands with messy, awful, incredible women—has been messy and awful, and maybe, hopefully, incredible in small bursts—it hurts how she chooses to side-step the bodies of the female characters she killed at the altar of gay romance, burying their deaths, their pain, by presenting Mars as a genderless society. As an Asian, it hurts to see someone intelligent and sweet and talented, whose work I used to love and respect, continue to lean into racist undertones, to selfishly use culture in a way that serves only what she is familiar with, unable or unwilling to shed her comfort layers to craft a genuine experience, to fully immerse into these people's lives. That she is reaching back toward all those moments when the world ground us down, the ghost of their voices bleeding from her pen. You don’t matter.
And it hurts because it’s clear, with this book, that Pulley wants to do good.
But wanting to do good isn’t good enough. Sometimes you have to look at the wreckage you made, take accountability and say, “I’m sorry, I’ll fix this.” And actually follow through.
I'm sorry.
I'm still waiting for that one.
And while I’m aware that I am in no position to dictate to someone what they should and shouldn’t do with their writing—it’s your art; your canvas; your freedom—I’m also grimly aware that art doesn’t persist in a vacuum. Art, once flung into the world, is no longer a secret. One that you molded in your hands until your joints popped, and you lifted it up to the light to see the edges shimmer. It's no longer your own.
So if it’s no longer your own, what is your responsibility to the process? There are sharp cracks running down your work and patches of darkness swimming through it, and out in the world, it’s slashing the skin of the person now holding it in their hands and the darkness is curling over their body as they hold it up to the light, edges shimmering. So what responsibility do you have to avoid such imperfections in the future?
Instead of shouldering any of it, Natasha Pulley moves forward with no baggage. With The Mars House, Pulley climbs up onto a polar bear and rides off into the sunset, and as she discovers a bright new horizon, a red-streaked landscape radiating with hope, she leaves her old neighbourhood in the dust. The line of buildings fitted with leaking roofs and swinging hinges on doors that never properly close, housing damp and desperation. And inside, in the dark. The people left behind. Begging. But you can only scream “Please do better” so many times before it starts to taste like poison in your mouth.
And no amount of pretty queer romance is going to fix that.
So here I am. In the year twenty twenty four. Saying the words that I can’t believe still need to be said:
Our cultures are not your prop.
Write the story you want.
But leave us the fuck out of it.
~~
review copy provided by the publisher. all opinions are my own.
I must have lost twenty years of my life reading the book, and another twenty years writing all this out, and I’m pretty sure when I depart this earth a ghostly mammoth will appear and tell me how much I’m in the wrong for the rating. But hey, unlike our dear Aubrey Gale, I’m not a pachyderm translator, so I think I’ll be sticking with the single star.
And even then, I’m being far, far too generous.
Hey Siri? Play Taylor Swift’s You’re Losing Me.
~~
The Mars House is Natasha Pulley’s sixth novel and her first real foray into the scifi genre. It’s also a book where Natasha Pulley has learned nothing from her previous mistakes and continues to shallowly represent and exotify the Asian race, turn a blind eye to her past treatment of female characters, and then politely smile and say, “My work here is done.”
But Kathy, it’s queer! The writing is pretty! There are polar bear cafes! And it’s got that classic Pulley relationship between a brittle main character and his flawed foil of a love interest and they both lay a hand on each other’s edges to smooth them down—
No.
I am tired and I am done excusing and apologizing for white authors and their shortcomings. No amount of good will fix the bad that has piled up across six books—six damn books—and toppled in a landslide by the end of this one. Enough really is enough.
>>China? Don't Know Her<<
The book calls Tharsis, our Mars setting, a Chinese colony. The book wouldn’t know what a Chinese colony looks like if it walked up to them and stuck a chopstick in each of its eyes.
What Pulley describes is a British world cosplaying as an East Asian one. One that wears the culture while refusing to live it. There is absolutely nothing in the worldbuilding to shape Tharsis’ unique position as an Asian-diaspora in an era of interstellar travel and colonization. Instead, there are a lot of very accurate descriptions of linguistics—the differences between Mandarin, English and Russian—and a few scatterings of Chinese history; the people have Chinese names and wear Chinese-style clothes, and there are the occasional mentions of foliage native to East Asia. But they all add up to cardboard set dressings for a play. Lifeless, cheap, and sparse. No smells, no colour or texture that would be relevant to an East Asian-dominant setting, let alone a Chinese one (where are the street vendors yelling everywhere? Kids tripping over each other? Spices and sizzling meat overwhelming the senses?) No exploration of how anything from Earth’s China has evolved on Tharsis. And the traditional food? The cornerstone of any Asian culture, one that shapes human interactions, levels kingdoms, acts as windows to diplomacy and treachery? Barely even mentioned.
Everything just feels nauseatingly western. I could have you flip the book to a random page and successfully convince you that the story is set in an alternate England without much confusion on the matter.
And the characters have the exact same issue, but multiplied by a hundred to just plain, infuriating disrespect.
Aubrey Gale, our love interest and resident fascist, is only Chinese in appearance. They’re really a British person wearing a Chinese mask, a British person who speaks and acts like a British person (there were moments during dialogues where I genuinely couldn’t tell them apart from January) and uses western sayings and analogies. The same goes for all the other characters, Chinese, Russian, or otherwise. And, look—I don't need an in-depth exploration of Gale’s feelings surrounding their heritage (that’s not something Pulley should be writing about, anyway). All I’m asking for is a modicum of authenticity. A single dust of evidence that Natasha Pulley went to a country, researched it inside-and-out, and was committed to writing something at least halfway believable.
Instead, we get January remarking that “Tharsis seems to frown on anyone being at all expressive. It was too loud, too big, too threatening. Good manners really meant small manners.”
Uh huh. You read that right. Tharsis, a Chinese-majority colony , is a monolith of people who carry themselves with quiet minimalism.
This strikes me as the writing of someone who fundamentally cannot distinguish the differences in mannerisms between the East Asian countries, and has chosen to lump them all into the “shy, polite, and quiet” stereotype. Either that, or Natasha Pulley has a soft-mannered-Asian fetish she has yet to shed from her teen fandom days and examine closely—because this is nothing new; she’s done this before with previous books—and I can’t decide which option is worse and boils my blood harder.
And all I can say is: how dare you?
This is not your home. What gives you the right to stroll in, make a complete mess of the place, and then simply waltz out? Language is beautiful. It’s terrifying. It informs so much of our actions. But translations alone don’t make a culture. No amount of linguistic info-dumping will make up for the fact that your world and its characters are built on a flimsy, rotting foundation of twigs that can crumble with a sigh.
And maybe Pulley feels that this isn't within her right to explore. Which: fine. So why write it that way? Why make that conscious choice? If this Mars colony being culturally Chinese has little impact on the story at large, the characters, and the overall theme—aside from the language; because that’s all that matters, right?—and serves mainly as a little decorative flower tucked into its hair, because you don't feel comfortable expanding on it, doing justice to it, then why are you writing it into existence? Why the fuck are you adding to the trope of the exotic Asian aesthetic?
I have always spoken about, and discussed at length with writer friends, the pressure of writing within your own culture. The anxiety that ever-nips at your neck because you can see the vast landscape of your heritage, and you know, fully well, there are valleys you will never reach, caverns, labyrinthine and beckoning, that will always remain hidden to you because culture is a writhing, heaving thing that shapeshifts to your personal experience, no one else’s. It’s a gift. And it’s a fist lodged in the stomach. Every detail I get wrong feels like a betrayal that runs down my roots. For every scene that skews too North American I see my grandmothers tutting and chiding me for the “twisted tongue” I now speak my native language with, the longer I remain in a land that I love but can never really be mine. That is the weight we carry with us.
What about you, Natasha?
The privilege of being a published author is immense; the privilege of being a white published author means that you’re given keys that some peers in your circle will never get to hold. Twelve years ago, Rainbow Rowell gained critical acclaim with a YA novel about a Korean boy falling for a white girl, exploring avenues of cultural identity and hatred that Rowell knew nothing about, and effectively drowning out the voices of Asian diaspora who felt betrayed by an industry that had made its point loud and clear: you don’t matter.
Twelve years.
A lot has changed since then. People speak louder. Consequences land harder. And yet, somehow, we’re still wading through the same bullshit.
The book repeatedly talks about honour. An honour code that exists within the Great Houses of Tharsis—to proffer themselves on the political stage with integrity, cleanness, and a responsibility to the people they serve. It’s another piece of east asian concept that's casually thrown in without considering the greater context of its history and is simply used as a vehicle to further the story. But still, its point resonates. Honour means duty. Honour means trust.
In your continued, careless, false portrayals of races you don’t belong to, where is your honour?
>>Love Means Forgiving all the Bad, Right?<<
The Mars House is definitely Pulley’s most socially pointed book.
There are moments of reflection that draw a circle around the issues that are at the forefront in our society today. The brutal measures leaders enact in the name of safeguarding their own; discrimination and oppression excused and shrouded by fear-mongering and the spreading of false information. It calls on the question of strength—who has it, who wields it—and a necessary, human responsibility to be aware of those who don't. A reminder that just because you can harm, doesn’t mean you will, and solutions can only be had when there’s a length of trust tied around everyone.
There’s a message here. Sometimes it’s a good one. And sometimes it gets buried under the hundredth mention of a polar bear, or some quirky one-liner from a character, or a chocolate bar peeking out from everyone’s pocket. Or, my favourite: a small pig walking through a politician’s door and saying “oink.” Literally: “oink.” I started to keep a count of all the animals that were mentioned (and had speaking lines), and for a book that is not set anywhere near a zoo or a jungle, it’s…it’s a lot. I found it cute for the first two dozen mentions. With every subsequent mention, the cuteness meter depleted. And now I’ll go to war with a frying pan with anyone who mentions the words “polar bear” and “mammoth” in my vicinity ever again.
But most of all, it gets buried under a narrative that prioritizes a character dynamic that Pulley recycles in so many of her books: bring the mc and love interest together and give them a happy ending by any means necessary.
January falls into Gale’s orbit, January despises Gale’s views and fears they might be a cold-blooded murderer, but he also thinks they’re smoldering and there’s just something about them that pulls him in (it’s the hot polygot geniuses you gotta watch out for.) Cue internal struggle that’s not much of a struggle because January always capitulates, never digging deep into all the weirdness and suspicions surrounding the Senator. It’s a familiar and exhausting pattern. January pushes back. And then he steps back. Pushes back. Steps back. And occasionally makes a big—admittedly heartfelt—speech about power and trust.
It’s a story that desperately wants to have depth but lacks the maturity and nuance to pull it off.
Like when you’re telling a bedtime story to a kid, but the story happens to be one of discrimination and violence and far-right ideologies, so you dress it up in a whimsical way with every animal the kid loves—mammoths, polar bears, dogs, llamas. And like any good fable, you even have the mammoth show up at a pivotal moment to drop lines of wisdom on the characters, making the bad person rethink their actions and step into a path into becoming a good person. And then, by the end, the two characters join hands to open up Mars to all the suffering humans on earth. A small toddler (collected somewhere along this journey, as one does) looks up at them with puppy eyes, everyone smiles at each other and talks about language, and they all live happily ever after.
…Yeah.
Nothing feels earned about this conclusion. Every strand of plot and character is twisted and heaved to fit that final shot: the ship doors opening, and beautiful, rare rain falling to the ground. In a scene straight out of some kind of satire sketch, January reassures the ambassador from China that all earthborn immigrants will be sent to a “cultural camp,” and even though it might sound like a concentration camp, it’s most definitely not, he swears. The ambassador replies, word for word, "A cultural quarantine. I like it." Never bringing up the fact that she's putting the lives of her people into the hands of a leader who, not too long ago, believed that the only solution to the immigration/refugee crisis was to round up every earthstrong and break their bodies and truncate their lifespan.
Not a single "How can I trust you?"
Not one "I'll believe it when I see it."
Because Gale is cured, you see! A lifetime of living in an echo chamber of cruel far-right think can be undone within the span of months by the perfect man who holds himself the perfect way, looks at the real you beneath all the thorns, and of course, a mammoth that strolls up and says, "Hey, you should stop being such a garbage person."
And no one. Questions. Anything.
It’s so stupidly unbelievable. And yet, not really. Because, again, it's the exact same pattern that runs through all of Pulley’s work. Laying down heavy themes while doing nothing logical and satisfying with them, fraying the narrative to a lazy, naive—and frankly, insulting—whole. It was annoying to witness in her historical fiction, but in sci-fi? The difference in her efforts versus all the incredible modern stories we have today is hilarious and blatant.
>>Stop, You're Losing Me<<
But at this point, I can’t help but feel rather stupid voicing these issues, pushing at a wall that will never budge, one that just pushes back with an inevitability that wears me out. Like glaring at the rain and shouting, “Why are you wet?” Or wondering why my local grocery store never has that one flavor of ice cream that I like in stock. Or like when you were young and had a genuine, heart-shattering question about the world and why it worked the way it did, and some adult looked down at you with papery eyes and ruffled your hair to a bird’s nest.
Why? Because, my child, that’s just how it fucking rolls.
The gods bicker. Fates weave their strings. And Natasha Pulley is the most stubborn person who can't find any kind of meaningful growth or self-awareness with her storytelling.
It’s a knot of disappointment that, over time, with each new book, has dried and splintered into hurt. And it hurts. As a female-presenting person, who has held hands with messy, awful, incredible women—has been messy and awful, and maybe, hopefully, incredible in small bursts—it hurts how she chooses to side-step the bodies of the female characters she killed at the altar of gay romance, burying their deaths, their pain, by presenting Mars as a genderless society. As an Asian, it hurts to see someone intelligent and sweet and talented, whose work I used to love and respect, continue to lean into racist undertones, to selfishly use culture in a way that serves only what she is familiar with, unable or unwilling to shed her comfort layers to craft a genuine experience, to fully immerse into these people's lives. That she is reaching back toward all those moments when the world ground us down, the ghost of their voices bleeding from her pen. You don’t matter.
And it hurts because it’s clear, with this book, that Pulley wants to do good.
But wanting to do good isn’t good enough. Sometimes you have to look at the wreckage you made, take accountability and say, “I’m sorry, I’ll fix this.” And actually follow through.
I'm sorry.
I'm still waiting for that one.
And while I’m aware that I am in no position to dictate to someone what they should and shouldn’t do with their writing—it’s your art; your canvas; your freedom—I’m also grimly aware that art doesn’t persist in a vacuum. Art, once flung into the world, is no longer a secret. One that you molded in your hands until your joints popped, and you lifted it up to the light to see the edges shimmer. It's no longer your own.
So if it’s no longer your own, what is your responsibility to the process? There are sharp cracks running down your work and patches of darkness swimming through it, and out in the world, it’s slashing the skin of the person now holding it in their hands and the darkness is curling over their body as they hold it up to the light, edges shimmering. So what responsibility do you have to avoid such imperfections in the future?
