Mars Life (2008) by Ben Bova

I cut my reading teeth on ‘50s and ‘60s scifi authors like Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, and a few others. Probably because so much of his output was aimed directly at the YA market, Heinlein is the one whose work I remember most vividly today, but all of my favorites had one thing in common: a relatively strong emphasis on the “science” part of the term “science fiction.” And that’s the kind of science fiction I’m most likely to enjoy and remember today even though I do like a well written space opera or alien invasion novel now and then. (My favorite scifi novel of the last few years is Andy Weir’s The Martian, a novel in which the science is almost a main character of its own.) 

Although it’s a little too light on the scientific details to suit me, Ben Bova’s Mars Life does place an emphasis on science over wild fantasy to tell its tale of a Mars exploration mission having to be shut down due to budgetary limitations. It’s come down to a choice of spending money on space exploration or on resettling the millions of people around the world who have been displaced by the rising tides of global warming. Not so hard a choice, really.

But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time for the team on Mars.

A team of anthropologists digging beneath previously discovered  60-million-year-old Martian cliff dwellings has just discovered an actual fossil in what they believe to be a small city located below the cliff dwellings. But that fossil, even with the discovery of an adjacent Martian cemetery filled with the bones of ancient Martians, will not be enough to save the project because the Mars project has more than just money problems - it has very powerful enemies actively working to shut it down for good. As in forever.

The New Morality, a dominant group of religious fundamentalists is so politically powerful that no politician running for office dares run without its endorsement. New Morality believes the type of archeological work proposed for Mars is a threat to its core religious beliefs. If God, or perhaps even another God, created a Martian population and then destroyed it what does that say about their own relationship to God? Is everything they believe about to be proven wrong? New Morality already has ensured that all remaining government funding has been pulled from the project, and now they are intimidating private donors to follow suit.

Mars Life is as much about politics and personal relationships as it is science fiction. It is a cynical look at what motivates peoples and governments and just how fortunate we often are to have a handful of good people turn up in exactly the right spot at the right time when we need them there most. Mars Life is unlikely ever to be considered a scifi classic, but it is an interesting look at what it might be like to be trapped on another planet with only a limited number of people around for support.   

(Mars Life, following Mars and Return to Mars, is the third book in Ben Bova’s Mars series.)

When Writers Are Less Real Than Their Fiction

I have been a reader for over 70 years now, and my opinion of the publishing industry has never been lower than it is today.  I realize this didn’t happen over night, that the industry decline was such a gradual one that its impact is only observable in a hindsight of several years. But sadly, I think we are in the middle of a perfect storm that will continue to degrade the quality of mass market publishing even well beyond the shameful level to which it’s already allowed itself to sink.

Vanity presses have always been around - but they are expensive enough that their collective output is relatively limited and easy enough for readers to spot. Most readers are unlikely even ever to  run across a vanity press product because bookstores seldom give them shelf space. But today, Amazon makes it possible for anyone (and I do mean anyone) to publish a book via its Kindle platform (KDP), plop a generic little e-cover on it, and place it for sale alongside legitimately published books, effectively making it impossible to browse the Amazon catalog in the manner readers used to enjoy browsing brick and mortar bookstores (the very stores Amazon and Barnes & Noble gleefully put out of business years ago). The number of quality books has not increased (if anything it has decreased), Amazon has just made them harder than ever to find in the reader slush pile.

So now, just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, AI comes along and starts doing the writing for us. Just plug in primitive plot, a setting, be prepared to do a little tweaking to the output, and you can write your own novel at the push of an AI button. It has been estimated that something like two million AI-written books are going to hit Amazon in 2026 - and who knows where we go from there? 

I remember a BookBub poll from 2025, that had responses from something over 1,000 writers, in which almost fifty percent said they were using AI in their books. Something like ten percent even admitted that they had done little more than slap their name on the title page of the AI-generated book. Using AI for research, editing, grammar checking, etc. is one thing; using AI to generate whole plots or to do most of the writing is something else. Is it any wonder that the same books seem to be getting written over and over again? Just clone a recent bestseller, tweak it a bit, slap a new purple or pink cover on it, and throw it on the market for the rest of us to sift through. And if that doesn’t work, try again next month.

Legitimate authors, I think, are embarrassed by the state of the industry - even to the point of going out of their way to state that they wrote their books themselves. Not long ago The Authors Guild started offering a “Human Authored” logo for their members’ use, and I’ve heard of others using stickers saying things like “No AI Used,” “Not by AI,” or “100% Human-Generated.” I find it sad that writers have to “prove” their legitimacy this way, but I suspect that this is their future.

