THE MARS HOUSE, latest from the ever-delightful Natasha Pulley

THE MARS HOUSE
NATASHA PULLEY
Bloomsbury USA
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This has a very "ripped-from-the-headlines" feel, like a big issues-driven Movie of the Week in the 1980s. The playfulness that the author, comme d'habitude, uses to frame her presentation of the Issues made me smile. I am particularly fond of the way she plays with the MM romance trope of a fake marriage that leads to a real relationship, in the context of a serious contemplation of the refugee crisis and the ever-increasing backlash againt gender minorities.

No one ever accused Author Pulley of lacking ambition.

Even inclusivity excludes, when it is a mandate...I am not a they, I am a he, and will resist being "they"d because of the same reasons I ask people what their not-always-obvious pronoun preference is. Like any overarching solution, it will not work for everyone...like absurd wealth disparities don't, like hypercompetition won't. And, as I expect from the author of The Kingdoms and The Secret Life of Valery K., that is the point. She invites us in to have a good, solid storytelling, then the real purpose sort of creeps up behind your chair and slaps some ropes around your wrists so you *need* to know what happens while also getting yor mind wedged open a bit.

Like the surgical "naturalization" of the Earthstrong immigrants that will artificially weaken them to make the like "real" Martians instead of merely imprisoning them in tightly binding suits...oh my goodness, the unpleasant parallels to our culture war over transness and the nature of being a "real" something. "We must PROTECT our weakest from these interlopers!" The eternal cry of the high-control fascist-leaning cultural bully. The Earthstrong immigrants have a terrible social ostracism as threats to the adapted Martians, confined to menial labor that renders their actual physical power differential a big advantage.

January, our main character, is the only character referred to by a masculine pronoun. As a former dancer, he is strong and lithe even by Earth standards. This makes him a scary monster of a beast to the adapted Martians, much less gravity having attenuated their strength and stamina. This is quite a come-down for him since he was once a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. It does make his masculine pronoun feel simultaneously othering and fetshizing...like all perceived-stronger minorities his gender is hyperemphasized. This makes his union with Martian nativist Senator Gale, whose impromptu soundbite caused January tremendous social trouble, all the more trenchant in its commentary on the social construction of gender and the fetishization of, especially the visible, Others in a society.

Like we do with highly intentionally muscular men, heavy-breasted women whose endowments are clearly artificially augmented, and those whose skin and/or eye colors are not like the resident majority's are.

This, then, is Author Pulley at her tendentious best. The invitation to think through the role of fetishization, or simply enjoyed as the slow, rocky coming-together of two people from opposite sides of an ideological divide, is there. It is up to you which one you wish to foreground as you read the book. The interpersonal stakes are not shorted, or allowed to dominate; they are, as always in this author's œuvre, balanced carefully thus enriching each strand.

What makes the read just less than five stars for me is my rather less than enjoyment experienced by the inclusion of resurrected wooly mammoths. The entire ecological commentary is, for my money, twee and forgettable, though of course well-crafted...I just do not buy the animals' PoV bits, which thankfully are confined to footnotes. This is a facet that will delight some but did not me.

A worldbuilding tour de force, a meet-cute/fake marriage queer love story, a takedown of high-control ideology, and most of all a chance to fall in love alongside two wounded souls who had to travel from literal different planets to find their happiness.