Instead of shouldering any of it, Natasha Pulley moves forward with no baggage. With The Mars House, Pulley climbs up onto a polar bear and rides off into the sunset, and as she discovers a bright new horizon, a red-streaked landscape radiating with hope, she leaves her old neighbourhood in the dust. The line of buildings fitted with leaking roofs and swinging hinges on doors that never properly close, housing damp and desperation. And inside, in the dark. The people left behind. Begging. But you can only scream “Please do better” so many times before it starts to taste like poison in your mouth.
And no amount of pretty queer romance is going to fix that.
So here I am. In the year twenty twenty four. Saying the words that I can’t believe still need to be said:
Our cultures are not your prop.
Write the story you want.
But leave us the fuck out of it.
~~
review copy provided by the publisher. all opinions are my own.
April 14, 2024
Complex, fascinating, enthralling, addictive and fantastic.
May 14, 2024
can't rate this unhinged fever dream until I've reread it 3 to 4 times thanks for your understanding x
ETA: ok I’ve now read it twice and I’m here to say I love it. I think it does it a disservice to classify it as sci-fi, cos then you have people in reviews nitpicking the science and talking about terraforming, so let’s call it speculative fiction and enjoy how weird it is. also I’m obsessed with the fact that Pulley’s writing style is the same regardless of whether the book is set in the 1800s or the 2500s(?). it comforts me. and finally River Gale call me on Thursday etc etc
ETA: ok I’ve now read it twice and I’m here to say I love it. I think it does it a disservice to classify it as sci-fi, cos then you have people in reviews nitpicking the science and talking about terraforming, so let’s call it speculative fiction and enjoy how weird it is. also I’m obsessed with the fact that Pulley’s writing style is the same regardless of whether the book is set in the 1800s or the 2500s(?). it comforts me. and finally River Gale call me on Thursday etc etc
March 20, 2024
buckle up folks, we’ve got a big storm coming
so, i should’ve read the description of this book and decided it wasn’t for me. alas i didn’t and here we are.
to be fair right off the bat, i don’t think there’s any universe where i loved this book. that’s through no fault of the actual book besides it being futuristic space sci-fi and having an arranged marriage trope, both of which i really don’t like.
but all of those baseline annoyances were compounded by how they’re handled in the plot. it boils down to this: oppressed immigrant forced into arranged marriage with xenophobic politician who fails to truly change their views at any point in the book and still gets a happily ever after with the main protag despite doing the absolute bare minimum (and that’s being generous) to earn it. one of pulleys strengths is her ability to develop such complex relationships between her mcs, but i just couldn’t buy it here. they both felt like shells of other characters, which brings me to my next point….
all of pulleys characters and plot devices are very very similar. here’s a one sentence summary of the mars house:
white male mc who is down on his luck/wants more out of life meets mysterious older asian love interest who brings them into a new interesting world/lifestyle and helps mc find some degree of self actualisation/acceptance.
sound familiar? because (with slight variations) it is literally the plot of every single one of her books. the meat of the plot may vary, but the bones are the same. (though i would argue january doesn’t even get the self actualization part here because his entire plot line revolves around gale but we’ll get into that).
that’s not all though! i haven’t read the bedlam stacks, but here is a non exhaustive list of Pulley Tropes™️ that reoccur in almost all her other books:
- 10+ year age gap between mcs
- power imbalance between mcs that is juuust mild enough to rationalize
- accidental child acquisition (you’d be shocked how she manages to get this in every single one)
- asian mc has a complicated relationship with their home country/culture that is not fully fleshed out
- daddy issues
- linguistics/ characters learning languages as a plot point
- mc is frightened of/intimidated by love interest
- the presence of timepieces/octopi/peru and/or other references to past pulley books
- semi-sentient animals
- magical realism aspect
- autistic coded mc, treated with varying degrees of respect
- a lone female character whose purpose in the plot is as some kind of obstacle for the mcs to overcome
- said female character is likely to have a negative association with motherhood and/or strain against “traditional femininity”— but in a way that belittles any woman who does conform to those stereotypes and/or acts like motherhood and intelligence can’t coexist
so, yeah. not great. at least she avoided to female character problem this time by having *literally zero women in this book*. the thing is, despite all these similarities, pulley had managed up to this point to make all her plots and mcs feel distinct.
- thaniel and mori, as the blueprint, feel like the most thought out pulley protags, off which she pulls basic archetypes for future characters
- joe and kite are set apart by the brutality of their world, though kite feels much more distinct from other love interests than joe does from other protags
- valery and shenkov’s respective backgrounds/life experiences are stark enough that i feel like their personalities (while similar to previous mcs) make sense as a product of their experiences
so while this is a reoccurring problem i didn’t suuuper care until now. but january and gale are *so* indistinct and muddled that they are like greyscale versions of every other pulley protagonist.
january is just a knockoff valery, but without the eccentrisms or intelligence or personal history that make valery an interesting character. sometimes january would say something that sounded so much like valery it could’ve been from a cut scene from valery k. and what do we actually know about january as a character? uhhh that he dances? that’s it?
januarys dancing has the same significant plot-wise as valerys ice skating: to show how much physically weaker they are now, and they both get like 1.5 scenes dedicated to that. difference is, valery has a fleshed out backstory and that is *literally all we know about january from before mars*. why does january dance? no clue. what was his family life like before coming to mars? seemingly lonely, but we get literally zero elaboration. he is a shell of a character.
january also “challenges gale” throughout the book, but it never feels like that changes much. that is also pretty much his only role. everything he does is because of/in reaction to gale and he never feels like he has autonomy outside of that. and what is january’s resolution here? “fixing” gale so they can live happily ever after? what does he actually *want* in the story besides avoiding naturalization? you tell me man.
and now gale. what to say about gale? they start as a xenophobic protagonist who wanted to surgically cripple all immigrants and ends as a xenophobic protagonist who is content to keep all immigrants in cages that cause them consistent bodily harm. ok, cool. not much else to say there.
yeah i really don’t know how this plot got by all the editors because nowhere in this book does pulley set up a potential resolution to gale’s character arc that doesn’t make the reader feel uncomfortable.
january/gale as a relationship also does not work because of the aforementioned power dynamics and such little amt of chemistry between them it’s actually impressive. january recognizes multiple times throughout the story that gale is a bad person with bad politics and despite changing very little that somehow… doesn’t matter in the end? he supports their election to consul despite gale promoting shamelessly xenophobic policies the whole time? because he just inexplicably *likes* them? come on man
soooo what did i like? the linguistics parts were fun though i can’t actually verify how rooted in actual linguistics they were. i liked the third act twist, that was neat.
i would say i liked the writing, but i think it’s more that the writing was trying to trick me into thinking this is a better book than it is. pulleys strength has always been her prose but instead of “wow! how whimsical! a clockwork octopus!” it’s now “wow! how whimsical! literal eugenics!” if you stop and think for more than 30 seconds it does not hold water.
so yeah. this book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. a lot of the issues here started in other pulley books and have morphed over time into… this. but those books had enough going for them in other ways to largely overlook that and i didn’t feel like i had to spend an hour of my morning writing about how odd and uncomfortable they made me.
this is a book that exists. and i don’t know what else to say about it besides that i am genuinely shocked it made it to print.
so, i should’ve read the description of this book and decided it wasn’t for me. alas i didn’t and here we are.
to be fair right off the bat, i don’t think there’s any universe where i loved this book. that’s through no fault of the actual book besides it being futuristic space sci-fi and having an arranged marriage trope, both of which i really don’t like.
but all of those baseline annoyances were compounded by how they’re handled in the plot. it boils down to this: oppressed immigrant forced into arranged marriage with xenophobic politician who fails to truly change their views at any point in the book and still gets a happily ever after with the main protag despite doing the absolute bare minimum (and that’s being generous) to earn it. one of pulleys strengths is her ability to develop such complex relationships between her mcs, but i just couldn’t buy it here. they both felt like shells of other characters, which brings me to my next point….
all of pulleys characters and plot devices are very very similar. here’s a one sentence summary of the mars house:
white male mc who is down on his luck/wants more out of life meets mysterious older asian love interest who brings them into a new interesting world/lifestyle and helps mc find some degree of self actualisation/acceptance.
sound familiar? because (with slight variations) it is literally the plot of every single one of her books. the meat of the plot may vary, but the bones are the same. (though i would argue january doesn’t even get the self actualization part here because his entire plot line revolves around gale but we’ll get into that).
that’s not all though! i haven’t read the bedlam stacks, but here is a non exhaustive list of Pulley Tropes™️ that reoccur in almost all her other books:
- 10+ year age gap between mcs
- power imbalance between mcs that is juuust mild enough to rationalize
- accidental child acquisition (you’d be shocked how she manages to get this in every single one)
- asian mc has a complicated relationship with their home country/culture that is not fully fleshed out
- daddy issues
- linguistics/ characters learning languages as a plot point
- mc is frightened of/intimidated by love interest
- the presence of timepieces/octopi/peru and/or other references to past pulley books
- semi-sentient animals
- magical realism aspect
- autistic coded mc, treated with varying degrees of respect
- a lone female character whose purpose in the plot is as some kind of obstacle for the mcs to overcome
- said female character is likely to have a negative association with motherhood and/or strain against “traditional femininity”— but in a way that belittles any woman who does conform to those stereotypes and/or acts like motherhood and intelligence can’t coexist
so, yeah. not great. at least she avoided to female character problem this time by having *literally zero women in this book*. the thing is, despite all these similarities, pulley had managed up to this point to make all her plots and mcs feel distinct.
- thaniel and mori, as the blueprint, feel like the most thought out pulley protags, off which she pulls basic archetypes for future characters
- joe and kite are set apart by the brutality of their world, though kite feels much more distinct from other love interests than joe does from other protags
- valery and shenkov’s respective backgrounds/life experiences are stark enough that i feel like their personalities (while similar to previous mcs) make sense as a product of their experiences
so while this is a reoccurring problem i didn’t suuuper care until now. but january and gale are *so* indistinct and muddled that they are like greyscale versions of every other pulley protagonist.
january is just a knockoff valery, but without the eccentrisms or intelligence or personal history that make valery an interesting character. sometimes january would say something that sounded so much like valery it could’ve been from a cut scene from valery k. and what do we actually know about january as a character? uhhh that he dances? that’s it?
januarys dancing has the same significant plot-wise as valerys ice skating: to show how much physically weaker they are now, and they both get like 1.5 scenes dedicated to that. difference is, valery has a fleshed out backstory and that is *literally all we know about january from before mars*. why does january dance? no clue. what was his family life like before coming to mars? seemingly lonely, but we get literally zero elaboration. he is a shell of a character.
january also “challenges gale” throughout the book, but it never feels like that changes much. that is also pretty much his only role. everything he does is because of/in reaction to gale and he never feels like he has autonomy outside of that. and what is january’s resolution here? “fixing” gale so they can live happily ever after? what does he actually *want* in the story besides avoiding naturalization? you tell me man.
and now gale. what to say about gale? they start as a xenophobic protagonist who wanted to surgically cripple all immigrants and ends as a xenophobic protagonist who is content to keep all immigrants in cages that cause them consistent bodily harm. ok, cool. not much else to say there.
yeah i really don’t know how this plot got by all the editors because nowhere in this book does pulley set up a potential resolution to gale’s character arc that doesn’t make the reader feel uncomfortable.
january/gale as a relationship also does not work because of the aforementioned power dynamics and such little amt of chemistry between them it’s actually impressive. january recognizes multiple times throughout the story that gale is a bad person with bad politics and despite changing very little that somehow… doesn’t matter in the end? he supports their election to consul despite gale promoting shamelessly xenophobic policies the whole time? because he just inexplicably *likes* them? come on man
soooo what did i like? the linguistics parts were fun though i can’t actually verify how rooted in actual linguistics they were. i liked the third act twist, that was neat.
i would say i liked the writing, but i think it’s more that the writing was trying to trick me into thinking this is a better book than it is. pulleys strength has always been her prose but instead of “wow! how whimsical! a clockwork octopus!” it’s now “wow! how whimsical! literal eugenics!” if you stop and think for more than 30 seconds it does not hold water.
so yeah. this book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. a lot of the issues here started in other pulley books and have morphed over time into… this. but those books had enough going for them in other ways to largely overlook that and i didn’t feel like i had to spend an hour of my morning writing about how odd and uncomfortable they made me.
this is a book that exists. and i don’t know what else to say about it besides that i am genuinely shocked it made it to print.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 19, 2024
I remember wondering how stupid publishers had to be to not pounce on a Pulley book when given one, but after reading this I get why Pulley had such a hard time selling this book to UK publishers—it wasn’t just because it was sci fi. It was because it was incredibly incompetent and poorly executed to an embarrassing degree. And given how clumsily it engages with its central topics, I wouldn’t want it in my imprint, either.
I read the Mars House with high hopes. I was beyond disappointed, I was actively angry at the sheer stupidity of it while reading.
It’s not a mystery that Pulley can lack a little bit of tact when dealing with certain topics, especially gender, race colonialism. I’m not usually one to whinge particularly about this beyond a little eye roll.
But this book is different. This is a book explicitly about these subjects and Pulley’s absolute incompetency at handling them comes to the forefront in a way that had me wanting to scream off a mountaintop. I am also not someone who needs or wants characters to be the pinnacle of moral virtue—I don’t want them to be. But these were too much simply for the passivity of everyone involved.
Using technology as a metaphor for a social issue is common in sci fi, and usually an interesting method of exploring it. The cages as a way to highlight inequality were interesting…until they started being a tool to show that yeah, oppression good actually. The main character wearing a cage around Gale 24/7 until Gale is comfortable rubbed me the wrong way—thematically it should’ve been, like, Jan showing Gale and being active in confronting their bigotry, right? Right? But then I realized no, this is not that kind of book, isn’t it?
This is ultimately a book about conservative policies and eugenics handled with the little charming witticisms that are meant for historical fantasy and not nightmarish political scenarios. Look here, isn’t it so cute how talking mammoths are giving advice to an anti-immigrant politician? Look how darling, our heroes build an immigrant detention center, how lovely. Nothing is engaged with behind a surface aesthetic level, and that’s the main issue.
Because of how juvenile the book is,beyond the surface “bigotry bad” is an underlying “racism can be justified” and “fascism is good” message. Not, I don’t think, out of any ill intent in the author’s part—but because she literally just doesn’t know what she’s doing.
Anyways. End rant, end review. This book was abysmal snd Pulley sure as hell isn’t an auto-buy author for me anymore.
I read the Mars House with high hopes. I was beyond disappointed, I was actively angry at the sheer stupidity of it while reading.
It’s not a mystery that Pulley can lack a little bit of tact when dealing with certain topics, especially gender, race colonialism. I’m not usually one to whinge particularly about this beyond a little eye roll.
