The first human mission to Mars meets with near‑disaster when a meteoroid strikes the spacecraft, almost destroying it. The ship is too far from Earth to simply turn around and return home. The eight‑person crew must ride their crippled ship to Mars while they desperately struggle to survive.
On Earth, powerful political forces that oppose human spaceflight try to use the accident as proof that sending humans into space is too dangerous to continue. The whole human space flight program hangs in the balance. And if the astronauts can’t nurse their ship to Mars and back, the voyagers will become either the first Martian colonists—or the first humans to perish on another planet.
Listen to the authors discuss the book here on the Baen Free Radio Hour.
-
Product ReviewThis book is vaguely similar to The Martian (as you might guess from the cover blurb), but the disaster occurs in space, not on Mars, and the rest of the novel is about the astronauts figuring out how to deal with what certainly appears like slow but certain death, coupled with how the astronauts affect political intrigue on earth despite being light-minutes away. It is much less about the technical details of survival. I nowhere felt like I was reading a clone of The Martian, but the book was intriguing once I got into it, and it kept me up much later than I should have been. That's a sign of a good book.
This is the second Ben Bova novel I read about landing on Mars; it ends with the same absolutely amazing discovery (and I'm pretty sure you could guess what that discovery is, so I don't consider that a particularly good point of the book). The lead-up to the discovery was far more interesting. The romance, such as it was, was a bit sappy soap-opera-y, but I suppose it was mildly interesting, and it did not detract from the more important parts of the plot.Posted on