My own response to all of this is to read pretty much only the authors I’ve already grown to trust over the years, or to read predominantly from pre-AI back catalogs. Breakthrough writers are going to find me a much more skeptical reader than I’ve been in the past. I may miss out on some good writing this way, but I’m pretty sure I’ll come out way ahead in the long run. Too, I will be a little less skeptical when it comes to literary fiction than to genre fiction - but that’s a whole other discussion.  

Dear Life - Alice Munro

 

Dear Life, published in 2012, was Alice Munro’s last book. She won the Nobel Prize the following year, becoming the first and only Canadian for having done so. At the time, she was called a “master of the contemporary short story,” and I very much agree with that assessment of her talents.

Dear Life contains fourteen short stories, the final four of which Munro tells us are based upon her own life:

“The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.” (Page 233)

Most of the stories involve small town women whose ordinary lives are forever changed by a chance meeting or occurrence they can never stop thinking about, sometimes even after they are the only one left who remembers what really happened.

In “Train,” my favorite of the stories, for example, a young World War II soldier returning to rural Canada, jumps off the train one town before arriving back in his hometown. He begins walking down the track in the direction he’s come from, and stumbles upon a rundown farm in need of numerous repairs. The woman who lives there alone asks for help, and the man ends up living there for years, never going home. But that’s not even the strangest thing about how their relationship evolves.

In another story, “Dolly,” the pre-World War II girlfriend of a woman’s husband coincidentally shows up at her front door one morning years later selling cosmetics door to door. Lives are changed in ways unforeseen just a few hours earlier. 

Over and over again lives are changed in an instant.

These are stories where sheer chance changes everything for the small town characters involved. Some are led into life-changing experiences by people wandering through their lives on a whim; some are powerfully impacted by the single decision they did or did not make; some wish they had escaped small town Canada when they had the chance; others wish they had never left. The stories are about real people living during and around the World War II years, a time when many were seeking ways to change - or put back together - their lives. It is a time when nothing seems impossible - so chances are taken.

Surprisingly, the least affective stories for me are the autobiographical ones, probably because I could not forget they are somewhere between memoir and short story. As a reader, I found myself wondering over and over where the truth stopped and the fiction began. That is probably not something that will bother all, or even most readers, but it kept me from losing myself in the stories enough to really enjoy them. 

Alice Munro is an excellent short story writer, and I look forward to reading much more of her work. Luckily, she wrote fourteen collections of short stories and one novel between 1968 and 2012. Lots to look forward to.  

The Reading Week Ahead - March 9, 2026

 Yesterday’s time-change really did a number on me. I woke up “late” and then felt sluggish all day long even though I ended up getting the same number of hours of sleep I normally get. It’s going to take me another couple of days, I think, to get into the sun’s new rhythm, and I really wish we would choose one time or the other and stick with that one for the duration. I did manage to get some reading in but my concentration level was so low that I would have a hard time today telling you what I read yesterday.

The stack of books on my desk is not going down, but at least their faces are starting to change now. I finished up C. William Langsfeld’s Salvation a few days ago, and was disappointed that the ending couldn’t save the book for me as I had hoped it would. The plot is really good, and for the most part well executed, but I had a difficult time fully believing in most of the characters, unfortunately even to the main character. I’m so conflicted by the way I feel about this one that I probably won’t do a more formal review of it even though sometimes it’s in the writing of a review that I finally come to a decent understanding/appreciation of what I’ve just read. 

The other book I’ve recently finished is Senator John Kennedy’s How to Test Negative for Stupid. This one really made me smile a lot, and as I said earlier, Kennedy is my idea of what it would have been like to have Mark Twain in the Senate back in the day. I hope to do more with this one in a few days, but here are some of the more Twainish quotes from the book:

“…sometimes it takes Congress months to get nothing done."

“…you don’t have to be crazy to serve in the senate; they will happily train you."

“Washington D.C. is often like high school but no one ever graduates and the media is stuck in permanent sophomore year."

You get the idea.

I’m still reading from three other books in the stack but it will be a while before I finish any of those, especially the Ron Chernow biography of Twain. I’m about 350 pages into that one now, and that’s barely one-third of the way through.

And of course, I added a couple to the stack to take up some of the slack of the three I finished this week. I’ve not taken easily to Agatha Christie novels in the past despite having started several of them over the years, and can claim only one Miss Marple mystery as actually having been finished. So I’m going to try my first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Maybe Christie will click for me this time around.

I’m in the mood for some solid science fiction, the type where the “science” is the key part of the equation, and I know that Ben Bova is one of the best at that style. Mars Life is set in what seems to be the near future, but a future in which the first fossil ever has been discovered on Mars just when the government has decided to pull the plug on the whole program because of massive flooding problems on Earth. I’m only about 65 pages in, but already the characters are starting to distinguish themselves via their individual backstories. So far, so good.