But this book is different. This is a book explicitly about these subjects and Pulley’s absolute incompetency at handling them comes to the forefront in a way that had me wanting to scream off a mountaintop. I am also not someone who needs or wants characters to be the pinnacle of moral virtue—I don’t want them to be. But these were too much simply for the passivity of everyone involved.
Using technology as a metaphor for a social issue is common in sci fi, and usually an interesting method of exploring it. The cages as a way to highlight inequality were interesting…until they started being a tool to show that yeah, oppression good actually. The main character wearing a cage around Gale 24/7 until Gale is comfortable rubbed me the wrong way—thematically it should’ve been, like, Jan showing Gale and being active in confronting their bigotry, right? Right? But then I realized no, this is not that kind of book, isn’t it?
This is ultimately a book about conservative policies and eugenics handled with the little charming witticisms that are meant for historical fantasy and not nightmarish political scenarios. Look here, isn’t it so cute how talking mammoths are giving advice to an anti-immigrant politician? Look how darling, our heroes build an immigrant detention center, how lovely. Nothing is engaged with behind a surface aesthetic level, and that’s the main issue.
Because of how juvenile the book is,beyond the surface “bigotry bad” is an underlying “racism can be justified” and “fascism is good” message. Not, I don’t think, out of any ill intent in the author’s part—but because she literally just doesn’t know what she’s doing.
Anyways. End rant, end review. This book was abysmal snd Pulley sure as hell isn’t an auto-buy author for me anymore.
Want to read
August 18, 2023natasha pulley i am once again on my humble knees offering you my measly life
March 24, 2024
I have read every Natasha Pulley book and it's getting harder and harder to excuse the extremely uncomfortable things in them. She is one of my favorite authors, but beautiful writing is not enough to excuse the poor handling of complex issues. It feels like she may have overreached in this book.
The out-of-pocket things characters say or think in Natasha Pulley's other books are more "okay" because you can accept there are some cultural differences. The culture of Mars and the future are obviously incredibly different, though one would assume a progression of cultural values and not a regression.
There is random fatphobia. It's all right if January is judgmental because he's a ballet dancer, it's the culture, okay. But nowhere is it ever presented as wrong. January jokes about it and the characters laugh and it's like oh. Also we do not get enough of January's backstory to explore the ballet culture, or really anything about him. We don't get much info on January's daddy issues. Just that he has them. So there's like no backstory for him aside from his being a dancer.
Mars has seasons for the same reason Earth does, which is its axial tilt, and the seasons are amplified by the eccentricity of its orbit. It doesn't have seasons BECAUSE of the eccentric orbit. I don't know enough science to consider the rest of how Mars is.
I liked the linguistic nerdiness. Mori and Daughter.
The gender thing is not explained well enough. Gender =/= pronouns. They got rid of "extreme gender traits." But what are those? One would assume those are the sexual/reproductive organs, since those are really the most extreme you can get. But we know they still HAVE genitalia because Gale offers to show January what they have. They don't, which I like, but it's still weird. Also they have to have genitalia to have sexual reproduction which they do since there are Naturals.* But then what are the other gender traits to get rid of? Also they might biologically and anatomically be similar, but it's not as if plenty of intersex people on Earth right now don't identify with a certain gender over the other. This book really doesn't do its due diligence in tackling the social aspect of gender and gender roles. To be quite pessimistic it makes very little sense that a culture that has a heavy basis/origin in Chinese culture abolishes gender roles, even centuries into the future. Chinese culture (and Asian culture in general really) is extremely patriarchal. I guess Confucius was just one of those other things lost to history.
*Actually Mars is just eugenic. They pick and choose genes. They still need eggs and sperm, no? Unless they're like importing them from Earth or getting them from the immigrants, which is another thing to tackle. Also eugenics is apparently okay because they don't end up whitewashing the population, since Mars was colonized by China and not a European country. Are we supposed to believe that a colony of China, or ANY COUNTRY, would not also end up prioritizing a homogenous population? I mean they prioritize sexual homogeneity.
Also the Mars people get all huffy about using "them" over "he" or "she" because it's more formal, which means they are super happy about misgendering people who do prefer "he" or "she." Also how are they able to tell when someone is using "he" or "she" in Mandarin when they sound the same and that's how the "they" arose in this culture apparently.
I still don't get why marriage only lasts five years. They just assume every couple ends up hating each other and wants to divorce after five years?
We are left with the assumption that Gale and January's relationship will just be an asexual one. Which is fine, Gale gives a-spec energy. Though it would be nice if that were explicit. I understand the lack of labels in Pulley's historical works. I feel like in this futuristic world such labels would be much more embraced. Well, one would hope.
I think the wishy-washy sexuality in this book is an attempt to make it a culture where the norm is pansexuality as a result of their lack of gender. Though this doesn't seem to be the case with the immigrants because, as mentioned earlier, Gale notes that people from Earth still like to know what's in their partner's pants before they have sex. We don't know what January's sexuality is, but he ends up feeling like most of Pulley's other protagonists, who seem to fall into that "gay for you" thing where they are only explicitly into women before they end up with their love interest. January seems more attracted to unattainability and kindness. This is really just a personal opinion, but I wish Pulley's protagonists could/would be unabashedly queer outside of their romances. All of Pulley's characters are divorced from any sort of queer culture. Sure your sexual orientation is just who you're attracted to and whatever, but actually being queer for a lot of people is more than that; I mean, it's part of your identity. It affects how you experience the world. And maybe in the future Pride is dead, maybe it's not needed anymore or whatever. Though I don't know if I buy that misogyny still exists on Earth without homophobia, since they are very much linked.
I think the romance in this book is weird but somewhat better handled than Natasha Pulley's other books. Though maybe it's because January admits he just falls in love with everybody so it just makes more sense that he likes Gale. Gale is smart and nice and sometimes funny so at least I get it if we ignore their politics. But we cannot ignore their politics.
"The Senator's fear is not irrational." Such is the problem with fantasy oppression. Racism is irrational. Whatever is in this book is not.
I was left feeling conflicted about the way everything wrapped up. The author tries to make every single character sympathetic and we are left trying to come to terms with Gale's politics, which have not changed that much. I suppose we are just suppose to agree with them now because they're nice and January likes them so I guess we're supposed to like them too. Things just wrap up much too nicely. January throws away most of his political opinions because Gale is nice. January gets bruises from his cage. They are mentioned like once.
January does not dance again and it is not mentioned again after all his injuries. I guess he will just never dance again.
I saw in some other reviews that Bethlehem was said to be in Israel. I think it's been changed because now Gale just vaguely says it's in the Middle East. However the other character still has a "homely Israeli accent" and one can only assume that "homely" is meant in the sense of "unpretentious," though it is still a bad word choice in this time and age. Of course this book was written before everything escalated to what it is now, but let's not forget this conflict has been going on for seventy-five years.
The out-of-pocket things characters say or think in Natasha Pulley's other books are more "okay" because you can accept there are some cultural differences. The culture of Mars and the future are obviously incredibly different, though one would assume a progression of cultural values and not a regression.
There is random fatphobia. It's all right if January is judgmental because he's a ballet dancer, it's the culture, okay. But nowhere is it ever presented as wrong. January jokes about it and the characters laugh and it's like oh. Also we do not get enough of January's backstory to explore the ballet culture, or really anything about him. We don't get much info on January's daddy issues. Just that he has them. So there's like no backstory for him aside from his being a dancer.
Mars has seasons for the same reason Earth does, which is its axial tilt, and the seasons are amplified by the eccentricity of its orbit. It doesn't have seasons BECAUSE of the eccentric orbit. I don't know enough science to consider the rest of how Mars is.
I liked the linguistic nerdiness. Mori and Daughter.
The gender thing is not explained well enough. Gender =/= pronouns. They got rid of "extreme gender traits." But what are those? One would assume those are the sexual/reproductive organs, since those are really the most extreme you can get. But we know they still HAVE genitalia because Gale offers to show January what they have. They don't, which I like, but it's still weird. Also they have to have genitalia to have sexual reproduction which they do since there are Naturals.* But then what are the other gender traits to get rid of? Also they might biologically and anatomically be similar, but it's not as if plenty of intersex people on Earth right now don't identify with a certain gender over the other. This book really doesn't do its due diligence in tackling the social aspect of gender and gender roles. To be quite pessimistic it makes very little sense that a culture that has a heavy basis/origin in Chinese culture abolishes gender roles, even centuries into the future. Chinese culture (and Asian culture in general really) is extremely patriarchal. I guess Confucius was just one of those other things lost to history.
*Actually Mars is just eugenic. They pick and choose genes. They still need eggs and sperm, no? Unless they're like importing them from Earth or getting them from the immigrants, which is another thing to tackle. Also eugenics is apparently okay because they don't end up whitewashing the population, since Mars was colonized by China and not a European country. Are we supposed to believe that a colony of China, or ANY COUNTRY, would not also end up prioritizing a homogenous population? I mean they prioritize sexual homogeneity.
Also the Mars people get all huffy about using "them" over "he" or "she" because it's more formal, which means they are super happy about misgendering people who do prefer "he" or "she." Also how are they able to tell when someone is using "he" or "she" in Mandarin when they sound the same and that's how the "they" arose in this culture apparently.
I still don't get why marriage only lasts five years. They just assume every couple ends up hating each other and wants to divorce after five years?
We are left with the assumption that Gale and January's relationship will just be an asexual one. Which is fine, Gale gives a-spec energy. Though it would be nice if that were explicit. I understand the lack of labels in Pulley's historical works. I feel like in this futuristic world such labels would be much more embraced. Well, one would hope.
I think the wishy-washy sexuality in this book is an attempt to make it a culture where the norm is pansexuality as a result of their lack of gender. Though this doesn't seem to be the case with the immigrants because, as mentioned earlier, Gale notes that people from Earth still like to know what's in their partner's pants before they have sex. We don't know what January's sexuality is, but he ends up feeling like most of Pulley's other protagonists, who seem to fall into that "gay for you" thing where they are only explicitly into women before they end up with their love interest. January seems more attracted to unattainability and kindness. This is really just a personal opinion, but I wish Pulley's protagonists could/would be unabashedly queer outside of their romances. All of Pulley's characters are divorced from any sort of queer culture. Sure your sexual orientation is just who you're attracted to and whatever, but actually being queer for a lot of people is more than that; I mean, it's part of your identity. It affects how you experience the world. And maybe in the future Pride is dead, maybe it's not needed anymore or whatever. Though I don't know if I buy that misogyny still exists on Earth without homophobia, since they are very much linked.
I think the romance in this book is weird but somewhat better handled than Natasha Pulley's other books. Though maybe it's because January admits he just falls in love with everybody so it just makes more sense that he likes Gale. Gale is smart and nice and sometimes funny so at least I get it if we ignore their politics. But we cannot ignore their politics.
"The Senator's fear is not irrational." Such is the problem with fantasy oppression. Racism is irrational. Whatever is in this book is not.
I was left feeling conflicted about the way everything wrapped up. The author tries to make every single character sympathetic and we are left trying to come to terms with Gale's politics, which have not changed that much. I suppose we are just suppose to agree with them now because they're nice and January likes them so I guess we're supposed to like them too. Things just wrap up much too nicely. January throws away most of his political opinions because Gale is nice. January gets bruises from his cage. They are mentioned like once.
January does not dance again and it is not mentioned again after all his injuries. I guess he will just never dance again.
I saw in some other reviews that Bethlehem was said to be in Israel. I think it's been changed because now Gale just vaguely says it's in the Middle East. However the other character still has a "homely Israeli accent" and one can only assume that "homely" is meant in the sense of "unpretentious," though it is still a bad word choice in this time and age. Of course this book was written before everything escalated to what it is now, but let's not forget this conflict has been going on for seventy-five years.
January 11, 2024
Listen. I tried I really did but once the light clicked on that went on this is basically the space equivalent liberal conservative romance except even more absurd my brain just went no.
If you want to good quality queer Mars then go listen to Penumbra Podcast and their Juno Steel story line for actual interesting gender dynamics. For Juno Steel he is one fine lady.
I also feel like all the time I've watched Gundam or for that matter Toward the Terra brittle bone disease among space colonists has the least issue with gravity. Though to be fair to gravity Goku did have to work extra hard to train under heavier gravity
Smarter people than me in other reviews have talked about the poor and racist use Mandarin in this book. Even I could see the problem with. Gender issues in this book are also poorly handled.
I am also stuck on the truly terrible annoying use of footnotes. Footnotes are supposed to add something to the narrative. Like in Chorus of Dragons they act as thurvisar and Kihirin making comments on the events. This book it explains how the train station name change and the difference between football(as in soccer not American football) and rugby. They aren't needed they aren't interesting important tidbits for the reader.
Why are their mammoths. Why are they teaching racism is bad.
Also London flooding just felt like ponyo when she sends the giant wave
If you want to good quality queer Mars then go listen to Penumbra Podcast and their Juno Steel story line for actual interesting gender dynamics. For Juno Steel he is one fine lady.
I also feel like all the time I've watched Gundam or for that matter Toward the Terra brittle bone disease among space colonists has the least issue with gravity. Though to be fair to gravity Goku did have to work extra hard to train under heavier gravity
Smarter people than me in other reviews have talked about the poor and racist use Mandarin in this book. Even I could see the problem with. Gender issues in this book are also poorly handled.
I am also stuck on the truly terrible annoying use of footnotes. Footnotes are supposed to add something to the narrative. Like in Chorus of Dragons they act as thurvisar and Kihirin making comments on the events. This book it explains how the train station name change and the difference between football(as in soccer not American football) and rugby. They aren't needed they aren't interesting important tidbits for the reader.
Why are their mammoths. Why are they teaching racism is bad.
Also London flooding just felt like ponyo when she sends the giant wave
March 18, 2024
The Mars House: five star reading experience with three star themes. I was invested in everything on the page and as long as I didn't think too hard about it, it was pretty perfect. First, some basics: this is hard science fiction. Earth is a flaming garbage heap, and there are climate refugees who need to escape their homelands. Some of them immigrate to Mars. Martian society was founded eight generations ago and has its own culture, adapted to the higher radiation and lower gravity of life on that planet. "Earthstrong" refugees are stronger and faster on Mars, although their life expectancy is lower; Martian "Naturals" are taller, slimmer, and have been genetically modified for the Martian climate. Earthstrongers don't know their own strength, making them a danger to their Natural neighbors. They can "naturalize," a process of acclimatizing to the Martian environment, but it's a difficult process that leaves even the luckiest with some kind of nerve damage. Without naturalizing, they can work only the most menial jobs, where their strength is an asset.
It's in this setting that we meet MC January, an Earthstrong refugee. In his former life, he was the principal of the London Ballet. On Mars, he barely ekes out a living in a water factory. His dry British humor lands him in jail for threatening the life of a Senator. When he gets out, he's surprised to be offered a political marriage of convenience to that same Senator. January's only other choice as a convicted felon is forced naturalization, so he reluctantly agrees ... only to find himself falling for Senator Gale, who might be a "Naturals First" politician, but who's also ... really nice?
