ARES

In Adams’ SF novel, a mission to Mars doesn’t go smoothly.

As the novel opens, Cmdr. Kate Holman is anxious but quietly elated to command the Ares mission, which will bring a crew to the surface of Mars for the first time in history. Holman is coming off a rocky mission to Earth’s moon a few years ago and is eager to prove herself, but on the very eve of landing, she receives a shock. A video from Assistant Director Richard Pearson of NASA informs her that once on the red planet, command of the mission will fall to Security Chief Julian Grimes who, along with Mission Specialist Joseph Cheney, has been briefed on the true, classified mission of the Ares project. Holman and the rest of the crew are outraged as Grimes marches them to the Habitat at Ares Base and then disappears to conduct his secret mission, leaving them to speculate among themselves as a huge Martian storm closes in. When a crisis erupts, Holman and the others are forced to use their evacuation rocket Gaia to flee the planet, eventually finding themselves making an emergency landing on Earth’s moon, where an encounter with armed, black-garbed figures appears to spell a different and more ominous kind of danger. Adams unfolds this by-the-numbers plot at a measured pace that’s thoughtful and never dull, and although there is a disappointingly one-dimensional villain, the rest of the cast (Holman; her close friend and second in command, Glenn Wiles, and the mission’s civilian passenger, Dr. Fisk) is uniformly well drawn; Holman’s competence and fierce determination are well balanced with her insecurities (Adams draws neat parallel between her earlier mission screwup on the moon and her later expert landing of Gaia there, for instance), and the story’s suspense is always carefully, steadily enhanced by subsequent plot twists.

An involving, solidly constructed tour of Earth’s solar system.