There’s been a lot of talk recently about the possibility, within the next few decades, of humans not only visiting the planet Mars but actually staying there. However the mechanics of spaceflight are such that the costs of a round trip to Mars could be considerably more than twice the cost of a one-way trip. With that in mind the concept of people taking a one-way trip to Mars with the intent of establishing a self-sufficient settlement is being seriously considered.
There are many in the spaceflight community who are convinced that this is the best path to follow for colonizing Mars. Elon Musk and Space X in particular have made this concept a central part of their future plans. It’s also the idea behind the novel ‘One way’ by author S. J. Morden but with a twist.
The twist is that the people who are going to be spending the rest of their lives on Mars are convicts, prison inmates who also happen to possess some kind of technical skill. In the novel Xenosystems Operations Corp. (XO) not only runs prisons for the State of California they also have a contract with NASA to design, fabricate and assemble on location the first Mars base so why not combine their expertise and use cheap convict labour on the Red Planet?
Cheap is the operative term here. Every chapter of ‘One Way’ begins with a memo, email or transcript from a meeting at XO where ways to reduce cost are given or at least hinted at. The convicts are given only enough training to perform their own tasks, only the bare minimum of supplies are provided and even their personal effects are left behind simply because it would cost so much to send them to Mars! Not surprisingly, once on Mars it isn’t long before murder and mayhem are rampant.
The problem for ‘One Way’ is that it’s all so predictable, even from the brief outline I’ve given above you can probably guess who the bad guys really are. Seriously, I pretty much had the ending figured out before the seven convicts and one guard / handler had even left Earth. Since the story is at heart a murder mystery knowing what’s coming and whodunit is not a good thing.
Which is a bit of a shame because the story is crisply told and filled with the kind of technical details that gives you a real feeling of being there. In fact Dr. S. J. Morden is a bona fide space scientist with a degree in planetary geophysics so he easily gets high marks for accuracy. In fact ‘One Way’ almost seems as if Dr. Morden just took a rather trite crime plot and thought he could make it fresh by putting it in outer space.
Which leaves me in something of a dilemma. ‘One Way’ is a well written book, the pace is good, there are no long dry spots and again, the details are meticulously drawn. However the clumsy plot means that it simply isn’t exciting, you’re left with just trying to guess who’s the next victim even though you know who will be left standing for the final battle. So in the end I suppose I’d only recommend ‘One Way’ to those of you out there who are the true lovers of hard science fiction.