Like I said, reading this book was a real pleasure. It might be lengthy, but I loved reading about Martian society, January's conflicted feelings about his place in it, and the slow (slooooow!) burn romance between him and Gale. It made me tear up at several points. After finishing it, though, I had to sit with my feelings and really think about what the book is trying to say.
Look, here's the thing: Gale is a right wing, immigration zero politician who marries January for the optics. I feel like Pulley is working with themes she's not sure what to do with. Speculative fiction is supposed to be fun, but it's also supposed to make you think. You know how some monster romance can end up using problematic images and themes without really meaning to? That's what it feels like here. For example, Earthstrong immigrants are truly dangerous to the Martian population. Gale is justified in being afraid of these immigrants - they lost a leg in an Earthstrong riot. If this is translated into today's world, are we meant to read this through the lens of European countries actually being at danger of losing their culture by accepting refugees from other parts of the world?
But like I said, I was soooo invested in this romance and this world. I blew through this long book in two days. I cried at the end. I just don't know if I can fully enjoy it in the way I like to enjoy my books. (I love when my critical thinking center is engaged, and if I let that happen here, it will just be critical.)
This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novel.
It's in this setting that we meet MC January, an Earthstrong refugee. In his former life, he was the principal of the London Ballet. On Mars, he barely ekes out a living in a water factory. His dry British humor lands him in jail for threatening the life of a Senator. When he gets out, he's surprised to be offered a political marriage of convenience to that same Senator. January's only other choice as a convicted felon is forced naturalization, so he reluctantly agrees ... only to find himself falling for Senator Gale, who might be a "Naturals First" politician, but who's also ... really nice?
Like I said, reading this book was a real pleasure. It might be lengthy, but I loved reading about Martian society, January's conflicted feelings about his place in it, and the slow (slooooow!) burn romance between him and Gale. It made me tear up at several points. After finishing it, though, I had to sit with my feelings and really think about what the book is trying to say.
Look, here's the thing: Gale is a right wing, immigration zero politician who marries January for the optics. I feel like Pulley is working with themes she's not sure what to do with. Speculative fiction is supposed to be fun, but it's also supposed to make you think. You know how some monster romance can end up using problematic images and themes without really meaning to? That's what it feels like here. For example, Earthstrong immigrants are truly dangerous to the Martian population. Gale is justified in being afraid of these immigrants - they lost a leg in an Earthstrong riot. If this is translated into today's world, are we meant to read this through the lens of European countries actually being at danger of losing their culture by accepting refugees from other parts of the world?
But like I said, I was soooo invested in this romance and this world. I blew through this long book in two days. I cried at the end. I just don't know if I can fully enjoy it in the way I like to enjoy my books. (I love when my critical thinking center is engaged, and if I let that happen here, it will just be critical.)
This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novel.
March 29, 2024
There hadn't been anyone though, and he couldn't see why it was striking him as all tragic and gooey now. Some people didn't get a person. It wasn't a right; it was a gift, and you couldn't go around sniffing about it as if you were entitled to be worried over.
The thing was, it did seem to be a gift that everyone else got at least once.
I have no idea how to rate this book. Part of the reason why I took so long to finish this was because I kept putting it off so I would be able to stew in my emotions and think about what this book is trying to say (not very obvious) and whether I'm taking away the right message from this, and what my beliefs on many of these topics are.
A very big departure from most of Pulley's books, this is not historical fiction and while it sells itself as scifi, I would say it is pretty firmly in the realms of fantasy disguised in the shabby clothes of scifi. Technology and science don't make much sense and are very "just trust me, bro". I did try not to think too hard about it because I knew if I did I would not have been able to stop or get past the first few chapters. It felt like just a speculative world for the author to make her "what if" scenario to discuss the different themes she wanted to talk about. And there were A LOT of themes.
Pulley has so much packed into this book. Gender, ableism, class privilege, xenophobia, sinophobia as well as bodily autonomy. I was worried that it would be too much for a single book to handle and that she would end up making very hard statements on solutions for such complex topics. And while I'm glad she didn't make any such strong statements for frankly difficult-to-solve topics, her two sides weren't super extremes which liked because rarely are humans so easy to sort into boxes. I still had a very hard time figuring out what exactly she was trying to say. Because at times it does come across as this "China bad, china powerful, Chinese people are coming to steal our land and put their dictatorship in our country. The refugees are brutes and savages who will bring their basic religions and cultures into our superior cultures which is why we should let them die." But idk if my own beliefs made it feel like she was trying to say that even if the refugees have different beliefs about gender and power it does not mean we let them die because the purpose of a colony on Mars is to extend the human race?? But also sometimes it felt very settler colony-esque? Who's land is it anyway? The people who have been living here for generations or those escaping from Earth? I would like to believe that land isn't owned by one class of humans and it should be common decency to share it with people who have nowhere to go, but at the same time do those people have the right to claim that land as their own? Isn't that how you get Israel? Like I said it was A Lot and I could not parse what the author was trying to say, but perhaps the point of the book was not to be a Mother Goose story but to make you ponder about this stuff and realize what your own beliefs are and if they are harmful and bigoted. So I understand how this could very easily fall prey to cancel culture and people with zero media literacy will be ready to sharpen their pitchforks and burn Pulley on the alter of their hardliner beliefs.
At the same time, writing a romance between a white refugee with no rights whatsoever with very leftist beliefs and an Asian non-binary nationalist right-wing politician is something not easy to sell. (Pulley says so in her acknowledgements that her UK publisher refused to publish this book). I did struggle a lot to connect with Gale and I know it was supposed to be confusing and a hard pill to swallow, and the path to them NOT being a huge bigot that wanted to forcibly disable people and was telling refugees to stay on Earth and die, was bumpy (understatement) as hell. But I wasn't the biggest fan of it. Pulley's pairing seems to be a lovable pathetic soft man x morally dubious man with slight psychopathic tendencies that has a path to slight redemption but she seems to be pushing the line with this pairing a lot. Mori was a sexist pig and a manipulative asshole, Kite killed a whole bunch of people and was chill with it, Shenkov was a member of the KGB and now Gale is basically Trump. So yeah...idk what she'll write next. Probably not a decent female character.
I do prefer Pulley when she writes magical realism or fantasy as compared to scifi. This lacked that magical aura that The Kingdoms and The Bedlam Stacks (IMO her best works), there weren't passages that blew me away or made me want to sob into a pillow. She is really good at writing romantic pining so I did have that funny heart-twisting breaking that I call the "Pulley Effect"; but primarily because of how January Stirling was written.
The plot twist was also pretty much predictable but I did like that the "villains" weren't two-dimensional mustache-twirling evil. It was nice to see some nuance and that politicians are inherently fucked up and even the good guys are not saints. Despite that
Not the best thing Pulley has written IMO, also could have used a stronger editor since there were some strange grammatical errors. The political elements she touched upon were interesting but a bit much for a single book. It did feel a lot more original than all those marriage-of-convenience AO3 inspired books that have been coming out recently.
May 9, 2024
dnf at 35% (page 162)
the mars house was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024, as natasha pulley is (was?) one of my favourite all time favourite authors.
firstly, the good bits: pulley's writing was extremely compelling as always, and the concept was so interesting. the first chapter might actually be one of my favourite opening chapters to a book, and the watchmaker reference made me so stupidly happy.
however.
the more i read, the more i got this feeling. it was the same feeling i got whilst reading the betrayals by bridget collins (the real betrayals was the terfs we met along the way) and the red flags just kept coming, so i stopped to check the goodreads reviews to see if my concerns would resolved by the end or if they would (as i suspected) get worse.
spoilers: it gets worse.
between the sinophobia, terf rhetoric and casual zionism, i can't in good conscious continue with this book. i'm at the point where i genuinely can't tell if pulley just doesn't have the skill to pull off these topics and themes with the nuance they needed and deserve, or if this whole novel is just a walking dog whistle. if you'd like to read some reviews that dive into these topics with more detail (and spoilers) then i'd recommend checking out these reviews here.
honestly, i'm not sure where this leaves me with pulley now, but i do know that i don't think i've ever been so genuinely disappointed by a book and an author quite like i have been with the mars house and natasha pulley.
• instagram • goodreads •
the mars house was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024, as natasha pulley is (was?) one of my favourite all time favourite authors.
firstly, the good bits: pulley's writing was extremely compelling as always, and the concept was so interesting. the first chapter might actually be one of my favourite opening chapters to a book, and the watchmaker reference made me so stupidly happy.
however.
the more i read, the more i got this feeling. it was the same feeling i got whilst reading the betrayals by bridget collins (the real betrayals was the terfs we met along the way) and the red flags just kept coming, so i stopped to check the goodreads reviews to see if my concerns would resolved by the end or if they would (as i suspected) get worse.
spoilers: it gets worse.
between the sinophobia, terf rhetoric and casual zionism, i can't in good conscious continue with this book. i'm at the point where i genuinely can't tell if pulley just doesn't have the skill to pull off these topics and themes with the nuance they needed and deserve, or if this whole novel is just a walking dog whistle. if you'd like to read some reviews that dive into these topics with more detail (and spoilers) then i'd recommend checking out these reviews here.
honestly, i'm not sure where this leaves me with pulley now, but i do know that i don't think i've ever been so genuinely disappointed by a book and an author quite like i have been with the mars house and natasha pulley.
• instagram • goodreads •
November 30, 2023
This book swallowed me whole and refused to let me go for 4 days. For fans of Winters orbit and Lois McMaster Bujold, this is a book about language, how new society subcultures form, gender, mammoths and space. It's fascinating - I want to live inside Natasha Pulley's brain, she has more astounding ideas than I know what to do with - and I would happily read a thousand more pages set on Mars. The incredible arranged marriage queer romance was just an added bonus. Book of the year for me.
April 22, 2024
Mars has been colonized and long enough ago that there is a large population of "natural" humans there that are genetically modified and developmentally acclimated to one third gravity and a much colder average temperature than Earth. January was once the principal ballet dancer at the London Ballet, but in an era of end-stage climate emergency, he's now a refugee on Mars. He's also "Earthstrong", three times stronger than the fragile natural human population, and very much a second class citizen. Due to the huge numbers of accidental deaths caused by Earthstrongers living alongside natural humans, all Earthstrongers are required to wear resistance cages (exoskeletons designed to impede movement), and limited in terms of position in society. There's societal pressure on Earthstrong people to "naturalize", a ghastly procedure that results in varying degrees of nerve damage, drastically shortened lifespan and is sometimes fatal.
For obvious reasons, January is reluctant to naturalize, but when he encounters a politician, Aubrey Gale, who backs a policy of forced naturalization of all immigrants, January finds himself caught up in political intrigue between the great houses of Martian government.
So first off, I have to acknowledge some of the reviews of this novel by Chinese readers which strongly criticize the depiction of Asian people and cultures in this book. I am not equipped to make a judgement here and I'm far too white to be defending this element of the book. I felt that I'd learned something from the book, particularly around linguistics, but I'll keep the criticisms in mind.
In other respects, I thought the depiction of a Mars colony was really well done, assuming certain elements have come to pass because of technology that the author wisely chooses not to go into (propulsion and terraforming technology mainly, but the level of genetic engineering here is also not very believable). I think the politics of the Tharsis colony was probably the most realistic thing about this, with a pro-independence party (Gale's) and a pro-colonial party (the current Consul's party). With the Chinese government on Earth trying to re-exert control of their wayward colony and vast numbers of Earthstrong refugees incoming, this is a crisis time in local politics.
I really liked the slow-burn between the leads, with January in such a vulnerable position (despite and sometimes because of his overwhelming physical strength) and Aubrey in such a naive privileged one. The Mars colony as it is, is a genderless one, and while this is commented on throughout and is a source of friction with immigrants, it's something that I thought could have been better explored in explaining familial processes as well as more on the production of children through artificial wombs.
I though overall that it was a good read and I enjoyed it, but be careful to read the reviews from Chinese people.
For obvious reasons, January is reluctant to naturalize, but when he encounters a politician, Aubrey Gale, who backs a policy of forced naturalization of all immigrants, January finds himself caught up in political intrigue between the great houses of Martian government.
So first off, I have to acknowledge some of the reviews of this novel by Chinese readers which strongly criticize the depiction of Asian people and cultures in this book. I am not equipped to make a judgement here and I'm far too white to be defending this element of the book. I felt that I'd learned something from the book, particularly around linguistics, but I'll keep the criticisms in mind.
In other respects, I thought the depiction of a Mars colony was really well done, assuming certain elements have come to pass because of technology that the author wisely chooses not to go into (propulsion and terraforming technology mainly, but the level of genetic engineering here is also not very believable). I think the politics of the Tharsis colony was probably the most realistic thing about this, with a pro-independence party (Gale's) and a pro-colonial party (the current Consul's party). With the Chinese government on Earth trying to re-exert control of their wayward colony and vast numbers of Earthstrong refugees incoming, this is a crisis time in local politics.
I really liked the slow-burn between the leads, with January in such a vulnerable position (despite and sometimes because of his overwhelming physical strength) and Aubrey in such a naive privileged one. The Mars colony as it is, is a genderless one, and while this is commented on throughout and is a source of friction with immigrants, it's something that I thought could have been better explored in explaining familial processes as well as more on the production of children through artificial wombs.
I though overall that it was a good read and I enjoyed it, but be careful to read the reviews from Chinese people.
August 13, 2024
Yeah, I'm genuinely insane about this one.
Might write a more coherent/decisive review upon rereading but, as it stands, in addition to the usual Pulley joy and tenderness and whimsy, which honestly rarely fail to delight me (it just kind of feels like coming home every time), there are really interesting dialogues with the very specific strain of transphobia prevalent in the UK at the moment (I can see why non-UK readers seem a bit thrown by some of the depictions of gender without this day-to-day context), framed within the wider, similarly nuanced themes revolving around the harm that can be caused when people get into the habit (and justifiably so) of reacting instinctively (especially when instinct equates to moral outrage) instead of taking the time to engage in more complex and meaningful ways with ideas that may be uncomfortable but are decidedly human because of their complexity and multi-facetedness and flaws and contradictions.
So, on a first reading, I don't think I necessarily agree with all of the conclusions reached by the end of the novel- I want to reread and interrogate these aspects more - but I also don't think I'm meant to or need to, because the conclusions themselves are not actually conclusions, I don't think; they're starting points, and thought processes without decisive ends (nothing in real life has clear-cut beginnings or endings), and reflections of the ways that real people in real life learn to navigate and survive complex issues. I really appreciate the time and thought and care taken with almost every idea depicted throughout the book, which is clearly in a genuinely well-intentioned way, with impactful implications. On a lighter note, the linguistics - especially those described through the use of very witty and very fun footnotes - are an absolute nerdy delight. And! It being situated in the same universe as Watchmaker and Pepperharrow!!!
