TWENTY-THREE

Some highly advanced technocrats foresee an extinction-level catastrophe looming for Earth and initiate a new civilization on Mars—but their superscience has its limits.

In this novel, Hiltner pens an SF mini-epic with a semi-experimental ambiance. A clue upfront is that the book begins with an epilogue and concludes with a prologue. Cosmic, hard-science descriptive and lyric prose emphasizes the immensity of space and the insignificance of humanity before a storyline coalesces. Homo sapiens have reached a pinnacle of perfection, with the abolition of wars and poverty, erasure of disease, and typical life spans extended via gene modification to 1,000 years. Reproduction must be carefully managed, of course, and some 4 million people congregate in the advanced, utopian city-state of Uinkaret (with pockets of comparatively primitive outliers living elsewhere in the undeveloped wilds of the planet). But scientists determine that one of Earth’s periodic extinction-level events—this time, an apocalyptic volcanic eruption—will doom Uinkaret. Leading engineer/industrialist Rotfach Theoretrics and his close, long-lived friends (environmental scientist Alfrieda Praxis, legal expert Konstantina Oblation, population-control director Humboldt Noraxton, and artists Shlater Curayan and Zabana Oblation) are prominent in the Autonomous Resettlement Kolony project to establish an expatriate human civilization on the nearest habitable planet, a plant-filled and blue-skied Mars (another clue, by the way). When the seismic catastrophe arrives early, the meticulous colonization effort must adapt or face the likely end of humankind.

Midway through the narrative, readers who have not recognized all the clues will realize that these events are all unfurling not in the far, far future but in the distant past. In the novel’s present—the early 21st century—the NASA Mars robot vehicle Curiosity only begins to trundle across the ancient Mars settlement site (“Haven”). Will contemporary folks ever decipher the traces of what happened so many millennia before? On one level, this is a variation on a hoary SF trope, the “Shaggy God Story,” wherein ancient, cherished myths and legends (Noah and the Ark, giants, Eden, Atlantis) turn out to have valid, high-tech SF foundations. But Hiltner does not oversell the gimmick, instead going with a fairly dispassionate, dialogue-sparse narrative voice, often lapsing into first-person plural, to emphasize the wonder of deep time and humanity’s place in the stars. There are rhapsodic passages of science jargon sufficiently abstruse as to be nearly indistinguishable from poetry (“The solar wind of charged particles emitted from the violent surface of our sun streams outward through the heliosphere’s cocoon of our solar system to where interplanetary space meets the realm of the interstellar. Here, at the termination shock, the solar wind slows to a subsonic speed”). An especially impressive detail salutes a common fly swept up in the chassis of a Mars-bound rocket. Although reduced to carbon, a few molecules of the insect succeed in reaching the Martian surface, which constitutes one giant leap for fly-kind. Compact in size yet vast in scope, the book will give readers much to think about even if thin characterizations are placeholders more than anything else. Genre fanciers who prefer the ray-gun stuff should get their thrills elsewhere.

A science-besotted, stellar spectacle that skillfully takes adventurous readers across eons.