This is going to be a week of doctors and, I hope, lunch with some old high school buddies back in my hometown. Ironically enough, as of the last several days a couple of new Long Covid symptoms have popped up: loss of smell and a wide distortion of taste. Perfect timing for a lunch out with old friends, but you have to just laugh at life sometimes. 

The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager

 

The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives consists of twenty-two author-interviews during which Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager ask the authors a set series of questions. Twenty-one of the interviews are conducted in person, and one, that of author Donna Tartt, via email. Despite the questions all being pretty much being the same from author to author, Pearl and Schwager manage to turn all of the in-person interviews into genuine conversations with the various authors (and one poet) they visit. The Donna Tartt interview is by far the stiffest of the twenty-two and clearly demonstrates the limitations of email interviews as compared to the in-person variety.

No matter who is being interviewed, whether the author is young or old, famous or lesser known, these four questions are key parts of the conversation:

“Did you come from a reading houselhold? How did you learn to read and at what age? Were you a voracious reader as a child? What were your favorite books as a child."

 Oftentimes, too, the interviewees are asked about their favorite classic and contemporary authors, what they read, if anything, while they are involved in their own creative process, whether they limit their pleasure (as opposed to research) reading to certain genres - if they read genre literature at all, which authors influenced their own work, and if there had been one book in their lives that convinced them they wanted to become writers also. 

Pearl and Schwager helpfully attached a summary to the end of each interview listing the key books and authors mentioned along the way. Each of the lists is headed up something like: “Some Books and Authors in Donna’s Library.” 

It is difficult to read The Writer’s Library without comparing your own early reading experiences to those being recounted by the various authors. You can’t help but wonder how your own early childhood experiences compared to theirs, or how differently your own life may have turned out if one or two key people had not appeared in your world just when they did.

I never really expected to finish The Writer’s Library when I first began reading it, figuring that it would soon become repetitive and predictable - and probably boring. Well, I was wrong. Pearl and Schwager’s enthusiasm for their project was so contagious that most of the authors they spoke with were soon so caught up in the fun of the whole thing that I never grew bored. And, despite having already read many of the books referenced in the twenty-two lists, I still managed to come away with a substantial lists of books and new-to-me authors of my own that I’ll be exploring for weeks to come. I enjoyed this one.

Top of the Desk: What I’m Reading on March 1, 2026

Of the six books I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, half of them are still on top of my desk as I type this. That’s not to say that I haven’t read in and out of most of them, just that my wandering eye was caught by some new ones along the way. I did manage to finish The Best Revenge by Gerald Seymour and Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald and write short reviews of both. One hit and one miss out of those two. 

But three new ones joined the fun:

As hard as I try sometimes, I can’t totally avoid politics. Every so often, a politician catches my eye/ear for positive reasons. Louisiana’s Senator John Kennedy is one of those people. He seems to be a hardworking, dedicated politician, he’s smart as a whip, and he makes me laugh a lot with his quips. He’s kind of like what I imagine Mark Twain would have been like if he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate back in the day. I picked up How to Test Negative for Stupid on a whim, and finished it in three days (it’s short). More later.

The cover of C. William Langsfeld’s debut novel, Salvation, is what drew my attention to it at all. I probably would never have picked it up otherwise. The novel is set in a small Colorado town where one man ends up killing someone who has been his best friend since they were children. It’s not a question of who did it in this one, more a question of how things could have possible gone so wrong for these two. I’m almost done with it, but unless the ending of this one blows me away, it's going to end up just a three-star book.

I was looking for a misplaced book a few days ago - never did find it - but found this Alice Munro short story collection from 2012 instead. I admire good short story writers even more, I think, than good novelists. It takes a special skill. Dear Life was Munro’s last collection, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize the next year for her “life achievement.”  I’ve only read a few of the stories so far, but they all seem to be set in Munro’s Canada during different periods of Canadian history. I’m really pleased that this one finally turned up again. 

In that same search, I also rediscovered A Passion for Books, a book I’d forgotten all about. I think I first read this 1999 compilation sometime in 2002, but I don’t remember many of the individual pieces. I’ve now re-read about a third of the book, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a combination of essays, fiction, cartoons, lists, etc. that covers every aspect of reading, books, libraries, book collecting, etc. The pieces are usually pretty short and easily read in a few minutes of spare time.

I’ve neglected a couple of the books on my last list in favor of these four new ones, but I am making steady progress in the C.S. Lewis book, Mere Christianity and The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager. I just watched a biopic on C.W. Lewis last night on Prime Video, and I’m really curious now to know more about the man and what made him who he turned out to be. I’m looking for a good biography on Lewis if anyone has any suggestions or a favorite. The Mark Twain biography hasn’t gotten much attention in the last few days, but I plan to get back to it soon.

So that’s where I’m beginning this new week. Where I’ll end it could look entirely different - and probably will.