(I'm also wondering if the US and UK editions are somehow wildly different, or maybe there are big changes between the ARCs and the published first run, because some of the reviews on Goodreads are making references to things that are factually incorrect going by my published UK edition - e.g., there are multiple references to terraforming throughout the novel; Bethlehem is not said to be in Israel - the exact words in my copy are "the Middle East", etc., etc., etc.).
(One thing that did bother me slightly was the number of typos throughout the book, actually, if we're getting into the nitty-gritty).
Anyway, this one's really zippy pace wise. I continue to be a sucker for the kinds of dynamics between the main characters and the recurring tropes set in new lights in Pulley's novels - though I do wish she would start going a bit further with them at times (though I appreciate why that's not the focus or the aim). The combination of comedy and tragedy (which, as genres, are often really just the same thing when it comes to the bare bones, just with different endings) throughout works to brilliant effect I think, with each providing relief from the other so neither becomes too much at any point. The depiction of difficult decisions is fantastic. The plot twists are skillfully foreshadowed without being too predictable. I also really like how playful it is with extrapolations in regard to the futuristic setting. It's grounded in enough solid sensible science that the insane stuff (which is also solid sensible science within the storyworld, even though it will probably never be likely or even possible in real life) is also convincing. Obviously half the science is batshit - it's a book about mammoths on mars - but it's cleverly set just far enough in the future that it's allowed to be. Besides, sci-fi needs to be as much fi as it is sci, or else you're just reading a textbook and not an act of imagination.
Definitely see if you can suspend your disbelief for five minutes and jump out the window alongside it so you can experience joy with this one - there's a lot at work beneath the surface that is really worth the time and the reckoning with, regardless of whether it immediately clicks with your worldview or prompts you to think more carefully about and test how you view the world and the assumptions you make without realising you're doing so. That aside, it's a satisfyingly rich and delightfully deliberate, compelling, and self-aware read, at the same time as being very heartfelt without ever becoming saccharine or preachy. I think it's got a great balance of a ton of different stuff overall and I'm very much looking forward to rereading and engaging in more depth.
Edit: CAN'T BELIEVE I'M SAYING THIS OR THAT I FORGOT TO SAY THIS INITIALLY - non-UK readers must familiarise themselves with Piggate (NSFW) if they have not heard of it before, for the sake of making one paragraph the funniest and ballsiest thing you will have read in 2024 so far. I love the more explicitly adult tone parts of this one of Pulley's has compared to her previous novels - maybe as a result of the non-historic setting? - in comedy and in horror. Regardless, it's absolutely hilarious throughout.
Second read: Yeah, I still really like this book!! Still love the complexity and nuance and discomfort of the politics, still love the batshit sci-fi elements, still love the characteristic tender romance underpinning the story. I really wish it had been edited more rigorously, because it could have been phenomenal but, as it is, it's up there with The Bedlam Stacks for me (though still nowhere near Watchmaker and Pepperharrow).
Might write a more coherent/decisive review upon rereading but, as it stands, in addition to the usual Pulley joy and tenderness and whimsy, which honestly rarely fail to delight me (it just kind of feels like coming home every time), there are really interesting dialogues with the very specific strain of transphobia prevalent in the UK at the moment (I can see why non-UK readers seem a bit thrown by some of the depictions of gender without this day-to-day context), framed within the wider, similarly nuanced themes revolving around the harm that can be caused when people get into the habit (and justifiably so) of reacting instinctively (especially when instinct equates to moral outrage) instead of taking the time to engage in more complex and meaningful ways with ideas that may be uncomfortable but are decidedly human because of their complexity and multi-facetedness and flaws and contradictions.
So, on a first reading, I don't think I necessarily agree with all of the conclusions reached by the end of the novel- I want to reread and interrogate these aspects more - but I also don't think I'm meant to or need to, because the conclusions themselves are not actually conclusions, I don't think; they're starting points, and thought processes without decisive ends (nothing in real life has clear-cut beginnings or endings), and reflections of the ways that real people in real life learn to navigate and survive complex issues. I really appreciate the time and thought and care taken with almost every idea depicted throughout the book, which is clearly in a genuinely well-intentioned way, with impactful implications. On a lighter note, the linguistics - especially those described through the use of very witty and very fun footnotes - are an absolute nerdy delight. And! It being situated in the same universe as Watchmaker and Pepperharrow!!!
(I'm also wondering if the US and UK editions are somehow wildly different, or maybe there are big changes between the ARCs and the published first run, because some of the reviews on Goodreads are making references to things that are factually incorrect going by my published UK edition - e.g., there are multiple references to terraforming throughout the novel; Bethlehem is not said to be in Israel - the exact words in my copy are "the Middle East", etc., etc., etc.).
(One thing that did bother me slightly was the number of typos throughout the book, actually, if we're getting into the nitty-gritty).
Anyway, this one's really zippy pace wise. I continue to be a sucker for the kinds of dynamics between the main characters and the recurring tropes set in new lights in Pulley's novels - though I do wish she would start going a bit further with them at times (though I appreciate why that's not the focus or the aim). The combination of comedy and tragedy (which, as genres, are often really just the same thing when it comes to the bare bones, just with different endings) throughout works to brilliant effect I think, with each providing relief from the other so neither becomes too much at any point. The depiction of difficult decisions is fantastic. The plot twists are skillfully foreshadowed without being too predictable. I also really like how playful it is with extrapolations in regard to the futuristic setting. It's grounded in enough solid sensible science that the insane stuff (which is also solid sensible science within the storyworld, even though it will probably never be likely or even possible in real life) is also convincing. Obviously half the science is batshit - it's a book about mammoths on mars - but it's cleverly set just far enough in the future that it's allowed to be. Besides, sci-fi needs to be as much fi as it is sci, or else you're just reading a textbook and not an act of imagination.
Definitely see if you can suspend your disbelief for five minutes and jump out the window alongside it so you can experience joy with this one - there's a lot at work beneath the surface that is really worth the time and the reckoning with, regardless of whether it immediately clicks with your worldview or prompts you to think more carefully about and test how you view the world and the assumptions you make without realising you're doing so. That aside, it's a satisfyingly rich and delightfully deliberate, compelling, and self-aware read, at the same time as being very heartfelt without ever becoming saccharine or preachy. I think it's got a great balance of a ton of different stuff overall and I'm very much looking forward to rereading and engaging in more depth.
Edit: CAN'T BELIEVE I'M SAYING THIS OR THAT I FORGOT TO SAY THIS INITIALLY - non-UK readers must familiarise themselves with Piggate (NSFW) if they have not heard of it before, for the sake of making one paragraph the funniest and ballsiest thing you will have read in 2024 so far. I love the more explicitly adult tone parts of this one of Pulley's has compared to her previous novels - maybe as a result of the non-historic setting? - in comedy and in horror. Regardless, it's absolutely hilarious throughout.
Second read: Yeah, I still really like this book!! Still love the complexity and nuance and discomfort of the politics, still love the batshit sci-fi elements, still love the characteristic tender romance underpinning the story. I really wish it had been edited more rigorously, because it could have been phenomenal but, as it is, it's up there with The Bedlam Stacks for me (though still nowhere near Watchmaker and Pepperharrow).
March 17, 2024
Natasha Pulley has gone in a different direction than she chose for the time travel magical realism hit 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑲𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒅𝒐𝒎𝒔 (one of my favorite novels of all-time). Pulley has taken the moral allegory in the Science Fiction thriller to a new level. Quite a departure, but sign me up. She retains her style: kind of a slow burn at first, like a very long fuse to a device that explodes in many directions at once. I particularly enjoyed how many subplots were going on. And I definitely wanted to see on a movie screen those glorious draping fabrics in the outfits she described. I really want to see this book made into a film. The costumes alone would be mesmerizing. Looking at you, HBO originals.
The novel's opening setting is in London, not as it is now, but as it most assuredly will be in the future, due to climate change. As it is with most people in times of great upheaval, Londoners improvise and adapt as much as possible. But, adaptations only take you so far, before you need actual change. January, the first character we meet, is faced with this tipping point. The circumstances are dire, as he is surrounded by expanding fear and growing desperation. When rescue finally comes, there's a bit of a catch, one which is technically voluntary, and could mean a very uncertain future, but since the chance of any viable alternatives already seemed bleak for him, signing up to go to Mars made a kind of sense. It is not lost on the reader that the refugees are made this offer when they are at their most vulnerable.
Is it unethical to push off-world immigration papers at traumatized people who have just felt the first swell of relief in weeks? Of course not, but it's also an effective way to get folks to the Mars colony, where they are desperate for more people.
We get a whiff of danger via a stray comment by a recruiter. Something has gone wrong on Mars with some other immigrants from Earth. Is this really a good idea? Maybe not, but it's a more reliable one than trying to compete for food, work, and somewhere to live, on this rapidly decomposing planet.
The narrative then jumps past the space voyage itself, which honestly disappointed me, but we do learn at least a little of what the journey was like, later on in the story.
The first two things we learn are that (a) Mars is a dangerous and often inhospitable place and (b) immigrant status, without citizenship, confers little protection. So, basically like Earth. The situation, even well in the future, seems sad, but hardly surprising. Anti-immigrant hate shows no signs of waning.
As one might expect, there is no way for an outsider to ever fit in completely, compared to those natural-born citizens of Mars. The physiological differences are immense, and the immigrant is presented with an impossible Sophie's choice. They can stay on the fringes and never experience the full benefits of citizenship, or they can become a naturalized citizen. You'd think people would jump at naturalization, but the physical changes they make to you in order to make you look more like them and therefore to accept you, may well cripple you and definitely will cause your life expectancy to be cut in half.
We know that something bad has happened on Mars, a riot, a protest, something like that. We get tiny glimpses of the edges of it. It's in the back of our minds, but we know it's there, waiting to pounce.
And in case you wondered, yes the politicians and the super rich are just as insufferable on Mars as they are on Earth. In the midst of the Mars political campaign, January is baited into a verbal battle, and makes a single spontaneous utterance which a powerful senator uses to political advantage. It sends January into new directions he had not at all anticipated. The carnival-like spectacle that is an election season on Mars is something I did not expect, either, so solidarity with you, January. These natural citizens do seem nuts. Treating their election as if it were the final of the World Cup. Sheesh. Of course, the importance of choosing a leader on a planet not at all suited to sustaining human life, raises the stakes considerably.
In this election, the two opponents have wisely turned attention away from their own shortcomings, and instead focused on the problem of, you guessed it: immigration.
One politician sees forced assimilation or expulsion as the only two acceptable approaches to the problems that immigrants pose. These kinds of "Native Son" politicians never realize that what they're truly asking: for the immigrant to give up everything they are, and become only a facsimile of someone they're not. The opponent politician points out some of the more practical reasons for needing immigrants, and raises the ideal of the moral high ground of safe haven. The very survival of the Mars colony depends on more people coming, not fewer. The debate is lively, and both politicians try to appeal to the emotions of the populace. One thing is clear, as January reluctantly thinks to himself: the identity of the speaker is given more weight than what they say.
Since his spirited exchange with a powerful senator got him into hot water, January finds that getting out of prison doesn't actually equate freedom. An ex-con immigrant is quite the sad picture, yet you sense that something huge is coming that will change January's fate forever. And boy does it ever; his entire world suddenly feels like it's at a tilted angle.
Meanwhile, the increasing frequency and duration of dust storms on Mars seem to be taunting the vulnerable, untenable nature of a system thought to be morally just and well thought-out. There are always anomalies; no system designed by humans can anticipate everything.
I wrote all of these reflections above this paragraph, before even reaching the quarter mark of the book. Already there have been multiple seismic events, and many parallels to our current climate, both literally and figuratively. We also find ourselves in the position of having no idea what is going to happen next, but we definitely know that it will be of epic proportion. Because I was focused on how almost anything could happen, it didn't register for me at first, that there were at least two extinct animals brought back just to live on Mars, exclusively for the enjoyment of the ridiculously wealthy (what I call the ridicrich). It is at this moment that I fell in love with the story. It's like watching a flower unfold into a stunning array of colors and patterns. The narrative and the setting are expanding, demonstrating that story has evolved to a point of razor-sharp moral conflict. The main premise facing both sides seems uncomfortably possible, which should scare the Dickens out of us, reading this story in the early 21st century.
There is a mysterious background element which is cunning, sentient and invisible to humans. The author did a marvelous job of keeping us in suspense as to what is happening underneath the main plot. What we thought was one mystery is actually two. Hats off to the author for this construction.
Events move more rapidly as the book goes on, just as the consequences of the multiple disasters generating all at the same time increase in intensity. It's exhilarating, scary at times, surreal at other times, and generally incredible. Everything seems to be spiraling out of control, all in completely different directions. It's impossible to know if anyone is being honest, let alone trustworthy. The author depicts a combination of tension and verbal judo, tempered by an especially gentle tenderness. I've never experienced anything quite like this in anyone's writing. It's effective in ways I never could have predicted.
This is not your typical battle between good and evil, the dichotomy central to Western thought that is popularized by comic book superheroes. To fully appreciate the ultimate conflict in this story, we must consult Eastern thought. The Yin Yang* concept in Chinese philosophy demonstrates that two opposites can create a stronger whole together: the circle. The Yin and Yang are not in tension so that one can 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒂𝒊𝒍 over the other, but rather the two are interdependent; they need each other. The circle they form is us, both individually and collectively. We might think it would be easier if everything we do, say, and are, were clearly delineated on either side of a straight line. Not only is that not how life works, but also (perhaps counterintuitively) that would result in instability, chaos, and necessitate an authoritarian state for enforcement. It could never last.
By recognizing that the true character of a person, a group, or an entire society, contains the whole of the Yin Yang, we get a more nuanced take on moral conflict and moral reasoning. There are truly very few absolutes. As the kids say, "It's complicated." And that's okay, because that's how it's supposed to work.
The rejection of most binary choices obviously lead the author directly into the exploration of what nonbinary and binary gender mean. This is interesting to me, and it's clear that the author means well by centering queer characters. But, the idea of everyone adhering to one standard pronoun 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮 is not a solution, because it erases a lot of people who won't feel seen. I understand that the author is trying to support the (possibly her own?) community, but she probably should have had a (or more than one) sensitivity reader, because she doesn't quite get it right. The author does want us to look at ourselves and shed our intense need to divide everything into either/or. I do wish she had waded into the fact that biological sex assignment at birth is very different from the construct of gender or agender. The LGBTQIA+ is a widely varied community, proving the adage that there are more differences within a group than outside it. I'd like to see that discussion, even (or perhaps especially) if the characters agonize over it. There seem to be some Aro or Ace characters but I'm not sure, because they don't refer to themselves in that way. I do think it's important to portray that one's gender can be fluid, and that gender is completely separate and apart from one's sexuality.
Along the same vein of expanding the social construct, Pulley shows that despite our staunch reverence for the biological family structure,what a child needs most is love and safety. Whoever can provide that for a child makes a parent.
