(courtesy Hachette Australia)
There’s a lovely, and surprisingly enduring, romantic idea that if you could just take humanity away from its usual surroundings that somehow we’d suddenly morph into thoughtful, more caring and emotionally and intellectually advanced beings.
It’s borne from that post-World War Two optimism, now being sadly and comprehensively battered by the de-evolution and progress smashing spearheaded by conservative and fascists around the world, that says if we simply dream big and aim high the our innate humanity will catch up and soar to similarly lofty heights.
A great example of this hopelessly optimistic longing is the space program; something so epic and society-changing must sure lead to greater and better things for us as a species right down to who we are and how we act, right?
Hmmm, Sam Wilson may beg to differ with you with his astoundingly clever future-occupying whodunnit, The First Murder on Mars, brilliantly trashing the idea that a new environment and a boldly exciting new mission as a species will fix that thousands of years of earthbound living has failed to do.
In this weighty blockbuster-level epic read, we’re taken to a future where humanity has colonised Mars, driven in large part by one company, Fuller Aerospace, who are selling a soaringly impressive future where the sky, or rather the lack of a viable atmosphere, is the absolute limit.
Perhaps for the company’s bottomline but not so much for the people, privileged and not, who flee to Mars as Earth descends further and further into a hellscape of environmental despoilment and societal collapse.
‘What we have here is valuable,’ says Sealgair, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. ‘Civilisation needs protection.’
All of this hope and expectation rests heavily on the shoulders of the first human being born on Mars, Rose Fuller, who dreams big about where a new planet could take us as a people but not in the way the corporate bigwigs, including her father, do.
Hers is a vision that dares to think things can be different; she takes that lofty idea that things can change, and wholly change for the better, and runs hard with it, and while there is some shifting of the dial, it’s nothing like she envisions, leading to, yes, the first murder, and quite a few more after that, of the title.
The doomsayer darkness of Rose’s trajectory, which isn’t quite as hopeless as it initially seems to be, contrasts with that of Dylan ward, also a native born child of Mars, who leaves the wilderness of scattered colonies for the bright lights of one of Mars’ biggest cities.
Together with her dad, she hopes that taking on a job as a guard with Fuller Aerospace, and by “guard” we essentially meaning a member of what turns out to be, for all intents and purposes, a private corporate army, will reshape her life.
But things don’t quite turn out as planned and when she’s hired by James Clifford, the head honcho of Internal Affairs at Fuller, for an expedition to get to the bottom of a decades-old mystery, she realises that people, no much the location and no matter the dreams are always going to be, for better, or more likely worse, people.
(courtesy official Sam Wilson Instagram)
So much for boundless optimism, huh?
Bleak though its honesty about the human condition might be, what really marks The First Murder on Mars out as something compulsively, page-turningly special, is how brilliantly and propulsively Wilson explores what it means to have everything change and yet nothing all at once.
This is a book that starts quietly and with thoughtful intent before putting the pedal well and truly to the rover’s metal, and gunning it for an ending that is breathlessly expansive, wildly imaginative and fantastically original.
The way Wilson builds and builds not just the mystery and its ultimate resolution, but also the politicking and machinations of a society headed for a violent reckoning is thrilling and action-packed, keeping you on the edge of your seat through almost 500 unputdownable pages.
What elevates The First Murder on Mars even further though is that while this exciting race to the finish line of a novel is doing its captivatingly engaging thing, it’s also taking an emotionally intimate and robustly intelligent look at what it means to be human.
Balancing the ruminative and the full speed ahead can be tricky but you’d never know it from the assured and near-flawless way Wilson spins a tale that sit firmly in a thrillingly optimistic but deeply flawed future while acknowledging that some things never change including the feet of clay leadenness of human nature.
Dylan turns to the plate-sized hole that the cannon punched in the wall of the upper deck. She presses her helmet against the torn plastic and metal, and looks outside. A second cloud of dust is rising straight up in the south.
‘There’s another one,’ she says.
‘We’re being hunted,’ says Clifford. ‘It’s the Outliers.’
The First Murder on Mars is one of those rare sci-fi epics that goes big and impressively expansive, worldbuilding on a huge and evocative scale while never losing sight of the emotionally intimacy that plays out no matter where people find themselves.
You are sucked into this story by fulsomely-realised characters, exposition that never once interrupts the adrenalised narrative and a sense that while there is darkness and loss no matter where people choose to roam, that we can’t help but dream big anyway.
The central thrust of The First Murder on Mars is a deep exploration of what makes us human, and it’s illuminating and alarming in almost equal measure, and frequently gives you pause about whether any hope we hold onto is worth our time.
Are we not doomed to fall down badly as this brilliant novel says?
Maybe, but people like Dylan, and others she comes across, also suggest that even if its just a small turn of the dial, that it is possible for us for live out some of that optimism and even we can’t change the world, maybe we can change it for us and those we love.
The First Murder on Mars is an engrossingly massive book that really vaults into the stratosphere with its storytelling ambition which it well and truly fulfills, but which for all its pell-mell action and big ideas never forgets that the key parts of our lives, the decisions and the feelings that make human, happen in the small moments, in the quiet places which may not always look like but which could change everything, now and forever, in an instant.