As a complete change of subject with no segue, I wouldn't want to go to another planet or satellite moon unless there were dogs, and thankfully, there are dogs on Mars in this story.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I can't wait to see what Natasha Pulley writes next.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Bloomsbury publishing for providing a copy of this novel for review.
*If my interpretation of Eastern religious thought and philosophy is inexpert, wrong, or not quite right, please forgive me. This is my understanding.
The novel's opening setting is in London, not as it is now, but as it most assuredly will be in the future, due to climate change. As it is with most people in times of great upheaval, Londoners improvise and adapt as much as possible. But, adaptations only take you so far, before you need actual change. January, the first character we meet, is faced with this tipping point. The circumstances are dire, as he is surrounded by expanding fear and growing desperation. When rescue finally comes, there's a bit of a catch, one which is technically voluntary, and could mean a very uncertain future, but since the chance of any viable alternatives already seemed bleak for him, signing up to go to Mars made a kind of sense. It is not lost on the reader that the refugees are made this offer when they are at their most vulnerable.
Is it unethical to push off-world immigration papers at traumatized people who have just felt the first swell of relief in weeks? Of course not, but it's also an effective way to get folks to the Mars colony, where they are desperate for more people.
We get a whiff of danger via a stray comment by a recruiter. Something has gone wrong on Mars with some other immigrants from Earth. Is this really a good idea? Maybe not, but it's a more reliable one than trying to compete for food, work, and somewhere to live, on this rapidly decomposing planet.
The narrative then jumps past the space voyage itself, which honestly disappointed me, but we do learn at least a little of what the journey was like, later on in the story.
The first two things we learn are that (a) Mars is a dangerous and often inhospitable place and (b) immigrant status, without citizenship, confers little protection. So, basically like Earth. The situation, even well in the future, seems sad, but hardly surprising. Anti-immigrant hate shows no signs of waning.
As one might expect, there is no way for an outsider to ever fit in completely, compared to those natural-born citizens of Mars. The physiological differences are immense, and the immigrant is presented with an impossible Sophie's choice. They can stay on the fringes and never experience the full benefits of citizenship, or they can become a naturalized citizen. You'd think people would jump at naturalization, but the physical changes they make to you in order to make you look more like them and therefore to accept you, may well cripple you and definitely will cause your life expectancy to be cut in half.
We know that something bad has happened on Mars, a riot, a protest, something like that. We get tiny glimpses of the edges of it. It's in the back of our minds, but we know it's there, waiting to pounce.
And in case you wondered, yes the politicians and the super rich are just as insufferable on Mars as they are on Earth. In the midst of the Mars political campaign, January is baited into a verbal battle, and makes a single spontaneous utterance which a powerful senator uses to political advantage. It sends January into new directions he had not at all anticipated. The carnival-like spectacle that is an election season on Mars is something I did not expect, either, so solidarity with you, January. These natural citizens do seem nuts. Treating their election as if it were the final of the World Cup. Sheesh. Of course, the importance of choosing a leader on a planet not at all suited to sustaining human life, raises the stakes considerably.
In this election, the two opponents have wisely turned attention away from their own shortcomings, and instead focused on the problem of, you guessed it: immigration.
One politician sees forced assimilation or expulsion as the only two acceptable approaches to the problems that immigrants pose. These kinds of "Native Son" politicians never realize that what they're truly asking: for the immigrant to give up everything they are, and become only a facsimile of someone they're not. The opponent politician points out some of the more practical reasons for needing immigrants, and raises the ideal of the moral high ground of safe haven. The very survival of the Mars colony depends on more people coming, not fewer. The debate is lively, and both politicians try to appeal to the emotions of the populace. One thing is clear, as January reluctantly thinks to himself: the identity of the speaker is given more weight than what they say.
Since his spirited exchange with a powerful senator got him into hot water, January finds that getting out of prison doesn't actually equate freedom. An ex-con immigrant is quite the sad picture, yet you sense that something huge is coming that will change January's fate forever. And boy does it ever; his entire world suddenly feels like it's at a tilted angle.
Meanwhile, the increasing frequency and duration of dust storms on Mars seem to be taunting the vulnerable, untenable nature of a system thought to be morally just and well thought-out. There are always anomalies; no system designed by humans can anticipate everything.
I wrote all of these reflections above this paragraph, before even reaching the quarter mark of the book. Already there have been multiple seismic events, and many parallels to our current climate, both literally and figuratively. We also find ourselves in the position of having no idea what is going to happen next, but we definitely know that it will be of epic proportion. Because I was focused on how almost anything could happen, it didn't register for me at first, that there were at least two extinct animals brought back just to live on Mars, exclusively for the enjoyment of the ridiculously wealthy (what I call the ridicrich). It is at this moment that I fell in love with the story. It's like watching a flower unfold into a stunning array of colors and patterns. The narrative and the setting are expanding, demonstrating that story has evolved to a point of razor-sharp moral conflict. The main premise facing both sides seems uncomfortably possible, which should scare the Dickens out of us, reading this story in the early 21st century.
There is a mysterious background element which is cunning, sentient and invisible to humans. The author did a marvelous job of keeping us in suspense as to what is happening underneath the main plot. What we thought was one mystery is actually two. Hats off to the author for this construction.
Events move more rapidly as the book goes on, just as the consequences of the multiple disasters generating all at the same time increase in intensity. It's exhilarating, scary at times, surreal at other times, and generally incredible. Everything seems to be spiraling out of control, all in completely different directions. It's impossible to know if anyone is being honest, let alone trustworthy. The author depicts a combination of tension and verbal judo, tempered by an especially gentle tenderness. I've never experienced anything quite like this in anyone's writing. It's effective in ways I never could have predicted.
This is not your typical battle between good and evil, the dichotomy central to Western thought that is popularized by comic book superheroes. To fully appreciate the ultimate conflict in this story, we must consult Eastern thought. The Yin Yang* concept in Chinese philosophy demonstrates that two opposites can create a stronger whole together: the circle. The Yin and Yang are not in tension so that one can 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒂𝒊𝒍 over the other, but rather the two are interdependent; they need each other. The circle they form is us, both individually and collectively. We might think it would be easier if everything we do, say, and are, were clearly delineated on either side of a straight line. Not only is that not how life works, but also (perhaps counterintuitively) that would result in instability, chaos, and necessitate an authoritarian state for enforcement. It could never last.
By recognizing that the true character of a person, a group, or an entire society, contains the whole of the Yin Yang, we get a more nuanced take on moral conflict and moral reasoning. There are truly very few absolutes. As the kids say, "It's complicated." And that's okay, because that's how it's supposed to work.
The rejection of most binary choices obviously lead the author directly into the exploration of what nonbinary and binary gender mean. This is interesting to me, and it's clear that the author means well by centering queer characters. But, the idea of everyone adhering to one standard pronoun 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮 is not a solution, because it erases a lot of people who won't feel seen. I understand that the author is trying to support the (possibly her own?) community, but she probably should have had a (or more than one) sensitivity reader, because she doesn't quite get it right. The author does want us to look at ourselves and shed our intense need to divide everything into either/or. I do wish she had waded into the fact that biological sex assignment at birth is very different from the construct of gender or agender. The LGBTQIA+ is a widely varied community, proving the adage that there are more differences within a group than outside it. I'd like to see that discussion, even (or perhaps especially) if the characters agonize over it. There seem to be some Aro or Ace characters but I'm not sure, because they don't refer to themselves in that way. I do think it's important to portray that one's gender can be fluid, and that gender is completely separate and apart from one's sexuality.
Along the same vein of expanding the social construct, Pulley shows that despite our staunch reverence for the biological family structure,what a child needs most is love and safety. Whoever can provide that for a child makes a parent.
As a complete change of subject with no segue, I wouldn't want to go to another planet or satellite moon unless there were dogs, and thankfully, there are dogs on Mars in this story.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I can't wait to see what Natasha Pulley writes next.
Thank you to NetGalley and to Bloomsbury publishing for providing a copy of this novel for review.
*If my interpretation of Eastern religious thought and philosophy is inexpert, wrong, or not quite right, please forgive me. This is my understanding.
October 29, 2023
Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for providing the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Natasha Pulley has done it again, but even better than before. This book is easily her most complicated, most romantic, and funniest book yet. I blasted my way through it in less than 20 hours. My mind has been properly blown to bits, my soul has not returned to my body yet, and I feel a little high like now, like I'm floating in Martian gravity. You can say that it was a very immersive reading experience.
The story is a bit hard to describe. We first meet an English ballet dancer named January, who is about to perform in a performance as a principle when England sinks. Not having any other options, he immigrates to a colony on Mars called Tharsis. Only, the Tharses aren't that similar to Earthstrongers (humans from Earth), not physically, not culturally, not linguistically, not even technologically. And life sucks for January for a while, until the day he meets Senator Gale, whose political view January completely disagrees with, and ends up in a prison. But this is as bad for Gale's campaign for the upcoming election as it is for January's job prospect. So, Gale proposes an urgent solution where they will hire January to marry them and January would make them seem less like the executioner of all Earthstrongers. January agrees for the sake of survival.
But then, he finds himself in a reality show shooting, in a haunted, high-tech house, in a hotel with polar bears, in a wintry forest with mammoths, and in a middle of a super intricate political game, all while inevitably falling in love with a very smart and kind politician whose policy he still doesn't buy. So, you can see where my difficulty in talking about anything beyond the premise of the book comes from.
You can say this book is an enemies-to-lovers, marriage-of-convenience, queer romance story, and you'd be right. It's actually a very lovely romance, with some angst but also a lot of hurt/comfort. January is a capable and reasonable person, who simply wishes that everyone would think in a straight line and would trust him to not blackmail them should they tell him their secrets. His confusion and fear as he navigates Tharsis is very relatable. And you just can't help but root for him, because you understand that he's really just doing his best. Gale, on the other hand, is the love of my life, and that's all I'm going to talk about them, because, if I have to pick my number one favorite thing about my reading experience of this book, the answer would be the slow-burn process of uncover what Gale is like for myself and falling in love with them alongside January.
You can think of it as a science fiction, with all the details about how to make Mars habitable for humans, which involves a lot of physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and statistics. But the worldbuilding of this story is immaculate, almost to the point of overwhelming, not because of the science, but the language, culture, and politics. The worldbuilding allows for discussion about international affairs, gender politics, racism, colonialism, and systematic welfare issues in a very refreshing way. It's nothing you haven't heard about before, but it's like seeing the roof of your own house from a bird-eye view for the first time and suddenly feeling your understanding of the world shift a few degrees beneath your feet.
By the way, this is not entirely a metaphor, though, as you sometimes get to see this very complicated world from the viewpoint of animals for real. If you've read Natasha Pulley's work before, you know that she is a master of writing animals, and they're such a delight in this book. Their little opinions are mostly in the footnotes, which are my favorite thing in this book, right after Gale.
You can also think of it as a horror-mystery fiction, surrounding the disappearance of Gale's previous lover, Gale's random episodes of sleep paralysis, the person that only the gigantic pet dog seems to see, and multiple attempt at both assassination and massacre that looks, from some angle, disturbingly like genocide. There are so many things going on that at times I couldn't quite keep track of what I know, but it was fascinating to see this very complex knot of intertwining plotlines gets entangled, gently, thread by thread, in the end. I can't begin to explain how Natasha Pulley does it. All I know is that she is truly a genius.
Natasha Pulley has done it again, but even better than before. This book is easily her most complicated, most romantic, and funniest book yet. I blasted my way through it in less than 20 hours. My mind has been properly blown to bits, my soul has not returned to my body yet, and I feel a little high like now, like I'm floating in Martian gravity. You can say that it was a very immersive reading experience.
The story is a bit hard to describe. We first meet an English ballet dancer named January, who is about to perform in a performance as a principle when England sinks. Not having any other options, he immigrates to a colony on Mars called Tharsis. Only, the Tharses aren't that similar to Earthstrongers (humans from Earth), not physically, not culturally, not linguistically, not even technologically. And life sucks for January for a while, until the day he meets Senator Gale, whose political view January completely disagrees with, and ends up in a prison. But this is as bad for Gale's campaign for the upcoming election as it is for January's job prospect. So, Gale proposes an urgent solution where they will hire January to marry them and January would make them seem less like the executioner of all Earthstrongers. January agrees for the sake of survival.
But then, he finds himself in a reality show shooting, in a haunted, high-tech house, in a hotel with polar bears, in a wintry forest with mammoths, and in a middle of a super intricate political game, all while inevitably falling in love with a very smart and kind politician whose policy he still doesn't buy. So, you can see where my difficulty in talking about anything beyond the premise of the book comes from.
You can say this book is an enemies-to-lovers, marriage-of-convenience, queer romance story, and you'd be right. It's actually a very lovely romance, with some angst but also a lot of hurt/comfort. January is a capable and reasonable person, who simply wishes that everyone would think in a straight line and would trust him to not blackmail them should they tell him their secrets. His confusion and fear as he navigates Tharsis is very relatable. And you just can't help but root for him, because you understand that he's really just doing his best. Gale, on the other hand, is the love of my life, and that's all I'm going to talk about them, because, if I have to pick my number one favorite thing about my reading experience of this book, the answer would be the slow-burn process of uncover what Gale is like for myself and falling in love with them alongside January.
You can think of it as a science fiction, with all the details about how to make Mars habitable for humans, which involves a lot of physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and statistics. But the worldbuilding of this story is immaculate, almost to the point of overwhelming, not because of the science, but the language, culture, and politics. The worldbuilding allows for discussion about international affairs, gender politics, racism, colonialism, and systematic welfare issues in a very refreshing way. It's nothing you haven't heard about before, but it's like seeing the roof of your own house from a bird-eye view for the first time and suddenly feeling your understanding of the world shift a few degrees beneath your feet.
By the way, this is not entirely a metaphor, though, as you sometimes get to see this very complicated world from the viewpoint of animals for real. If you've read Natasha Pulley's work before, you know that she is a master of writing animals, and they're such a delight in this book. Their little opinions are mostly in the footnotes, which are my favorite thing in this book, right after Gale.
You can also think of it as a horror-mystery fiction, surrounding the disappearance of Gale's previous lover, Gale's random episodes of sleep paralysis, the person that only the gigantic pet dog seems to see, and multiple attempt at both assassination and massacre that looks, from some angle, disturbingly like genocide. There are so many things going on that at times I couldn't quite keep track of what I know, but it was fascinating to see this very complex knot of intertwining plotlines gets entangled, gently, thread by thread, in the end. I can't begin to explain how Natasha Pulley does it. All I know is that she is truly a genius.
March 19, 2024
A Joyfully Jay review.
5 stars
I won’t say “don’t bother reading this review, just buy the book,” but I will say “just buy the book.”
Pulley has crafted a stunning story that starts with a brief introduction to ballet principal, January Stirling, in a London whose normal is to be semi submerged, and who gets rescued from the sinking city by a Chinese ship that is taking climate refugees to Mars. The bulk of the story delves deep into the world, culture, languages, and norms of life in Tharsis.
Much of the plot is about Gale and January agreeing to enter into a mutually beneficial marriage contract of five years. The forced proximity gives them a chance not to simply appreciate the merits of each other’s pro- and anti-naturalization arguments, but to understand the experiences that led up to each of them having these opinions. Though there are arguments in the book, much of Gale and January’s differences in opinion play out right in the plot.
Overall, if you are looking for an engrossing space fantasy that intimately explores the idea of identities and power structures, class differences, not a little hurt-comfort and glimmers of unrequited love, and books that make you sneak in an extra chapter when honestly you just woke up at 2am to go to the bathroom, then I cannot recommend The Mars House highly enough.
Read Camille’s review in its entirety here.
5 stars
I won’t say “don’t bother reading this review, just buy the book,” but I will say “just buy the book.”
Pulley has crafted a stunning story that starts with a brief introduction to ballet principal, January Stirling, in a London whose normal is to be semi submerged, and who gets rescued from the sinking city by a Chinese ship that is taking climate refugees to Mars. The bulk of the story delves deep into the world, culture, languages, and norms of life in Tharsis.
Much of the plot is about Gale and January agreeing to enter into a mutually beneficial marriage contract of five years. The forced proximity gives them a chance not to simply appreciate the merits of each other’s pro- and anti-naturalization arguments, but to understand the experiences that led up to each of them having these opinions. Though there are arguments in the book, much of Gale and January’s differences in opinion play out right in the plot.
Overall, if you are looking for an engrossing space fantasy that intimately explores the idea of identities and power structures, class differences, not a little hurt-comfort and glimmers of unrequited love, and books that make you sneak in an extra chapter when honestly you just woke up at 2am to go to the bathroom, then I cannot recommend The Mars House highly enough.
Read Camille’s review in its entirety here.
May 8, 2024
I loved this!
It's impossible to explain what this book is about. You think it's about one thing, then it turns out to be about so many things, then it veers off in directions you didn't even realize were possibilities.
This was a slow book, but the good kind. It was focused on the characters and the situation and the politics on Mars and things changing and people changing. And all of it was great. It was a bit meandering and didn't have much high-energy action, but I was interested and fascinated and eager to be along for the ride.
Then it got closer to the end, and suddenly there was action and danger and tension and mystery. So much mystery! About something I didn't even realize would be such a weird mystery.
There was also this whole little section involving talking to mammoths. I know, that sounds random, and it sort of was, but it was also wonderful. I loved that part.
And the characters! I liked January as a main POV character. He was easy to like and root for and brought a relatable element to this story that was full of so much new and unusual stuff. He understandably was willing to do what he had to sometimes to survive, but he also spoke up for or did what was right other times, even when it put himself at risk. It was Gale who was the most interesting though. This author has a skill for writing about characters who do or have done or want to do things that are bad or wrong, and you know they're bad or wrong, and then making you care about them and root for them anyway. She writes characters who make me feel so conflicted, and I love it. She didn't try to cover up or make the reader forget about everything wrong with Gale and their politics. She repeatedly reminded me of it while also making me like Gale. There were some other characters too. Some fun, some deeply flawed, some awful.
Fucked up people doing fucked up things. Fucked up people doing good things. Good people doing fucked up things. Good people doing good things. That's really what's at the core of the book.
The world-building was so unique and creative. Gravity is less strong on Mars, so the people who've grown up there with generations of family before them have weaker bones, making the people from Earth 3x as strong and thus dangerous. So they have to wear cages that form to their body and make moving more difficult. There's a process that can acclimate Earthstrongers so they don't have to wear a cage, but it leaves them disabled with shortened lifespans or dead. So many Earthstrongers keep struggling, working in manual labor, barely getting by financially. There was also a whole government system, futuristic technology, solar power. Maybe not scientifically accurate with the gravity stuff, I honestly wouldn't know. But there was clearly a lot of thought put into it in terms of how things would work if things were this way, possible technology, how society would be affected, how people would live and react.
I can tell you one thing this book is not about, and that's gender. Which is fine. I only mention it because descriptions or reviews may lead you to believe it is. But, although the Mars people have essentially removed gender by altering physical characteristics and using they/them pronouns, that idea isn't explored. It's more of a backdrop.
I really enjoyed the audio narration by Daniel de Bourg. It sounded so natural and pleasant and suited the characters and the feel of the story perfectly. Characters also sounded different, so I was never confused.
My review was a bit scattered because I just have so many thoughts after finishing, and it's a hard book to explain, but I really did love it. The world-building was interesting, the characters ranged from likeable to hateable to fascinating (and sometimes more than one) and made me feel conflicted, and the story sucked me in!
*Rating: 4.5 Stars // Read Date: 2024 // Format: Audiobook*
Recommended For:
Anyone who likes books set on other planets with unique worlds and politics, mystery, tension, slow-paced stories, characters who make you feel conflicted, and a touch of queer romance.
Original Review @ Metaphors and Moonlight
It's impossible to explain what this book is about. You think it's about one thing, then it turns out to be about so many things, then it veers off in directions you didn't even realize were possibilities.
This was a slow book, but the good kind. It was focused on the characters and the situation and the politics on Mars and things changing and people changing. And all of it was great. It was a bit meandering and didn't have much high-energy action, but I was interested and fascinated and eager to be along for the ride.
Then it got closer to the end, and suddenly there was action and danger and tension and mystery. So much mystery! About something I didn't even realize would be such a weird mystery.
There was also this whole little section involving talking to mammoths. I know, that sounds random, and it sort of was, but it was also wonderful. I loved that part.
And the characters! I liked January as a main POV character. He was easy to like and root for and brought a relatable element to this story that was full of so much new and unusual stuff. He understandably was willing to do what he had to sometimes to survive, but he also spoke up for or did what was right other times, even when it put himself at risk. It was Gale who was the most interesting though. This author has a skill for writing about characters who do or have done or want to do things that are bad or wrong, and you know they're bad or wrong, and then making you care about them and root for them anyway. She writes characters who make me feel so conflicted, and I love it. She didn't try to cover up or make the reader forget about everything wrong with Gale and their politics. She repeatedly reminded me of it while also making me like Gale. There were some other characters too. Some fun, some deeply flawed, some awful.
Fucked up people doing fucked up things. Fucked up people doing good things. Good people doing fucked up things. Good people doing good things. That's really what's at the core of the book.
The world-building was so unique and creative. Gravity is less strong on Mars, so the people who've grown up there with generations of family before them have weaker bones, making the people from Earth 3x as strong and thus dangerous. So they have to wear cages that form to their body and make moving more difficult. There's a process that can acclimate Earthstrongers so they don't have to wear a cage, but it leaves them disabled with shortened lifespans or dead. So many Earthstrongers keep struggling, working in manual labor, barely getting by financially. There was also a whole government system, futuristic technology, solar power. Maybe not scientifically accurate with the gravity stuff, I honestly wouldn't know. But there was clearly a lot of thought put into it in terms of how things would work if things were this way, possible technology, how society would be affected, how people would live and react.
I can tell you one thing this book is not about, and that's gender. Which is fine. I only mention it because descriptions or reviews may lead you to believe it is. But, although the Mars people have essentially removed gender by altering physical characteristics and using they/them pronouns, that idea isn't explored. It's more of a backdrop.
I really enjoyed the audio narration by Daniel de Bourg. It sounded so natural and pleasant and suited the characters and the feel of the story perfectly. Characters also sounded different, so I was never confused.
My review was a bit scattered because I just have so many thoughts after finishing, and it's a hard book to explain, but I really did love it. The world-building was interesting, the characters ranged from likeable to hateable to fascinating (and sometimes more than one) and made me feel conflicted, and the story sucked me in!
*Rating: 4.5 Stars // Read Date: 2024 // Format: Audiobook*
Recommended For:
Anyone who likes books set on other planets with unique worlds and politics, mystery, tension, slow-paced stories, characters who make you feel conflicted, and a touch of queer romance.
Original Review @ Metaphors and Moonlight
April 4, 2024
dnf @20%
I literally did not think it was possible for me to dislike a Natahsa Pulley book...not only is hard sci-fi so very much not Pulley’s genre I should have guessed that her attempts to make a statement about Gender would end up a weird uncomfortable dumpster fire. Major disappointment. Points for the first chapter which I enjoyed hugely and also the brief Mori and Daughter mention. Honestly would have liked this a lot more if it stuck to being about a ballet dancer in flooded climate apocalypse London and Mars and Mammoths were left out of it.
I literally did not think it was possible for me to dislike a Natahsa Pulley book...not only is hard sci-fi so very much not Pulley’s genre I should have guessed that her attempts to make a statement about Gender would end up a weird uncomfortable dumpster fire. Major disappointment. Points for the first chapter which I enjoyed hugely and also the brief Mori and Daughter mention. Honestly would have liked this a lot more if it stuck to being about a ballet dancer in flooded climate apocalypse London and Mars and Mammoths were left out of it.
April 24, 2024
it hurts so bad when an author you love writes an absolute dumpster fire of a book but this seriously should have stayed in the drafts because WHAT THE HELL
March 26, 2024
Natasha Pulley has consistently been a problematic fave of mine. More problematic than I usually like my literature, but her writing is lovely and she has the knack for making my heart ache so I’m a sucker.
Some of her token problems are The Way She Writes Women (when she includes them at all) and the fact that she is an English Woman who has only ever written queer men, one of whom is always Without Fail Chinese or Chinese-adjacent. Honestly, the majority of her books are essentially exactly the same. But like Maroon 5- as they have secretly only one song (or novel, in Pulley’s case), they tend to hit each time.
The Mars House is her first book which is not historial magical realism/historical fiction. I will say, I don’t think, by way of sci-fi, that this one hit. I’m not 100% on the science of terraforming Mars, but I felt as though the snatches we got of the worldbuilding were spotty at best and confusing most of the time. Like, I’ve read sci fi before. It’s one of my favorite genres. I could understand A Memory Called Empire better than this book’s science and A Memory Called Empire is one of the most immersive alien cultural worldbuilding novels I’ve ever seen. (For real, go read it.)
I’ve always felt that Pulley was vaguely transphobic, or at least that her idea of gender was really freaking strange. I’ve also always thought it was strange that she only wrote about queer men. However, The Mars House really hit these fuckers out of the park. It’s like Pulley read The Left Hand of Darkness and Woman on the Edge of Time and was like “I can write an alien book about gender too.” But she could not. At least, not without making me think she’s a giant transphobe.
Essentially, an Earth colony came to Mars and over the course of their 200 year old history, erased gender and gender presentations from society. Everyone uses they/them pronouns and everyone treats the refugees from earth as though they’re gauche for using them. The whole thing kind of comes off like a role reversal thing, like “what if the world was run by women instead of men,” but for nonbinary people. It made me feel as though Pulley hadn’t gotten the novel sensitivity checked, which is really fucking weird when you’re writing a book of a society of nonbinary people and you yourself are cis.
Also she uses language as the reason for the switch to a nonbinary society. Now, I’m not a linguist by trade but I’ve studied many languages. I don’t know Mandarin, so maybe Mandarin is different, but I’ve personally never experienced a moment in the languages I’ve studied, where the language ruled something about the physical world, rather than the other way around. Usually, I explain it like this: without a word for something, a person speaking the language literally struggles to comprehend it. This is why genders in different cultures and languages got wiped out so thoroughly by western society. It’s hard to explain a third gender to someone who has no words for that at all. So the idea that the use of pronouns in Mandarin, even if they do sound similar to each other, would produce one gender doesn’t make a lot of sense.
At a separate point, Pulley indicated it was a conscious decision in order to destroy patriarchal thinking. Which…as a feminist is fucking rude???? The answer to the patriarchy is not, in fact, all women and men being turned into nonbinary people. Identity is identity bruh. Also they tried that in Communist Russia, and while it didn’t suck, it also did NOT stop patriarchy.
There are other things about the book that were suspect. In fact, I think the politics at large in this book are going to make me have to lie down for a week. The novel’s look at immigration was literally staggering. The worldbuilding was frankly used in order to warrant extreme xenophobia and I have no understanding as to why Pulley would want her worldbuilding to do that and then refused to give a straight agenda refuting the worldbuilding? It’s like, you can’t write a book where people are giant xenophobes and then have the answer NOT be that the xenophobes are fucking horrible without coming off like a giant jerk. Once again, it’s like she read The Left Hand of Darkness once and thought she could do better. The problem is, you can’t do better, Pulley. Even like fifty years into the future, you still managed to make a fucked up book.
The freaking problem is, her writing is so charming you can still enjoy the book, but every time I looked away I was like “...wait a minute.” It’s like the Great Gatsby in the sense that it sits with you. It’s unlike the Great Gatsby in the sense that Fitzgerald still had more impactful female characters in one book than Pulley has had so far in her entire writing career.
March 23, 2024
Natasha Pulley's The Mars House is, like everything she writes, an absolute show-stopper. I start reading her work and very little else matters. I just want to stay in her world of complex challenges and gentle, timid hopes as long as I can.
I've started this review several times and found myself caught up in complex and lengthy summary, so I'm going to forgo the summary almost completely. I'll just say, imagine January, an Earth refugee, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet, who moves to Tharsis, a Mars colony, and experiences all kinds of physical and cultural shocks. (Most of the other reviews of this title include such summary, so you'll have no trouble finding some.)
I'd like to highlight the points of contact and tension that drive this novel.
• Miscommunication between a gender-neutral Tharsis culture and a highly gendered Earth approach to identity
• Huge differences in physical strength between recent Earth arrivals (strong, having lived at a gravity three times that on Mars) and Tharsises (fragile bones and reduced strength as a result of generations of life on lower-gravity Mars)
• Lots and lots of difficulties concerning the costs and benefits of assimilation
• A possibility of physical assimilation, "naturalization," that risks the health and lives of the Earth refugees
• Complicated and bloody political manoeuvering among Tharsis politicians
• An uneasy arrangement between a Tharsis politician determined to make naturalization mandatory, and January, who is looking for a way of moving beyond the poverty and exclusion he's experienced on Tharsis
• And the possibility of an awkward, near-impossible budding romance.
So that's
√ The climate crisis on earth
√ Climate refugees on Mars
√ State-sponsored disabling of arriving refugees
√ Colonial tensions as Earth nations attempt to maintain control over Tharsis
√ Awkward non-binary/binary attraction
Pulley is gathering up the foibles of our own time and holding up a mirror to our biases and incompleteness via a space colony 200 years in the future. As always, the prose is exquisite, the plotting full of twists, and the central characters emotionally engaging. Bonus: woolly mammoths (yep, those, too).
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.
I've started this review several times and found myself caught up in complex and lengthy summary, so I'm going to forgo the summary almost completely. I'll just say, imagine January, an Earth refugee, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet, who moves to Tharsis, a Mars colony, and experiences all kinds of physical and cultural shocks. (Most of the other reviews of this title include such summary, so you'll have no trouble finding some.)
I'd like to highlight the points of contact and tension that drive this novel.
• Miscommunication between a gender-neutral Tharsis culture and a highly gendered Earth approach to identity
• Huge differences in physical strength between recent Earth arrivals (strong, having lived at a gravity three times that on Mars) and Tharsises (fragile bones and reduced strength as a result of generations of life on lower-gravity Mars)
• Lots and lots of difficulties concerning the costs and benefits of assimilation
• A possibility of physical assimilation, "naturalization," that risks the health and lives of the Earth refugees
• Complicated and bloody political manoeuvering among Tharsis politicians
• An uneasy arrangement between a Tharsis politician determined to make naturalization mandatory, and January, who is looking for a way of moving beyond the poverty and exclusion he's experienced on Tharsis
• And the possibility of an awkward, near-impossible budding romance.
So that's
√ The climate crisis on earth
√ Climate refugees on Mars
√ State-sponsored disabling of arriving refugees
√ Colonial tensions as Earth nations attempt to maintain control over Tharsis
√ Awkward non-binary/binary attraction
Pulley is gathering up the foibles of our own time and holding up a mirror to our biases and incompleteness via a space colony 200 years in the future. As always, the prose is exquisite, the plotting full of twists, and the central characters emotionally engaging. Bonus: woolly mammoths (yep, those, too).
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.
March 22, 2024
Does this book have its problems that anybody smarter than me can articulate in a more effective way? Yes.
Did I have fun reading? Absolutely.
Am I going to go on a fanart spree? Duh.
Did I have fun reading? Absolutely.
Am I going to go on a fanart spree? Duh.
March 20, 2024
Wow do I have some mixed feelings on The Mars House. On the one hand, I *loved* reading it. There's compelling worldbuilding, romantic tension, and thought-provoking science fiction. On the other hand, some of the ideas are uncomfortable in a way that's hard to describe in a few sentences. Basically, the author has chosen a hot button topic on earth (refugees and immigration), translated that to Mars, and made one of the main characters a climate refugee and the other staunchly anti-immigration politician. It's never clear to me in the writing what value judgment Pulley is putting on immigrants.
For those interested in picking it up for the romance- it's really more of a traditional science fiction style book.
And yet, wow, what an interesting read.
It's out 3/19.
Thank you to @plottrysts and @jordanian.reads for helping process this one.
Genre: science fiction
Mars, the future
Devastation from climate change and war have made life on earth tenuous. January Stirling was a principal at the London Royal Ballet, until he is forced to evacuate. The colony of Tharsis on Mars could be a lifeline for refugees, except that the Earthstrong are considered dangerous (due to muscle mass from developing in different gravity) and resources like water are extremely limited. In a live interview, January makes an ill-perceived comment that lands him in big trouble with his job and with Senator Aubrey Gale. Gale has a staunch anti-immigrant platform, but they recognize that they may need something more in order to win the upcoming election…so they propose a 5-year marriage of convenience contract with January. With cameras on them at all times, January will have a harder time getting to know the real Gale.
Buckle up, or strap on your Martian-resistence-cage, because I have a lot of feelings about this book. I loved the romance, I loved the worldbuilding, I’m wildly uncomfortable with the political statement that Pulley may or may not be making about immigration, and the other questionable things that may be brushed aside during reading, but on deeper reflection give significant pause. Because of that, I’m very cautious about how I’d recommend this, and if this interests you, I recommend you read reviews first to set up some expectations.
The worldbuilding for The Mars House is intricate, with big worldbuilding gestures and small worldbuilding moments alike. The primary worldbuilding element is the physiological differences between the natural born Martians and the Earthstrong. The Earthstrong have bodies used to living at a much stronger gravitational force than the Martians whose bones and muscles develop at ⅓ of Earth’s. Because of this, immigrants from Earth have two choices: wear cages (like exoskeletons) that function as resistance to low-g or “naturalize” by undergoing treatment to reduce their mass. They are seen as dangerous outsiders, with the real possibility of accidentally killing natural Martians simply by bumping them. I’ve read other books that emphasize the physiological differences of people born in low gravity - The Expanse series comes to mind with the Belters and their lighter bones - but this is the first time I’ve run across a solution 7 generations deep into colonization that addresses limitations on Earthers rather than strength-building for the Martians. What makes me less comfortable is that in this case, the Earthstrong are refugees and often marked as dangerous criminals, and the easy-to-draw analogy is that refugees can cause real harm without meaning it.
Gender markers for natural born and naturalized Martians have been eliminated from Tharsis culture. The intent here is to imagine a progressive society where gender doesn’t impact opinion or presence in public society. Pulley does a remarkable job with writing this: you never lose track of who she’s talking about. January, as an Earthstrong, holds on to his pronouns, but he is also careful about using nonbinary forms of address with the Martians. Earthstrong use gender markers - usually pins to indicate their preference - which is another SF mini-trope I love seeing. Give a visual non-physical marker for gender, and you don’t worry about mis-gendering characters. Sex does not necessarily lead to procreation, and most Martian citizens choose from genetic banks when it comes time to make children… but that means they genetically engineer towards nonbinary traits, which feels like a slippery slope.
Mars is a barren wasteland with almost no water, so everyone is rationed. Electricity is primarily solar generated, but because Mars is further from the sun than Earth the amount of kw power is significantly less per panel. Gale’s family owns the solar panels, so they are prepared to address power shortage issues as a major dust storm rolls in. I enjoyed that the terraforming of Mars can only progress so far, whereas other science fiction engages in full scale martian terraforming within only a few generations (looking at you, Red Mars).
One thing that Pulley nails is the enemies to lovers romantic tension. There is a romance story at the heart of the novel, and it’s built on a marriage of convenience between diametrically opposed characters. Gale has all of the power in the relationship, literally, since they are a senator, a seventh generation Martian, and the heir to one of the wealthiest families on Mars. January has nothing now that he isn’t on earth. It’s a slow burn for them to learn to trust one another and fall in love, but when they do, it’s immensely satisfying.
The discomfort created by the socio-political implications of this book are not ones that challenge the reader to examine their own beliefs, because it’s ultimately not clear to me where Pulley falls on the side of immigration issues or genetic manipulation. But it’s a well-written book that gave me a lot to think about. If you pick it up, find someone to read it with, and go into it with an open but critical mind.
Thank you to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for an eARC for review. All opinions are my own. This book is out 3/19/24.
For those interested in picking it up for the romance- it's really more of a traditional science fiction style book.
And yet, wow, what an interesting read.
It's out 3/19.
Thank you to @plottrysts and @jordanian.reads for helping process this one.
Genre: science fiction
Mars, the future
Devastation from climate change and war have made life on earth tenuous. January Stirling was a principal at the London Royal Ballet, until he is forced to evacuate. The colony of Tharsis on Mars could be a lifeline for refugees, except that the Earthstrong are considered dangerous (due to muscle mass from developing in different gravity) and resources like water are extremely limited. In a live interview, January makes an ill-perceived comment that lands him in big trouble with his job and with Senator Aubrey Gale. Gale has a staunch anti-immigrant platform, but they recognize that they may need something more in order to win the upcoming election…so they propose a 5-year marriage of convenience contract with January. With cameras on them at all times, January will have a harder time getting to know the real Gale.
Buckle up, or strap on your Martian-resistence-cage, because I have a lot of feelings about this book. I loved the romance, I loved the worldbuilding, I’m wildly uncomfortable with the political statement that Pulley may or may not be making about immigration, and the other questionable things that may be brushed aside during reading, but on deeper reflection give significant pause. Because of that, I’m very cautious about how I’d recommend this, and if this interests you, I recommend you read reviews first to set up some expectations.
The worldbuilding for The Mars House is intricate, with big worldbuilding gestures and small worldbuilding moments alike. The primary worldbuilding element is the physiological differences between the natural born Martians and the Earthstrong. The Earthstrong have bodies used to living at a much stronger gravitational force than the Martians whose bones and muscles develop at ⅓ of Earth’s. Because of this, immigrants from Earth have two choices: wear cages (like exoskeletons) that function as resistance to low-g or “naturalize” by undergoing treatment to reduce their mass. They are seen as dangerous outsiders, with the real possibility of accidentally killing natural Martians simply by bumping them. I’ve read other books that emphasize the physiological differences of people born in low gravity - The Expanse series comes to mind with the Belters and their lighter bones - but this is the first time I’ve run across a solution 7 generations deep into colonization that addresses limitations on Earthers rather than strength-building for the Martians. What makes me less comfortable is that in this case, the Earthstrong are refugees and often marked as dangerous criminals, and the easy-to-draw analogy is that refugees can cause real harm without meaning it.
Gender markers for natural born and naturalized Martians have been eliminated from Tharsis culture. The intent here is to imagine a progressive society where gender doesn’t impact opinion or presence in public society. Pulley does a remarkable job with writing this: you never lose track of who she’s talking about. January, as an Earthstrong, holds on to his pronouns, but he is also careful about using nonbinary forms of address with the Martians. Earthstrong use gender markers - usually pins to indicate their preference - which is another SF mini-trope I love seeing. Give a visual non-physical marker for gender, and you don’t worry about mis-gendering characters. Sex does not necessarily lead to procreation, and most Martian citizens choose from genetic banks when it comes time to make children… but that means they genetically engineer towards nonbinary traits, which feels like a slippery slope.
Mars is a barren wasteland with almost no water, so everyone is rationed. Electricity is primarily solar generated, but because Mars is further from the sun than Earth the amount of kw power is significantly less per panel. Gale’s family owns the solar panels, so they are prepared to address power shortage issues as a major dust storm rolls in. I enjoyed that the terraforming of Mars can only progress so far, whereas other science fiction engages in full scale martian terraforming within only a few generations (looking at you, Red Mars).
One thing that Pulley nails is the enemies to lovers romantic tension. There is a romance story at the heart of the novel, and it’s built on a marriage of convenience between diametrically opposed characters. Gale has all of the power in the relationship, literally, since they are a senator, a seventh generation Martian, and the heir to one of the wealthiest families on Mars. January has nothing now that he isn’t on earth. It’s a slow burn for them to learn to trust one another and fall in love, but when they do, it’s immensely satisfying.
The discomfort created by the socio-political implications of this book are not ones that challenge the reader to examine their own beliefs, because it’s ultimately not clear to me where Pulley falls on the side of immigration issues or genetic manipulation. But it’s a well-written book that gave me a lot to think about. If you pick it up, find someone to read it with, and go into it with an open but critical mind.
Thank you to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for an eARC for review. All opinions are my own. This book is out 3/19/24.
April 14, 2024
Still not up for properly reviewing but I wanted to take a moment to hype this book. If you love Everina Maxwell's books you'll love this. Climate refugees on Mars? A charming arranged marriage romance between an Earthstrong man and a genetically modified Senator suited to Mars gravity with a prejudice against non-Naturalized folks in a world where gender has been abolished? This book had all my favorite things. The footnotes were a bit pretentious and the prose got bogged down at times in technical explanations but overall this exceeded my expectations. I love January/Gale. I wish this wasn't a stand alone, I love this world and wanted more of it.
March 19, 2024
thank you to Bloomsbury for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review
Natasha Pulley’s books have been on my TBR for years but this is the first time I’ve actually picked one of her books up and now I’m considering abandoning my responsibilities for the next week so I can read her entire backlist. I came for the scifi arranged political marriage and I stayed for that plus incredible character exploration and the ideas of power dynamics and control and what it means to be human. Pulley has created a futuristic world that’s recognizable but still unique, and installed it with characters that made this book so difficult to put down. The various academic elements and sometimes more complex pieces of the world might be a little difficult to get into but I was almost immediately drawn into the world and I am so enamored with the characters that I’m a little sad to have finished the book and left them behind. If this isn’t already on your TBR, I highly recommend checking it out.
Basically, the world is falling apart and there’s been a colony on Mars to take those that Earth can no longer handle, and has then grown its own population. Our protagonist, January, is a ballet dancer in London when the flood waters rise so high that he has no choice but to board a ship to Tharsis. There, those with Earth strength are second class, seemingly because of the dangers that they pose to citizens naturalized to Mars’s gravity. A run-in with a senator on Tharsis means January can no longer go under the radar, and as they bid for the seat of Consul, they ask January to marry them. What happened after ended up with some plot twists where I genuinely had to put the book down and gape at nothing. There’s this delicately developed tension and relationship between January and Gale but also between all of the various characters, Earthstrong and Naturals. This book is in some ways completely what I expected and also nothing like I expected at the same time, both in a good way.
It’s difficult to pick out the individual elements of the story that were good because the whole thing was just so enjoyable to read. The plot is so full while still exploring each and every avenue. It read pretty easily for me but there’s also so much world-building and exploration of linguistics that were so fascinating to dig into (there’s even footnotes!). The world itself is so opposed to a lot of things on Earth and a part of me is almost defensive about it, but it’s also cool and so well-done from elements of queerness to a commitment to characters being genderless. It truly feels like Pulley invested time and effort and heart into these characters and this story and I am so glad that I read it.
Natasha Pulley’s books have been on my TBR for years but this is the first time I’ve actually picked one of her books up and now I’m considering abandoning my responsibilities for the next week so I can read her entire backlist. I came for the scifi arranged political marriage and I stayed for that plus incredible character exploration and the ideas of power dynamics and control and what it means to be human. Pulley has created a futuristic world that’s recognizable but still unique, and installed it with characters that made this book so difficult to put down. The various academic elements and sometimes more complex pieces of the world might be a little difficult to get into but I was almost immediately drawn into the world and I am so enamored with the characters that I’m a little sad to have finished the book and left them behind. If this isn’t already on your TBR, I highly recommend checking it out.
Basically, the world is falling apart and there’s been a colony on Mars to take those that Earth can no longer handle, and has then grown its own population. Our protagonist, January, is a ballet dancer in London when the flood waters rise so high that he has no choice but to board a ship to Tharsis. There, those with Earth strength are second class, seemingly because of the dangers that they pose to citizens naturalized to Mars’s gravity. A run-in with a senator on Tharsis means January can no longer go under the radar, and as they bid for the seat of Consul, they ask January to marry them. What happened after ended up with some plot twists where I genuinely had to put the book down and gape at nothing. There’s this delicately developed tension and relationship between January and Gale but also between all of the various characters, Earthstrong and Naturals. This book is in some ways completely what I expected and also nothing like I expected at the same time, both in a good way.
It’s difficult to pick out the individual elements of the story that were good because the whole thing was just so enjoyable to read. The plot is so full while still exploring each and every avenue. It read pretty easily for me but there’s also so much world-building and exploration of linguistics that were so fascinating to dig into (there’s even footnotes!). The world itself is so opposed to a lot of things on Earth and a part of me is almost defensive about it, but it’s also cool and so well-done from elements of queerness to a commitment to characters being genderless. It truly feels like Pulley invested time and effort and heart into these characters and this story and I am so glad that I read it.
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